“Tell me, Alain! If I pulled the trigger of the pistol in a moment of madness, were you quite sane when you cried out ‘Fire!’?”
She pulled up the window as de Moulny, with a deathly face, fell back from it. The coachman, taking the sound as a signal, whipped up the eager horse. The little brougham rolled through the tall gateway into the frosty fog that hung down like a gray curtain over the bloody pavement, and was swallowed up in the mad whirlpool of Insurrection, to be cast up again on the shores of the Second Republic of France.
Follow, not the furtive little brougham, but Dunoisse, rejected of Death, perhaps because he courted the grim mower.... Follow him through the populous fog to the corner of the Rue Lafitte, where the scattered units of the shattered column of bloused men and wild-eyed women had assembled in front of the Café Tortoni, occupying the angle between this street and the boulevard.
A bearded man, the same who had carried the Red Flag, was addressing the people from the steps of the Café. He had been wounded, the blood dripped from the clenched hand he shook above his head, as he denounced the perfidy of Ministers, the ingratitude of Kings, and the blood-lust of the Army, who for gold spilled their brothers’ lives. A sullen roar went up at each of his phrases, the vast crowd of listeners about his impromptu rostrum heaved and billowed, and whitened with furious faces constantly tossed up, like patches of foam upon a sinister sea.
Dunoisse, like a striving swimmer, battled in the muddy waves of that same sea, in the endeavor to reach the steps where raved the orator. It was too dark for the owners of those bodies between which he forced his way to distinguish that he was in uniform, and, so, realizing his desperate determination, they aided him.
But when at last he gained the steps, and the mingling glare and flare of the oil-lamps and the gas showed up the loathed gray-blue and red of the Line—though the Staff shako bore no number to identify its wearer as an officer of the regiment that had fired upon them—the cry that went up from all those hot and steaming throats was as the howl of ravening wolves:
“Murderer! Accursed! Back to your corps! Down with the Ministry! Down with the Line!”...
A hundred hands, some of them stained with red, thrust out to seize Dunoisse and tear and rend him. A hundred voices demanded his blood in expiation, his life for all those lives spilled on the paving-stones of the Boulevard des Capucines....
“Take it if you will!” cried Dunoisse at the fullest pitch of his clear hard ringing voice, “but let me speak!”