“‘Take it,’ he said to me; ‘I give it to you, and every time there is to be an insurrection, be against the government—always! always! always!’
“An hour afterward he was dead. I went out in the night. At the first barricade I stopped and offered myself. A man examined me by the light of a lantern. ‘A child!’ he cried. I was not yet fifteen. I was very small, quite undersized. I answered: ‘A child, that’s possible; but my father was killed about two hours ago. He gave me his musket. Teach me how to use it.’
“Starting with that moment, I became what I have been always, for forty years: an insurgent! If I fought during the Commune, it was neither from compulsion nor for the thirty sous, it was from taste, from pleasure, from habit, from routine.
“In 1830, I bore myself rather bravely at the attack on the Louvre. That gamin who—the first—climbed the iron fence under the bullets of the Swiss—that was I. I received the medal of July; but the bourgeoisie gave us a king. Everything had to be done over again. I joined a secret society, I learned to mould bullets, to make powder. In short, I completed my education—and I waited.
“I had to wait nearly two years. The 5th of June, 1832, at midday, before the Madeleine, I began by unhitching one of the horses from the hearse of General Lamarque. I passed the day shouting, ‘Vive Lafayette!’ and the night in making barricades. The next morning we were attacked by the soldiers. That afternoon towards four o’clock we were pocketed, cannonaded, fired upon with grape-shot, crushed, in the Church of St. Méry. I had a bullet and three bayonet thrusts in my body when I was picked up by the soldiers on the flag-stones of a little chapel on the right—the chapel of St. John. I used often to return to that little chapel—not to pray, I was not brought up in those ideas—but to see the trace of my blood which is still marked upon the stones.
“Because of my youth, I got only ten years in prison. I was sent to Mont-Saint-Michel. That was why I didn’t take any part in the uprisings of 1834. If I had been free, I should have been fighting in the Rue Transnonian as I had fought in the Rue St. Méry. Against the government—always!—always!—always! That was the last word of my father, that was my gospel, my religion! I called that my catechism in six words. I got out of prison in 1842 and again I began to wait.
“The revolution of ’48 made itself—without help. The bourgeoisie were stupid and cowardly. They were neither for us nor against us. The City Guards alone defended themselves. We had a little trouble in capturing the post of the Château-d’Eau. The evening of the 24th of February I stayed three or four hours on the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville. The members of the Provisional Government one after another made speeches to us, said to us that we were ‘heroes,’ ‘noble citizens,’ ‘the first people of the world;’ that we had shaken off the yoke of tyranny. After having regaled us with these fine words, they gave us a republic which wasn’t any better than the monarchy which we had tumbled to the ground.
“In June I took up my musket again—but that time things were not successful. I was arrested, condemned, sent to Cayenne. It seems that out there I behaved myself well. One day I saved a captain of marines who was drowning. They thought that very fine. Notice that I would very cheerfully have shot at that captain—if he had been on one side of a barricade and I on the other; but a man who is drowning, who is dying——. In short, I received my pardon. I got back to France in 1852, after the Coup d’État. I had missed the insurrection of 1851.
“At Cayenne I had made a friend, a tailor named Bernard. Six months after my departure for France, Bernard died. I went to see his widow. She was in destitution. I married her. We had a son in 1854. You will understand all in good time why I speak of my wife and of my son. Only, you ought already to suspect that an insurgent who marries the widow of an insurgent does not have royalist children.
“Under the Empire, nothing was going on. The police held a firm grip. We were dispersed, disarmed. I worked, I brought up my son in the ideas that my father had given me. The wait was long—Rochefort, Gambetta, public reunions; all those things put us in motion again.