Pitou heard not a word of this, and consequently made no reply.
“Should I be wounded mortally, and not be able to fulfil my mission, you will, in my place, seek out Doctor Gilbert, and you will say to him—do you understand me, Pitou?” added the farmer, stooping towards his companion, “and you will say to him—why, confound him, he is positively snoring, the sad fellow!”
All the excitement of Billot was at once damped on ascertaining that Pitou was asleep.
“Well, let us sleep, then,” said he; and he laid himself down by Pitou’s side, without grumbling very seriously. For, however accustomed to fatigue, the ride of the previous day and the events of the evening did not fail to have a soporific effect on the good farmer.
And the day broke about three hours after they had gone to sleep, or rather, we should say, after their senses were benumbed.
When they again opened their eyes, Paris had lost nothing of that savage countenance which they had observed the night before. Only there were no soldiers to be seen; the people were everywhere.
The people armed themselves with pikes hastily manufactured, with muskets which the majority of them knew not how to handle, with magnificent weapons made centuries before, and of which the bearers admired the ornaments, some being inlaid with gold or ivory or mother-of-pearl, without comprehending the use or the mechanism of them.
Immediately after the retreat of the soldiers the populace had pillaged the palace called the Garde-Meuble.
And the people dragged towards the Hôtel de Ville two small pieces of artillery.
The alarm-bell was rung from the towers of Notre Dame, at the Hôtel de Ville, and in all the parish churches. There were seen issuing,—from where no one could tell,—but as from beneath the pavement, legions of men and women, squalid, emaciated, in filthy rags, half naked, who but the evening before cried, “Give us bread!” but now vociferated, “Give us arms!”
Nothing could be more terrifying than these bands of spectres, who, during the last three months had poured into the capital from the country, passing through the city gates silently, and installing themselves in Paris, where famine reigned, like Arabian ghouls in a cemetery.
On that day the whole of France, represented in Paris by the starving people from each province, cried to its king, “Give us liberty!” and to its God, “Give us food!”
Billot, who was first to awake, roused up Pitou, and they both set off to the College Louis-le-Grand; looking around them, shuddering and terrified at the miserable creatures they saw on every side.
By degrees, as they advanced towards that part of the town which we now call the Latin Quarter, as they ascended the Rue de la Harpe, as they approached their destination, the Rue Saint Jacques, they saw, as during the times of La Fronde, barricades being raised in every street. Women and children were carrying to the tops of the houses ponderous folio volumes, heavy pieces of furniture, and precious marble ornaments, destined to crush the foreign soldiers in case of their venturing into the narrow and tortuous streets of old Paris.
From time to time Billot observed one or two of the French Guards forming the centre of some meeting which they were organizing, and which, with marvellous rapidity, they were teaching the handling of a musket,-exercises which women and children were curiously observing, and almost with a desire of learning them themselves.
Billot and Pitou found the College of Louis-le-Grand in flagrant insurrection; the pupils had risen against their teachers, and had driven them from the building. At the moment when the farmer and his companion reached the grated gate, the scholars were attacking this gate, uttering loud threats, to which the affrighted principal replied with tears.
The farmer for a moment gazed on this intestine revolt, when suddenly, in a stentorian voice, he cried out:—
“Which of you here is called Sebastien Gilbert?”
“‘Tis I,” replied a young lad, about fifteen years of age, of almost feminine beauty, and who, with the assistance of four or five of his comrades, was carrying a ladder wherewith to escalade the walls, seeing that they could not force open the gate.