The people of Haramont were enthusiastic, and replied energetically.
The Revolution was proclaimed with loud acclamation throughout the village.
The men from Villers-Cotterets who had remained at the meeting, returned home, their hearts swelling with the patriotic leaven, singing in the most threatening tones towards the aristocrats, and with savage fury:
“Vive Henri Quatre,
Vive ce roi vaillant—”
Rouget de l’Isle had not then composed the “Marseillaise,” and the Federalists of ’90 had not yet re-awakened the old popular “Ça ira,” seeing that they were then only in the year of grace 1789.
Pitou thought that he had merely made a speech. Pitou had made a revolution.
He re-entered his own house, regaled himself with a piece of brown bread and the remains of his cheese, from the Dauphin Hotel, which he had carefully stowed away in his helmet; then he went and bought some brass wire, made some snares, and when it was dark, went to lay them in the forest.
That same night Pitou caught a good-sized rabbit, and a young one about four months old.
Pitou would have much wished to have set his wires for hares, but he could not discern a single run, and this proved to him the correctness of the old sporting axiom, “Dogs and cats, hares and rabbits, live not together.”
It would have been necessary to go three or four leagues before reaching a country well-stocked with hares, and Pitou was rather fatigued; his legs had done their utmost the day before, for besides the distance they had performed, they had carried for the last four or five leagues a man worn out with grief, and there is nothing so heavy as grief to long legs.
Towards one in the morning he returned with his first harvest; he hoped to gather another after the passage in the morning.
He went to bed, retaining within his breast remains of so bitter a nature of that grief which had so much fatigued his legs the day before that he could only sleep six hours consecutively upon the atrocious mattress, which the proprietor himself called a shingle.
Pitou therefore slept from one o’clock to seven. The sun was therefore shining upon him through his open shutter while he was sleeping.
Through this open shutter, thirty or forty inhabitants of Haramont were looking at him as he slept.
He awoke as Turenne did, on his gun-carriage, smiled at his compatriots, and asked them graciously why they had come to him in such numbers and so early.
One of them had been appointed spokesman. We shall faithfully relate this dialogue. This man was a wood-cutter, and his name Claude Tellier.
“Ange Pitou,” said he, “we have been reflecting the whole night; citizens ought, in fact, as you said yesterday, to arm themselves in the cause of liberty.”
“I said so,” replied Pitou, in a firm tone, and which announced that he was ready to maintain what he had said.
“Only in order to arm ourselves the principal thing is wanting.”
“And what is that?” asked Pitou, with much interest.
“Arms!”
“Ah! yes, that is true,” said Pitou.
“We have, however, reflected enough not to allow our reflections to be lost; and we will arm ourselves, cost what it may.”
“When I went away,” said Pitou, “there were five guns in Haramont,—three muskets, a single-barrelled fowling-piece, and a double-barrelled one.”
“There are now only four,” rejoined the orator; “one of the fowling-pieces burst from old age a month ago.”
“That must have been the fowling-piece which belonged to Désiré Maniquet,” said Pitou.
“Yes, and, by token when it burst, it carried off two of my fingers,” said Désiré Maniquet, holding above his head his mutilated hand; “and as this accident happened to me in the warren of that aristocrat who is called Monsieur de Longpré, the aristocrats shall pay me for it.”
Pitou nodded his head to show that he approved this just revenge.
“We therefore have only four guns left,” rejoined Claude Tellier.
“Well, then, with four guns you have already enough to arm five men,” said Pitou.
“How do you make that out?”
“Oh, the fifth will carry a pike! That is the way they do at Paris; for every four men armed with guns, there is always one man armed with a pike. Those pikes are very convenient things; they serve to stick the heads upon which have been cut off.”