Raging multitudes surround the Hotel-de-Ville, crying:  Arms!  Orders!  The Six-and-twenty Town-Councillors, with their long gowns, have ducked under (into the raging chaos);—­shall never emerge more.  Besenval is painfully wriggling himself out, to the Champ-de-Mars; he must sit there ‘in the cruelest uncertainty:’  courier after courier may dash off for Versailles; but will bring back no answer, can hardly bring himself back.  For the roads are all blocked with batteries and pickets, with floods of carriages arrested for examination:  such was Broglie’s one sole order; the Oeil-de-Boeuf, hearing in the distance such mad din, which sounded almost like invasion, will before all things keep its own head whole.  A new Ministry, with, as it were, but one foot in the stirrup, cannot take leaps.  Mad Paris is abandoned altogether to itself.

What a Paris, when the darkness fell!  A European metropolitan City hurled suddenly forth from its old combinations and arrangements; to crash tumultuously together, seeking new.  Use and wont will now no longer direct any man; each man, with what of originality he has, must begin thinking; or following those that think.  Seven hundred thousand individuals, on the sudden, find all their old paths, old ways of acting and deciding, vanish from under their feet.  And so there go they, with clangour and terror, they know not as yet whether running, swimming or flying,—­headlong into the New Era.  With clangour and terror:  from above, Broglie the war-god impends, preternatural, with his redhot cannon-balls; and from below, a preternatural Brigand-world menaces with dirk and firebrand:  madness rules the hour.

Happily, in place of the submerged Twenty-six, the Electoral Club is gathering; has declared itself a ‘Provisional Municipality.’  On the morrow it will get Provost Flesselles, with an Echevin or two, to give help in many things.  For the present it decrees one most essential thing:  that forthwith a ‘Parisian Militia’ shall be enrolled.  Depart, ye heads of Districts, to labour in this great work; while we here, in Permanent Committee, sit alert.  Let fencible men, each party in its own range of streets, keep watch and ward, all night.  Let Paris court a little fever-sleep; confused by such fever-dreams, of ’violent motions at the Palais Royal;’—­or from time to time start awake, and look out, palpitating, in its nightcap, at the clash of discordant mutually-unintelligible Patrols; on the gleam of distant Barriers, going up all-too ruddy towards the vault of Night. (Deux Amis, i. 267-306.)

Chapter 1.5.V.

Give us Arms.

On Monday the huge City has awoke, not to its week-day industry:  to what a different one!  The working man has become a fighting man; has one want only:  that of arms.  The industry of all crafts has paused;—­except it be the smith’s, fiercely hammering pikes; and, in a faint degree, the kitchener’s, cooking off-hand victuals; for bouche va toujours.  Women too are sewing cockades;—­not now of green, which being D’Artois colour, the Hotel-de-Ville has had to interfere in it; but of red and blue, our old Paris colours:  these, once based on a ground of constitutional white, are the famed tricolor,—­which (if Prophecy err not) ’will go round the world.’