Mlle. Fouchette Part 46

"It is the head-dress of the barricades."

"Sure!"

"Of la Villette, hein?"

"The man is mad!"

"Ah! look at that!"

"There goes a good rascal."

"A young man and his father perhaps."

"No!"

"Long live the students!"

"En avant!" roared the man in the red turban.

"Vive l'anarchie!" shouted an individual on the curb whose eyes were glazed from absinthe.

The crowd laughed. Some applauded,--not so much the sentiment as the drunken wit. The people were being entertained.

"We certainly have the street this day," observed Jean to his companion.

"Right you are, my boy!"

Both noted the squadron of cuira.s.siers drawn up in front of the Opera, the police agents ma.s.sed on either side, and the regiment of the line under arms in the Rue 4 Septembre close at hand. In the middle distance a squadron of the Garde de Paris came leisurely up the Avenue de l'Opera.

"You see, my friend," said Jean, smiling, "the government is looking sharply after its strategic position."

"Vive l'armee!"

The man in the red turban swung his baton, and his resounding cry was caught up by the manifestants. It was the voice of flattery and conciliation extended to the army, through which the royalist party hoped to win a throne.

But they were not alone there. From several quarters came sharp rejoinders of "Vive la justice!" "Vive la republique!" "Vive la France!"

While these cries seemed harmless if not proper, they were judged seditious by the police, who made a dash for those who uttered them.

In another instant the man with the red turban would have saved the agents the trouble of arresting the nearest person had not Jean grasped the baton. The brute face had taken on a flush of red ferocity. His blow restrained, the man spat in the face of his intended victim and strode on.

"Not yet, my friend!" exclaimed the student leader. "What! precipitate a fight here! Madness! We should be ridden down within three minutes!

The government will be sure to protect the Opera."

"Yes; you are always right, mon enfant," growled the man.

Meanwhile, the unfortunate Parisian who wanted "justice" got it; being dragged off by two police agents, who took turns in kicking and cuffing their prisoner on the way to the depot. There he was charged with uttering seditious cries calculated to lead to a breach of the peace.

Gathering confidence from immunity, however, the manifestants soon ceased to observe this respect for public opinion. In Boulevard Haussmann they got out from the eye of the military. They began to hustle those who happened to get in their way. Those who were not sufficiently explicit in their views were compelled to cry "Vive l'armee;" whoever refused was promptly knocked on the head.

"Monsieur Front de Boeuf," said Jean Marot to his companion, who had narrowly missed spattering the young leader with the brains of a misguided Dreyfusarde, "if you will strike less heavily you will longer remain with us, and possibly for a time escape the guillotine.

Let us do no murder, mon ami. Your stick is heavy."

"That's so; but it is a lovely stick all the same," replied the man, with a satisfied air, as he wiped the blood from his hands upon his blouse.

Then for the first time Jean noticed that this blouse bore many old stains of the same sanguinary color. Undoubtedly it was blood. Human?

Faugh!

Jean saw around him other men of the same type, red-faced and strong-limbed, mentally as well as physically saturated with the brutality of their calling. He thought of Mlle. Fouchette. It was true, then, that these human brutes from the abattoirs were here. That other type, the "camelot,"--he of the callous, cadaverous face, thinly clad body, cunning eyes, husky lungs,--was more familiar.

But these butchers of La Villette, why were they royalists? What special interest had the killers of cattle in the restoration of the monarchy? They had emphasized their devotion to the Duc d'Orleans by re-electing his parliamentary leader, the Comte de Sabran, by an overwhelming vote. From the rich and influential wholesaler to the low hind whose twelve hours a day were pa.s.sed in knocking bullocks on the head or in slitting throats with precision the butchers stood three to one for the royal regime. Men may be hired for certain services, but in such a case as this there must exist some natural sentiment at bottom. This sentiment was perhaps only the common French intolerance of existing things.

Jean Marot's train of thought had not reached that far, owing to fresh differences of opinion between some of his followers and the spectators, in which it became necessary for a dozen men to kick one helpless fellow-man into insensibility.

They were now nearing the proposed place of meeting, and the hitherto scattered cries of "Vive la justice!" "Vive la liberte!" "Vive la France!" and "Vive la republique!" had developed into well-defined opposition. Personal collisions, blows, objurgations, came thicker and faster.

Finally, from the "terra.s.se" of a fashionable cafe in the Boulevard Malesherbes came very decided expressions of dissent. They were followed by a general a.s.sault on the place. Not less than thirty of the usual respectable Sunday afternoon "consommateurs" occupied the chairs, and, though not more than half a dozen of these could have offended, the mob came down upon them like a living avalanche, throwing the entire Sunday party of both s.e.xes promiscuously among the debris of tables, chairs, gla.s.ses, and drinks.

The women shrieked, the men cursed loudly, and everybody struggled in the general wreck. While the male portion were kicked and stamped where they lay, the feminine part of the cafe crowd fought tooth and nail to escape in any direction.

There were three dissatisfied beings, however, who objected to this summary treatment, and who, having regained a footing, courageously defended themselves with the nearest weapons at hand. These were empty beer-gla.s.ses, which, being fraudulently double thick at the bottom, were admirably designed for that particular use. But when three beer-gla.s.ses conflict with twenty loaded canes the former, however valiantly wielded, must succ.u.mb to the rule of the majority. Among the latter, too, was the particularly heavy stick of the patriot from the abattoirs of La Villette. He had received a blow from a gla.s.s that laid his cheek open and had jumped upon his a.s.sailant.

"Death!" he roared.

The man sank without a groan amid the broken gla.s.s, beer, and blood.

The savage aimed a terrific blow of the boot at the upturned face, but was jostled out of his aim. Again, and with the snarl of a wild beast; but a woman had thrown herself across the prostrate figure and encircled the still form with her protecting arm. The butcher would have planted his iron-shod heel upon her, but at this critical juncture another woman--a slender, pale, weak-looking thing whose blonde hair fell loosely over her rouged cheeks--flew at him with a scream half human, half feline,--such as chills the blood in the midnight of the forest. With one hand she tore out great bunches of beard by the roots, with the other she left red furrows on his face like the paths of a garden-rake. Quick as lightning-flashes, again and again, and with each successive stroke of her claws came the low, hysterical whine of the wild beast.

It was Mlle. Fouchette.

Her catlike jaws were distended and quivering,--the white teeth glistened,--the eyes of steel seemed to emit sparks of fire,--the small, lithe body swayed and undulated like that of an angry puma.

"Yes!--so!--death!--yes!--death!--you!--beast!--you devil!"

With each energetic word went a wild sweep of the claws or came a wisp of beard.

The man bellowed with pain. The unexpected fury of her onslaught, the general melee of close quarters, the instinct of protection, contributed to prevent the man from simply braining her with his "ca.s.se-tete." He was a lion against a hornet, powerless to punish his puny a.s.sailant. As he finally broke away, she suddenly whirled and delivered beneath the arm that shielded his eyes a kick that half choked him with his own teeth.

Blinded with blood and howling with pain, the wretch plunged headlong through the cafe front amid a crash of falling gla.s.s.

In the mean time, while this little curtain-raiser had been getting under way, there was still another and more important drama in active preparation.

The police, as if to lend such material aid to the royalist cause as lay in their power, and to a.s.sist in the punishment of those misguided Frenchmen who took the words "Liberte, egalite, Fraternite," inscribed over the doors of the public hall, in a too literal sense, had violently closed those doors against the latter and by cunningly arranged barriers driven the unsuspecting Dreyfusardes down upon their armed enemies. It was a most admirably arranged plot to destroy the public peace, and reflected credit upon the clerico-royalist-military council that had planned it.

Before the indignant republicans had begun to realize the character of the trap set for them they found themselves hemmed in on three sides by the police and attacked by the combination of hostile forces on the other side.

The latter had been quietly a.s.sembled in the vicinity in antic.i.p.ation of this denouement. They were led by Senators and Deputies wearing the official scarf of their high legislative function. This at once afforded the latter reasonable immunity from arrest, and served to encourage and a.s.sure those accustomed to look for some shadow of authority to conceal or excuse the evil of their deeds.

The French Senator or Deputy who leads street rioters against a peaceable a.s.semblage of his fellow-citizens one day and serenely sits in national legislative deliberation the next day is the faithful representative of a const.i.tuency as far removed from the American type of citizenship as the French legislator is from our national legislator.