Page 1787 - les-miserables

it was my husband who told me.’
One cluster broke into a curiosity shop in the Rue des
Vielles Haudriettes, and seized yataghans and Turkish
arms.
The body of a mason who had been killed by a gun-shot
lay in the Rue de la Perle.
And then on the right bank, the left bank, on the quays,
on the boulevards, in the Latin country, in the quarter of
the Halles, panting men, artisans, students, members of
sections read proclamations and shouted: ‘To arms!’ broke
street lanterns, unharnessed carriages, unpaved the streets,
broke in the doors of houses, uprooted trees, rummaged cel-
lars, rolled out hogsheads, heaped up paving-stones, rough
slabs, furniture and planks, and made barricades.
They forced the bourgeois to assist them in this. They
entered the dwellings of women, they forced them to hand
over the swords and guns of their absent husbands, and they
wrote on the door, with whiting: ‘The arms have been de-
livered”; some signed ‘their names’ to receipts for the guns
and swords and said: ‘Send for them to-morrow at the May-
or’s office.’ They disarmed isolated sentinels and National
Guardsmen in the streets on their way to the Townhall.
They tore the epaulets from officers. In the Rue du Cimi-
tiere-Saint-Nicholas, an officer of the National Guard, on
being pursued by a crowd armed with clubs and foils, took
refuge with difficulty in a house, whence he was only able to
emerge at nightfall and in disguise.
In the Quartier Saint-Jacques, the students swarmed
out of their hotels and ascended the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe

1787