Page 2033 - les-miserables
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of this sort that had slain Jean Prouvaire. Fierce Lynch law,
         with which no one party had any right to reproach the rest,
         for it has been applied by the Republic in America, as well as
         by the monarchy in Europe. This Lynch law was complicated
         with mistakes. On one day of rioting, a young poet, named
         Paul Aime Garnier, was pursued in the Place Royale, with
         a bayonet at his loins, and only escaped by taking refuge
         under the porte-cochere of No. 6. They shouted:—‘There’s
         another of those Saint-Simonians!’ and they wanted to kill
         him. Now, he had under his arm a volume of the memoirs
         of the Duc de Saint-Simon. A National Guard had read the
         words Saint-Simon on the book, and had shouted: ‘Death!’
            On  the  6th  of  June,  1832,  a  company  of  the  National
         Guards from the suburbs, commanded by the Captain Fan-
         nicot, above mentioned, had itself decimated in the Rue de
         la Chanvrerie out of caprice and its own good pleasure. This
         fact, singular though it may seem, was proved at the judicial
         investigation opened in consequence of the insurrection of
         1832. Captain Fannicot, a bold and impatient bourgeois, a
         sort of condottiere of the order of those whom we have just
         characterized,  a  fanatical  and  intractable  governmental-
         ist, could not resist the temptation to fire prematurely, and
         the ambition of capturing the barricade alone and unaided,
         that is to say, with his company. Exasperated by the suc-
         cessive apparition of the red flag and the old coat which he
         took for the black flag, he loudly blamed the generals and
         chiefs of the corps, who were holding council and did not
         think that the moment for the decisive assault had arrived,
         and who were allowing ‘the insurrection to fry in its own

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