Hardly had the last able-bodied man gone out of the place than Citizen Conty had climbed on the top of the table, and begun his harangue by apostrophizing the musicians.
"What mean you, rascals," he cried lustily, "by scraping your fiddles to give us nothing but sentimental ballads fit only for weaklings to hear? Our fine men have gone to work for their country, and here you are trying to make us sing about shepherdesses and their cats. Mordieu! have you never heard of the air that every patriotic Frenchman should know, an air that puts fire into our blood, not water: 'Allons enfants de le patrie! Le jour de gloire est arrivé!'"
At first the people did not take much notice of Conty; the men had gone and there was nothing much to do but go back to one's own hovels and mope there till they returned. But when presently the musicians, in response to the speaker's challenge, took up the strains of the revolutionary song, they straightened out their backs, turned about the better to hear the impassioned oratory which now poured from Citizen Conty's lips.
"Citizens," he bellowed, while the musicians stopped playing so as not to drown his voice, "while our able-bodied men toil and moil to forge the arms wherewith the soldiers of France will smite the enemies of our beloved country, shall we who cannot join them in this noble work sit still and do nothing to rid France of those other enemies of hers who are far more insidious and far more dangerous to her safety than the English or the Dutch? You know to what enemies I refer! It is to those ci-devants, noble seigneurs, to those aristos who for years, nay, for centuries, battened on the misery and the toil of the people, who grew richer and fatter year by year, while you and your fathers and your grandfathers before you starved so that they might eat, bore misery and disease so that they might wallow in good food and sprawl in down beds."
Murmurs of approval greeted this somewhat confused metaphor, while the musicians at a sign from Conty once more struck up the martial strain:
"Contre nous de la tyrannie,
L'étendard sanglant est levé!"
Conty put up his hand. Once again the musicians paused and once again the orator raised his voice, certain now that he held the attention of his audience. But this time he did not bellow. He began quietly with hardly any emphasis, to explain to them just how in the past the rich had lived and the poor had suffered, how they had all worked hard in order to provide the aristos up in their château with all those luxuries of which they themselves had not even a conception. They, the women, had worked their fingers to the bone sewing and washing and scrubbing; the men had endured kicks from horses, bites from dogs, thrashings from their masters, had contracted sickness, lost a limb or an eye, all in the service of aristos who had never done anything to alleviate their woes.
At the first mention of a château, the crowd began to prick up its ears. They knew all about a château. There was La Rodière up on the hill whither they would all have marched this afternoon had not the aristos cajoled the Chief Commissary into ordering the men to go to work even on the Day of Rest.
"Aux armes, citoyens !
Chargez vos bataillons!"
The musicians seemed a little uncertain of the tune at this point, but what did it matter? The crowd was getting into the right mood, and a hundred lusty throats soon put them in the right way.
"Chargez vos bataillons!" they sang, and banged on the tables with their hands or any tools that were handy.
Conty was in his element. He held all these poor, half-starved people in a fever by the magic of his oratory, and he would not allow their fever to cool down again. From an abstract reference to any château to the actual mention of La Rodière did not take him long. Now he was speaking of Dr. Pradel, the respected citizen of Choisy, the friend of the poor, who dared to express his political opinions in the presence of those arrogant ci-devants, and what had happened? He had been insulted, outraged, thrashed like a dog!
"And you, Citizens," he once more bellowed, "though the government has not called upon you to fashion bayonets and sabres, are you going to sit still and allow your sworn enemies, the enemies of France, to ride rough-shod over you now that our glorious revolution has levelled all ranks and brought the most exalted heads down under the guillotine? You have no sabres or bayonets, it is true, but you have your scythes and your axes and you have your fists. Are you going to sit still, I say, and not show those traitors up there on the hill that there is only one sovereignty in the world that counts and which they must obey, the sovereignty of the people?"
The magic words had their usual effect. A perfect storm of applause greeted them, and all at once they began to sing: "Allons enfants de la patrie!" and the musicians blew their trumpets and banged their drums and soon there reigned in the restaurant the sort of mighty row beloved by agitators.
22 AT THE CHÂTEAU
It did not take Conty long after that to persuade a couple of hundred people who were down in the dumps and saw no prospect of getting out of them that it was their duty to go at once to the Château de la Rodière and show these arrogant ci-devants that when the sovereignty of the people was questioned, it would know how to turn the tables on those who dared to flout it. The fact that he quite omitted to explain how the sovereignty of the people had in this particular instance been assailed did not weigh with his unsophisticated audience in the least. They had nothing on earth to do this afternoon, and they were told that it was their patriotic duty to march to La Rodière and there to make themselves as unpleasant as possible, so why in the world should they hesitate?
Headed at first by Citizen Conty himself they all trooped out of the Restaurant Tison, after the manner of those determined Amazons who had marched from Paris to Versailles and there insisted on seeing the ci-devant royal family-Louis Capet, his wife and his two children-and on making their presence felt there, in spite of Bodyguards. So most of what was left of the population of Choisy assembled on the Grand' Place, there formed itself into a compact body and started to march through the town, and thence up the hill, headed by a band of musicians who had sprung up from nowhere a few days ago and had since then greatly contributed to the gaiety inside the cafés and restaurants by their spirited performance of popular airs. On this great occasion they headed the march with their fiddles and trumpets and drum. There were five of them altogether and their leader, a great hulking fellow who should have been fighting for his country instead of scraping the catgut, was soon very popular with the crowd. His rendering of the "Marseillaise" might be somewhat faulty, but he was such a lively kind of vagabond that he put every one into good humour long before they reached the château.
And they remained in rare good humour. For them this march, this proposed baiting of the aristos was just an afternoon's holiday, something to take them out of themselves, to help them to forget their misery, their squalor, the ever-present fear that conditions of life would get worse rather than better. Above all, it lured them into the belief that this glorious revolution had done something stupendous for them-they didn't quite know what, poor things, but there it was: the millennium, so the men from Paris kept on assuring them. Admittedly, this stupendous thing, this millennium, was already overdue, but these exciting expeditions and telling those arrogant ci-devants a few home truths, made it easier to wait for the really happy days to come, and so the insurrectionary march on La Rodière progressed merrily. It is a fact that insurrection, as an art, carried on by an unruly mob, was the direct product of the Revolution in France. It was revolutionary France that first invented and then perfected the art of insurrection. There was no such thing before 1789, when the crowd stormed the Bastille and reduced it, as a besieging army would reduce an enemy fort. And the movement has to a great extent retained its perfection only in France, probably because it suits the impulsive French temperament better than the temperament of other nations.