The shopkeepers of Paris, having the experience of centuries of revolutionary outbreaks behind them, knew when to retire; and before Monday night the heavy wooden shutters with which they protect their fronts were all up, their doors closed, and the Quarter was alive with soldiers and mounted police. The center of the disturbance that day, however, was not the Latin Quarter but the streets around the Chamber of Deputies, where a great band of angry students kept up a tumult. There were funny incidents. A big group of deputies came out to look over the demonstration, and on the instant the air rang with the jingling of hundreds of big copper sous pitched on the pavements to cries of “Panama, Panama.”
The Dahomans were pets of Paris in those days, a picturesque addition to the population. Handsomer creatures never were seen. It happened a carriageful, naked to the waist, attempted to pass through the crowd. At once the students set up the cry, “Berenger, Berenger, bring ’em a figleaf, bring ’em a figleaf.”
By Tuesday the Latin Quarter had begun to look sinister. The inevitable had happened.
A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who start it. Advocates of all sorts of systems and causes join it, seize it, if one of them can produce a real leader. A students’ revolt can easily become an anarchist raid, with looting and arson on the side by professional lawbreakers, who always come out of their hiding places when anarchy breaks out. As the to-be-expected invasion of the Latin Quarter from without began, destruction increased. Omnibuses were seized and, at strategic points, piled up as barricades.
But the rioters never succeeded in making a stand. Steadily and quietly, night and day, platoons of mounted police moved up and down the boulevards and into the Quarter. I tried at first to go on my usual round, hoping to learn something of revolutionary technique, but after I had been caught in a crowd the cavalry was driving from the Place de la Sorbonne, had heard bullets whistling over my head, been forced to take refuge in the portal of the church, I was content to stay at home. However, there was excitement enough there.
Our street was narrow and steep. When the cavalry charged, it would fill up with the rioters. The movement was amazingly quiet—no shouting, no shots, the only noise the clatter of the horses’ feet as they drove the mass ahead.