of a riot.
Everything bursts forth everywhere at once. Was it foreseen? Yes. Was it
prepared? No. Whence comes it? From the pavements. Whence falls it? From
the clouds. Here insurrection assumes the character of a plot; there
of an improvisation. The first comer seizes a current of the throng
and leads it whither he wills. A beginning full of terror, in which is
mingled a sort of formidable gayety. First come clamors, the shops are
closed, the displays of the merchants disappear; then come isolated
shots; people flee; blows from gun-stocks beat against portes cocheres,
servants can be heard laughing in the courtyards of houses and saying:
"There's going to be a row!"

A quarter of an hour had not elapsed when this is what was taking place
at twenty different spots in Paris at once.

In the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, twenty young men, bearded and
with long hair, entered a dram-shop and emerged a moment later, carrying
a horizontal tricolored flag covered with crape, and having at their
head three men armed, one with a sword, one with a gun, and the third
with a pike.

In the Rue des Nonaindieres, a very well-dressed bourgeois, who had a
prominent belly, a sonorous voice, a bald head, a lofty brow, a black
beard, and one of these stiff mustaches which will not lie flat, offered
cartridges publicly to passers-by.

In the Rue Saint-Pierre-Montmartre, men with bare arms carried about a
black flag, on which could be read in white letters this inscription:
"Republic or Death!" In the Rue des Jeuneurs, Rue du Cadran, Rue
Montorgueil, Rue Mandar, groups appeared waving flags on which could be
distinguished in gold letters, the word section with a number. One of
these flags was red and blue with an almost imperceptible stripe of
white between.

They pillaged a factory of small-arms on the Boulevard Saint-Martin, and
three armorers' shops, the first in the Rue Beaubourg, the second in the
Rue Michel-le-Comte, the other in the Rue du Temple. In a few minutes,
the thousand hands of the crowd had seized and carried off two hundred
and thirty guns, nearly all double-barrelled, sixty-four swords, and
eighty-three pistols. In order to provide more arms, one man took the
gun, the other the bayonet.

Opposite the Quai de la Greve, young men armed with muskets installed
themselves in the houses of some women for the purpose of firing. One
of them had a flint-lock. They rang, entered, and set about making
cartridges. One o