The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [126]
Lisa forgot all about her brother-in-law, her fears, the reason she was there. She was lost in the fascination of one woman staring at another without inhibition and with no concern for being caught. She had never had an opportunity to study her rival from this close up. She examined her hair, nose, and mouth; she held the photograph at a distance, then brought it closer. Then with pursed lips she read on the back, written in large, distasteful letters, “From Louise, to her friend Florent.” She was shocked. It was as good as a confession, and she was tempted to keep the photograph as a weapon against her enemy. But she put it back in the envelope, slowly, thinking that keeping it would be wrong, and besides, she could always come back and get it later.
Then it was back to sifting through the papers, laying them one on top of the other. It occurred to her to look in the back where he had shoved Augustine's needles and thread. And there between the prayer book and The Guide to Dreams she found what she was looking for: incriminating notes hidden under a layer of gray paper. The idea of an uprising, a movement to overthrow the empire, an armed insurrection, had been proposed one evening at Monsieur Lebigre's and had ripened in Florent's impassioned soul. He had soon come to think of it as a duty, a mission. At last he had found the reason for his escape from Guiana and his return to Paris. Thinking it his calling to avenge his thinness against this city that had grown fat while those who defended justice starved in exile, he was a self-appointed avenger, and he dreamed of rising up, right in Les Halles, and crushing this regime of drunks and gluttons. Into his sensitive nature, this idea had easily driven its nail. Everything grew out of all proportion. The strangest of stories were based on nothing. He imagined that immediately upon his arrival, Les Halles had grabbed him to sap him of his strength and poison him with its rankness.
It was Lisa who wanted to hypnotize him, and he would avoid her for days at a time, as though she were an acid that would, if he was exposed, eat away his will. These spasms of irrational panic, the outbursts of a man in revolt, always resulted in a surge of tenderness, the need to love, which he would hide like an embarrassed child.
Especially at night Florent's brain was consumed with such noxious fumes. Depressed by his day's work, his nerves tense, unable to sleep out of fear, he would stay late at Monsieur Lebigre's or the Méhudins', and when he got home, he still couldn't sleep, so he wrote, preparing the illustrious revolution. Slowly he drew up a plan. He divided Paris into twenty sectors, one per arrondissement,2 each with its own leader, a sort of general who would command twenty lieutenants in charge of twenty companies of followers. Every week these leaders would hold a staff meeting, always in a different sector, and, to ensure even greater secrecy, the followers would know only the lieutenant who commanded them, who in turn would deal only with the head of his sector. It would also be advisable that the companies be led to believe that they were discussing a hypothetical mission, which would have the effect of throwing off the police.
As for actually mobilizing these forces, that would be simple enough. Once the ranks had been instructed completely, you would only have to take advantage of the first public outcry. Since they would probably have nothing more than a handful of hunting guns, they would first have to overrun military posts and disarm fire stations, the guard, and regular soldiers, with as little combat as possible