• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

With that Santerre moved on to other things. A few feet away from the general, a captain of the chasseurs and a soldier were standing apart but within earshot, the first leaning on his rifle, the second sitting on top of a cannon.

“Did you hear that?” the captain half-whispered to the soldier. “Maurice hasn’t turned up yet.”

“Yes, but he’ll come, don’t worry, unless there’s a riot.”

“If he can’t make it,” said the captain, “I’ll put you on sentry duty on the stairs, and as she is likely to go up the tower, you can have a word with her there.”

At that moment, a man recognizable as a municipal by his tricolor scarf1 entered, but this man was unknown to the captain and the chasseur, and they stared hard at him.

“Citizen general,” said the newcomer, addressing Santerre, “please accept me in place of citizen Maurice Lindey, who is sick; here is the doctor’s certificate. My tour of duty was to arrive in a week, so I’ll do a swap with him; in a week he’ll do my duty, and I’ll do his today.”

“If the Capets and Capettes are still alive in a week, of course,” jeered one of the municipal officers.

Santerre responded with a faint smile to the zealot’s joke. Then, turning to Maurice’s replacement, he said, “That’s fine. Go and sign the register in place of Maurice Lindey and write down the reasons for the swap in the comments column.”

The captain and the chasseur looked at each other in joyful surprise. “One week,” they chorused.

“Captain Dixmer,” cried Santerre, “take up position in the garden with your company.”

“Come, Morand,” said the captain to his companion, the chasseur.

The drum rolled and the company, led by the master tanner, marched off in the prescribed direction. Arms were stacked and the company split into groups that began to pace up and down and all around, as the fancy took them.

Their patrol ground was the very garden where, in the days of Louis XVI, the royal family used to come sometimes to take the air. This garden was now barren, arid, and desolate, completely bare of flowers, trees, and greenery of any kind.

At approximately twenty-five paces from the section of the wall that lined the rue Porte-Foin stood a sort of shack, which the municipality in its foresight had allowed to be built for the greater convenience of the National Guards stationed at the Temple, who could get something to eat and drink there when the riots were on and no one was allowed out. There was stiff competition for the running of this little internal canteen, the concession finally being granted to an excellent patriot, the widow of a local killed on the tenth of August who answered to the name of Plumeau.

The little cabin, built out of wood and cob, a compact mixture of clay and straw, sat in the middle of a flower bed whose outer rim was defined by a hedge of dwarf boxwood. It comprised a single room about twelve foot square, with a cellar beneath. Access to the cellar was down a set of stairs roughly hacked out of the ground itself. That was where the widow Plumeau stored her liquids and comestibles, over which she and her daughter, a girl aged somewhere between twelve and fifteen, took turns keeping watch.

The National Guards had only just set up when, as we’ve said, they began to disperse, some strolling about the garden, others chatting to the concierges, others examining drawings traced on the wall, all representing some patriotic aim, such as the King strung up, with the inscription “Monsieur Veto air-bathing,” or the King guillotined with “Monsieur Veto coughing up in the sack”; still others making overtures to Madame Plumeau regarding the gastronomic ideas suggested to them by their more or less compelling appetites.

Among the latter were the captain and the chasseur already noted.

“Ah! Captain Dixmer!” said the canteen lady. “I’ve got some marvelous Saumur wine today, come!”

“Lovely, citizeness Plumeau; but in my opinion, at least, a Saumur is nothing without a bit of Brie,” replied the captain, who, before uttering this