Les Invalides

Chapter four The Bastille Next morning, the fourteenth early, the word was passed among the populace.

To the Invalides, the military hospital.

There at least arms must be forthcoming.

And sure enough, the people were rewarded for their courage in braving the troops assembled in the Champs de Mars and forcing their way into the great military depot.

The decree of expulsion against the nobles and priests was now rescinded.

The 73 members who had protested against the expulsion of the Girondins were released from prison and reinstated in their places in the convention.

The monument in front of the Invalides celebrating the victory of the mountain over the Gironde was destroyed.

Soon after this, the few remaining Girondist leaders who had come out of hiding were received back into the convention, thus further strengthening the great moderate party which had formed out of the wreckage of various parties.

But the few there were did not care to be disturbed.

they lurked behind their walls of sheeting their bastions of flannelette as if ashamed to be discovered and when one had coaxed them out they went through the necessary gestures automatically as if mournfully wondering that any one should care to buy i remember once at the louvre seeing the whole force of a department including the salesman i was trying to cajole into showing me some medicated gauze desert their posts simultaneously to gather about a motor-cyclist in a muddy uniform who had dropped in to see his pals with tails from the front but after six months the pressure of normal appetites has begun to reassert itself and to shop is one of the normal appetites of woman i say shop instead of buy to distinguish between the dull purchase of necessities and the voluptuousness of acquiring things one might do without it is evident that many of the thousands now fighting their way into the great shops must be indulging in the latter delight at a moment when real wants are reduced to a minimum how else account for the congestion of the department store even allowing for the immense the perpetual buying of supplies for hospitals and workrooms the incessant stoking up of the innumerable centres of charitable production there is no explanation of the crowding of the other departments except the fact that woman however valiant however tried however suffering and however self-denying must eventually in the long run and at whatever cost to her pocket and her ideals begin to shop again she has renounced the theatre she denies herself the tea-rooms she goes apologetically and furtively and economically to concerts but the swinging doors of the department stores suck her irresistibly into their quicksand of remnants and reductions no one in this respect would wish the look of paris to be changed It is a good sign to see the crowds pouring into the shops again, even though the sight is less interesting than that of the other crowds streaming daily, and on Sunday in immensely augmented numbers, across the Pont Alexandre III to the great court of the Invalides, where the German trophies are displayed.

Here the heart of France beats with a richer blood, and something of its glow passes into foreign veins as one watches the perpetually renewed throngs, face to face with the long triple row of German guns.

there are few in those throngs to whom one of the deadly pack has not dealt a blow there are personal losses lacerating memories bound up with the sight of all those evil engines but personal sorrow is the sentiment least visible in the look of paris it is not fanciful to say that the parisian face after six months of trial has acquired a new character the change seems to have effected the very stuff it is moulded of as though the long ordeal had hardened the poor human clay into some dense commemorative substance i often pass in the street women whose faces look like memorial medals idealized images of what they were in the flesh and the masks of some of the men those queer tormented gallic masks crushed in and squat and a little satyr like look like the bronzes of the naples museum burnt and twisted from their baptism of fire but none of these faces reveals a personal preoccupation they are looking one and all at france erect on her borders even the women who are comparing different widths of valenciennes at the lace counter all have something of that vision in their eyes or else one does not see the ones who haven't

Bonaparte, who was much dissatisfied with it, gave the name of Dessay to a new key, the first stone of which was laid with great solemnity on the 14th of July.

On that day, the crowd was immense in the Champ de Mars and in the Temple of Mars, the name of which, at that time, the Church of the Invalides still preserved.

Lucien delivered a speech on the encouraging prospects of France, and Lannes made an appropriate address on presenting to the government the flags taken at Marengo.

Two more followed, one from an aide-de-camp of Masséna and the other from an aide-de-camp of Le Corbe.

and the music composed by Meul.

But what was most remarkable in this fete was neither the poetry, music, nor even the panegyrical eloquence of Lucien.

It was the arrival at the Champ de Mars, after the ceremony at the Invalides, of the consular guard returning from Marengo.

I was at a window of the Ecole Militaire, and I can never forget the commotion, almost electrical, which made the air resound with cries of enthusiasm at their appearance.