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opposite the Rue Guérin-Boisseau.
"
They are constructing the barricades amicably, without angering any
one. They do what they can not to annoy the neighborhood. The combatants
of the Bourg-Labbé barricades are ankle-deep in mud on account of the
rain. It is a perfect sewer. They hesitate to ask for a truss of straw.
They lie down in the water or on the pavement.
"
I saw there a young man who was ill, and who had just got up from his
bed with the fever still on him. He said to me, 'I am going to my death'
he did so).
(
"
In the Rue Bourbon-Villeneuve they had not even asked a mattress of the
shopkeepers,' although, the barricade being bombarded, they needed them
to deaden the effect of the balls.
'
"
The soldiers make bad barricades, because they make them too well. A
barricade should be tottering; when well built it is worth nothing; the
paving-stones should want equilibrium, 'so that they may roll down on
the troopers,' said a street-boy to me, 'and break their paws.' Sprains
form a part of barricade warfare.
"
Jeanty Sarre is the chief of a complete group of barricades. He
presented his first lieutenant to me, Charpentier, a man of thirty-six,
lettered and scientific. Charpentier busies himself with experiments
with the object of substituting gas for coal and wood in the firing of
china, and he asks permission to read a tragedy to me 'one of these
days.' I said to him, 'We shall make one.'
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