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even ransacked under the beds with their bayonets.
Amongst the Representatives there were several Constituents, and at
their head Bastide. Bastide, in 1848, had been Minister for Foreign
Affairs. During the second night, meeting in the Rue Popincourt, they
reproached him with several of his actions. "Let me first get myself
killed," he answered, "and then you can reproach me with what you like."
And he added, "How can you distrust me, who am a Republican up to the
hilt?" Bastide would not consent to call our resistance the
"
insurrection," he called it the "counter-insurrection." he said,
Victor Hugo is right. The insurgent is at the Elysée." It was my
"
opinion, as we have seen, that we ought to bring the battle at once to
an issue, to defer nothing, to reserve nothing; I said, "We must strike
the coup d'état while it is hot." Bastide supported me. In the combat
he was impassive, cold, gay beneath his coldness. At the Saint Antoine
barricade, at the moment when the guns of the coup d'état were leveled
at the Representatives of the people, he said smilingly to Madier de
Montjau, "Ask Schoelcher what he thinks of the abolition of the penalty
of death." (Schoelcher, like myself, at this supreme moment, would have
answered, "that it ought to be abolished") In another barricade Bastide,
compelled to absent himself for a moment, placed his pipe on a
paving-stone. They found Bastide's pipe, and they thought him dead. He
came back, and it was hailing musket-balls; he said, "My pipe?" he
relighted it and resumed the fight. Two balls pierced his coat.
When the barricades were constructed, the Republican Representatives
spread themselves abroad; and distributed themselves amongst them.
Nearly all the Representatives of the Left repaired to the barricades,
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