“Near the Place St. Michel, the faithful committee of _Nul_ was ordered by the armed force to conduct its candidate to the nearest police station. Naturally, the committee paid no attention, and kept on its way. The car crossed the Seine, and soon it halted before the _Palais de Justice_.
“The police, re-enforced, surrounded the white jackass, the impassive jackass. The candidate was arrested at the gate of this _Palais de Justice_, whence deputies, defaulters, _panamistes_, all the big thieves, go out free.
“In the midst of the surging crowd the car swayed as if about to capsize. The police, a brigadier at their head, had seized the shafts and donned the straps. The committee insisted no more: they helped harness the _sergents de ville_.
“Thus the white jackass was abandoned by his warmest partisans. Like any other vulgar politician, the animal had come to a bad end. The police towed him, authority guided his route. _From this moment Nul was only an official candidate._ His friends acknowledged him no more. The door of the prefecture opened wide, and the jackass entered quite as if he were entering his own stall.”
What has all this starving and self-killing and freakishness and practical joking of the _Quartier_ Bohemians to do with revolution? Much every way.
Jules Vallès (all his life a Latin Quarter Bohemian), whom Richepin has characterised as “the most curious and the most complete of the _déclassés_ of the pen”; of whom his intimate friend Gill said, “He would be the tenderest, the most _spirituel_, the most charming, and the most eloquent fellow in the world, were it not for the mania which possesses him to believe himself at ease only in the smoke of battles or the bawlings of the faubourgs”; who presented himself at the elections of 1869 as “_le candidat de la misère_,” and put at the head of his second volume of _Jacques Vingtras_ (_Le Bachelier_), “_A ceux qui nourris de Grec et de Latin sont morts de faim, je dédie ce livre_,”—Jules Vallès (and who should know better than Vallès?) said, not long before the Commune was declared:—
“In this life there is a danger. _Misère_ without a flag conducts to the _misère_ that has a flag, and makes of the scattered _réfractaires_ an army which counts in its ranks less sons of the people than sons of the _bourgeoisie_. Behold them bearing down upon us, pale, mute, emaciated, beating the charge with the bones of their martyrs upon the drum of the _révoltés_, and waving as a standard, at the point of a sword, the blood-stained shirt of the last of their suicides!...