The streets were lined with soldiers bivouacking on the pavements. The avenue from the station was a long line of stacked rifles, and soldiers in blue and red lounging against the walls, smoking cigarettes, or lying on the pavement, where beds of hay had been made. Many of the shops were shuttered. He looked up, and the flat roofs of the houses were like barracks, with the _képis_ of soldiers visible between the chimney-pots. The bus passed an open square--cavalry held it, and another street, broad and long, leading from it, was a camp of white tents.
Sentries guarded the bridges across the river, and though the main Boulevard was free of soldiers, he saw a hint of power in the courtyards of large houses. The walls were placarded with green and yellow posters, addressed to "Citoyens," urging them to resist the Government. The soldiers read them idly.
And, in the midst of all this, the people of Narbonne sat outside the cafés in the sunshine, under the red and white striped awnings, drinking their vermouth or absinthe!
Later, after he had taken his room at the Hotel Dorade, he walked about the town through the ranks of the soldiers. Groups of people stood here and there, with grim faces and stern-set lips; they looked revengefully at officers and mounted police, and whenever a regiment marched into the town to the music of its drums and bugles, it was greeted with hoarse shouts of derision, and mocking cries of "Assassins!"
At the corner of a street of shops he came upon a little mound of stones set round a dark stain on the cobbled road; a wreath was laid there, and a night-light still burned under a glass cover. A piece of white cardboard, cut in the shape of a miniature tombstone, rested against a brick. He read the ill-written inscription on the card:--
RENÉ DUCLOS âgé de 29 ans assasiné par le gouvernement.
There were seven other little memorial mounds in the neighbourhood. Each one of them marked where a victim had fallen to the soldiers' ball cartridge. One of the cardboard tombstones bore a woman's name. Her death was one of the inexplicable accidents of life: she was to have been married on the morrow. On her way she had been carried along in the crowd which was marching towards the Town Hall ... and in a minute she was dead.