"Armand Carrel would have been, nevertheless, a good revolutionist, Louis," said Marrast; "but he was a bad conspirator. He had no faith in the people, no confidence in the efforts of undisciplined and unarmed masses."
"And therein," said Rollin, "he greatly erred."
"Although we can as yet boast of having accomplished but very little by them, Ledru," added Flocon, with a meaning smile. "The masses are easily roused, but they don't stay roused, and then they often get unmanageable, even by those by whose summons they were stirred up. They fight well, but, somehow or other, they always get beaten; they succumb at last, and bow their necks to the yoke lower than ever."
"It is not the people," said Louis Blanc, "it is we the leaders, who are to be blamed. We rouse them before we are ready for them--before we have prepared them or anything else for a result; and then it is not strange that they only rush bravely on to death and defeat. We seize on the occasion of a funeral for an outbreak without organization, and the cuirassiers of the military escort trample our ranks beneath their horses' hoofs. But for unusual efforts, such would have been the case at the funeral of Dulong, the Deputy who fell in a duel with General Bugeaud, in January of '34."
"What were the circumstances?" asked Rollin.
"Armand recollects them better than I," replied Louis Blanc.
"The circumstances were these, as I remember them," said Marrast. "General Bugeaud remarked in the course of a speech in the Chamber that 'obedience is always a soldier's duty.' 'What if the order be to become a turnkey?' asked Dulong, in allusion to the General's position in relation to the Duchess of Berri, during her pregnancy and confinement at Baye. Armand Carrel endeavored to pacificate, but the effort failed. They met in the Bois de Boulogne at ten o' clock in the morning; the weapons were pistols; the distance forty paces. Bugeaud fired almost as soon as he turned, advancing only a few steps; his ball entered above Dulong's right eye, and at six o'clock that evening he was dead."
"There was a splendid ball at the Tuileries that night, was there not?" asked Flocon.
"There was, and this, with other things, excited in the masses the idea that their champion was the victim of a Royalist conspiracy, which all the influence of Armand Carrel and Dulong's uncle, Dupont de l'Eure was hardly sufficient to suppress. But Dupont immediately resigned his seat in the Chamber. He would sit no longer in a body one man of which he deemed the murderer of a beloved nephew. The obsequies were grand. Armand Carrel pronounced the eulogy, and two hundred and thirty-four deputies wet the grave with their tears. The people were greatly excited, and, as has been said, were with great difficulty restrained by Carrel and Dupont. Had they been suffered to revolt, the only result which could have followed would have been a terrific outpouring of their blood, furnishing another instance, I suppose, of the evil of impatience; is it not so, Louis?"