He had gone with them, helping them pull up a few paving stones. He had sat on the barricade, worn out from wandering the streets, and he had vowed to himself that when the soldiers came he would fight. He wasn't even carrying a knife, and his head was still hatless. Around eleven o'clock, he nodded off, and in his sleep he saw the two holes in the white bodice staring at him like two bloodshot, tearstained eyes. When he woke up, he was being taken by four sergents de ville, who were beating him with their fists. The men at the barricade had all fled. The sergents had become enraged and almost strangled him when they found that he had blood on his hands. It was the young woman's blood.

Florent, lost in all these memories, looked up at Saint Eustache without noticing the hands of the clock. It was almost four o'clock. Les Halles was still asleep. Madame François was standing and arguing with Mère Chantemesse about the price of a bunch of turnips. Florent was remembering how he had almost been executed right there, against a wall of Saint Eustache. There a police detachment had just blown the heads off five unlucky souls, taken at a barricade on rue Grenéta. Five bodies had been piled on the sidewalk at a spot where he now saw what seemed to be a heap of bright pink radishes. He had avoided being shot only because sergents de ville carried only swords. They had taken him to the nearest police station and left him with the precinct chief, who was given a note written in pencil on a scrap of paper. It said, “Taken with his hands covered in blood. Very dangerous.”

He had been dragged from station to station until morning. Everywhere he was taken, the scrap of paper had accompanied him. He had been handcuffed and guarded as though he were a raving lunatic. On rue de la Lingerie, some drunken soldiers had wanted to shoot him and had already lit a lantern in preparation when the order had come to take him to the prison at police headquarters. Two days later he was in a dungeon at Fort Bicêtre. He had been suffering from hunger ever since. The pangs of hunger that had visited him in that dungeon had never left.

He had been one of a hundred men at the bottom of that cellar, where there was barely air enough to breathe, scrambling like captive animals for the few pieces of bread thrown to them. When he had been brought before the judge without any witnesses and with no opportunity to defend himself, he had been accused of belonging to an underground group, and when he swore that it was not true, the judge had pulled the scrap of paper from a file. “Taken with his hands covered in blood. Very dangerous.” That was all they had needed. He had been sentenced to deportation to the penal colony.

On a January night six weeks later, a guard had awakened him and taken him to a courtyard with about four hundred other prisoners. An hour later this first convoy had been marched in handcuffs between two columns of gendarmes with loaded rifles, to be shipped into exile. They had crossed the Austerlitz bridge and followed the boulevards to the Gare du Havre.

It was a festive carnival night.