It was soon morning. The barricades of the city were empty, and the streets were swarming. From a window above, in the hôtel of the addressed, Armand Carrel looked down with a smile.
"Marechal Clausel," He said to that worthy, "I do believe that you have your legion."
"The devil!" Clausel tried not to sound pleased and failed, "M. le Marquis (meaning Lafayette, of course) is fearless, but we expect this from him, and no one cares anymore. Who rallies these? I cannot imagine!"
Carrel smiled only, and it was this smile which would cause him and Armand Marrast, smug foxes of the newspaper world to go down erroneously as two of the premier architects of the nouveau revolution. As for Clausel, that noble figure who had so brashly made his famous promise, he cursed once more eloquently and with style, and no less aplomb, kept to it. At once he sounded out that remainder of the Vieux Guarde Generals who were either recalled to Paris at the moment or were officially non-active, waking them to the restless spirits of the old ghosts they had so long served of Republic, and a little, of Empire.
In the streets, the affair had been largely bloodless. Grandeur had by this time gathered to his immediate cortege a proper panel of legitimate voices: Reille, Jeanne, and a general named Caudelac, once an Aide-de-Camp to absolute power, now content to be a knight for universal power. These personalities sufficed to preserve the peace for riled armies, and that of Grandeur served likewise to rouse them again, in the proper direction. By this time, Grandeur had begun to get a little hoarse and his breathing had grown laboured, a little, but that was the price of excitement. His fever aped fervor with terrible likeness; the people looked upon him and were inflamed, and were not afraid.
By the chiming of Matins-- or when Matins would have rung, on any other day-- Invalides was in revolutionary hands, likewise the Palais, and likewise the Assembly, though there was very little holding that in the first place. It was the arsenal at the Invalides which was important anyway, though there was little need for it until perhaps 8:30 or thereabouts. It was approximately this time that the lot converged upon the Hôtel de Ville à Paris, where the Citizen King huddled in his offices with his ministers, none of whom were particularly emboldened. The premier viper in his den was Prince Klemens von Metternich, that old poisoner, who spread his venom equally in the ear of Louis-Phillipe as in the cup of Reichstadt. Antidotal to Metternich's poison was the Marquis de Lafayette, who had been carried in not long before when the unrest proved unlikely to quiet. Having spied Grandeur at the head of the mob earlier and known him by his words, he would be later quoted to say:
"Yes, I saw that man; such was his look that I almost thought to offer him my chair, poor lad. But I think he would have refused. I rather admired him."
In the Hôtel de Ville, other quite quotable phrases were being uttered.
"You have been called Kingmaker," Metternich was saying to the Marquis, "Now you would dethrone the very man you crowned, but two years ago!"
"It is never the man," said Lafayette with a thin smile, "it is the will of the people. I do not make kings, I remind them that they are citoyens."
"And pale children who would be Emperor? Are those also citoyens?"
"You are an aristocrat, and a Prince besides," Lafayette said apologetically, "it is in your nature to confuse heredity with competency."
"You are also an aristocrat."
"That is how I know you."
"And the Bonapartists? Their titles are just out of the box, and yet they have seemed aristocrat enough to believe this thing."
"Do you think so? I disagree. Herr Prince, you wish to steer a middle course between what is glorious and what is right, and that I cannot fault you. But you also seem to wish to sail backwards. You would preserve a corpse because it is comforting. Herr Prince, I think that in your prudence, you have supported your cause to death."
"You have no proof!" Cried the Austrian.
"But what should I do!?" cried the citizen-king, who was more prudently concerned with the ominous mob at his gates than the disposition of a half-dead boy who some called the King of Rome. Just a few minuted before the heat of this conversation, M. Delessert, having slipped away from the custody of the revolutionaries, had come to warn them of the temper in the streets and also gathered a force under a certain number of loyalist generals: monarchists devoted to the House of Bourbon, Prussians, and Austrians. To these, the most impassioned speech of Grandeur in his heightened passion would do infuriate, rather than inflame. These brave and dedicated souls had even now begun to engage the insurgents at the gate, forcing the battle into the surrounding streets and a little onto the banks of the Seine, above the Pont Notre Dame. This would come to be known as the Terrible Moments, or la guerre de cinq-minutes.
In that time, the chaos that gripped the insurgency was formidable. The battle was led by Reille on the one flank with the conscripted Army, under him his general and aide was the General-Baron Caudelac. The other wing was led by Enjolras, Jeanne his aide, and those forces assembled were sparked suddenly by several reports of grape from the suddenly opened gates of the Hôtel de Ville.
In the first minute, the sudden resistance before the hour that had been appointed to knock politely upon the gate startled the insurgents so that they fell back to the Blvd. Sebastopol.
In the second minute, Reille and Enjolras rallied, though Reille responded a touch more slowly, and they thusly met the charging enemy.
In the third minute, the Division of Jeanne overwhelmed their challengers and, followed by the Division of Caudelac (a motley assortment of national guard with half-stripped uniforms by this time), who went as mad as the cavalry at Borodino following the death of Montbrun.
In the fourth minute, Clausel and Soult arrived in precisely the way that Grouchy did not at Waterloo, the one via Les Halles and the other from Saint-Michel. The Bourbon forces were pushed back within the gate, shooting desperately and badly crippled. Cannons, which had not been fired since the initial sprout of grape, bristled readily on both sides, the potential for more as always a powerful punitive reminder.
In the fifth minute, the order was given by Louis-Phillipe to Delessert, who had been badly wounded by a shot from Enjolras's musket, to desist. Thus, the city was surrendered.
In the accounting afterward, it was noted that the actual casualties were startlingly few: a total of eight dead on the royalist side, and twelve on the revolutionary. A good deal more were wounded in some capacity, but this was negligible in the face of what had been accomplished here. The worse off were taken at once to the Invalides, even as Louis-Phillipe, Lafayette behind him and Metternich swiftly en-route to Austria, issued a series of proclamations to general acclaim. The first created France a Republic once more, the next few promoted Jeanne and Combeferre to the ministry, and there was weeping as he pinned his own Legion of Honour to the chest of Enjolras. That youth spoke to him gravely from the words of Grandeur, and with such depth, that even Louis was moved, and tears streaked his face as he saluted the insurgent.
But no one knew, for some time, what had become of Grandeur. Concerned murmuring spread throughout the afternoon and into the early evening, but it was not until almost dark that he was found.