clothes and faces; poor people with their babies: workmen loafing. A few
here and there wore the red eglantine in their buttonholes: they looked
quite inoffensive: they were revolutionaries by dint of self-persuasion:
they were obviously quite benevolent and optimistic at heart, well
satisfied with the smallest opportunities for happiness: whether it were
fine or merely passable for their holiday, they were grateful for it ...
they did not know exactly to whom ... to everything and everybody about
them. They walked along without any hurry, expansively admiring the new
leaves of the trees and the pretty dresses of the little girls who went
by: they said proudly:

"Only in Paris can you see children so well dressed as that."

Christophe made fun of the famous upheaval that had been predicted....
Such nice people!... He was quite fond of them, although a little
contemptuous.

As they got farther along the crowd thickened. Men with pale hangdog
faces and horrible mouths slipped into the stream of people, all on the
alert, waiting for the time to pounce on their prey. The mud was stirred
up. With every inch the river grew more and more turbid. Now it flowed
slowly thick, opaque, and heavy. Like air-bubbles rising from the depths
to the greasy surface, there came up calling voices, shrill whistles,
the cries of the newsboys, piercing the dull roar of the multitude, and
made it possible to take the measure of its strata. At the end of a
street, near Amelie's restaurant, there was a noise like that of a
mill-race. The crowd was stemmed up against several ranks of police and
soldiers. In front of the obstacles a serried mass was formed, howling,
whistling, singing, laughing, and eddying this way and that.... The
laughter of the people is the only means they have of expressing a