The Explosion
On the late afternoon of 3 Nivôse Year IX of the French Republic (Christmas Eve, December 24, 1800) the plotter Carbon, who had made the machine infernale, harnessed the mare to the cart with the big wine cask and with Limoëlan drove it to the Porte Saint-Denis, on the northern outskirts of Paris. In a deserted building, they loaded the cask with gunpowder.
Then they drove it to the Rue Saint-Nicaise, north of the palace. Limoëlan crossed over to the place du Carrousel, whence he could signal his two fellow plotters to light the fuse. Saint-Régeant saw a teenage girl named Pensol, whose mother sold fresh-baked rolls and vegetables in the nearby Rue du Bac. He paid her twelve sous to hold the mare for a few minutes. At 8 P.M., thinking his police had caught the plotters against him, a relaxed but tired Napoleon reluctantly drove to the Opéra to attend a performance of Joseph Haydn’s majestic oratorio Die Schöpfung ("The Creation"), performed in France for the first time. Bonaparte’s carriage was preceded by a cavalry escort from the Garde consulaire. War Minister Berthier, General Lannes, and Colonel Lauriston, Bonaparte’s aide-de-camp, rode with the First Consul. From their memoirs, a nineteenth-century French psychologist named Garnier deduced that on his way to the Opéra the exhausted Napoleon fell asleep.
As he slept, Napoleon is said to have had a bad dream reliving his defeat at the Tagliamento River by the Austrians three years earlier. While he had been dreaming, Napoleon’s carriage, driven by a drunken man named César, passed the Rue Saint-Nicaise and entered the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Limoëlan, standing in the place du Carrousel, panicked and failed to signal Saint-Régeant in the Rue Saint-Nicaise, who thus lost a precious minute or two. When the leading grenadiers in Napoleon’s guard rode past him, Saint-Régeant lit the fuse and fled.
The machine infernale exploded, killing the teenage girl Pensol and killing and injuring many other innocent bystanders.
Read more about this topic: Plot Of The Rue Saint-Nicaise
Famous quotes containing the word explosion:
“Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion ....”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“Frau Stöhr ... began to talk about how fascinating it was to cough.... Sneezing was much the same thing. You kept on wanting to sneeze until you simply couldn’t stand it any longer; you looked as if you were tipsy; you drew a couple of breaths, then out it came, and you forgot everything else in the bliss of the sensation. Sometimes the explosion repeated itself two or three times. That was the sort of pleasure life gave you free of charge.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)