It was supposed that they met for consultation in a wine-shop near the point Saint-Eustache. A certain Aug--, chief of the Society aid for tailors, Rue Mondetour, had the reputation of serving as intermediary central between the leaders and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
Nevertheless, there was always a great deal of mystery about these leaders, and no certain fact can invalidate the singular arrogance of this reply made later on by a man accused before the Court of Peers:--
"Who was your leader?"
"I knew of none and I recognized none."
There was nothing but words, transparent but vague; sometimes idle reports, rumors, hearsay.
Other indications cropped up.
A carpenter, occupied in nailing boards to a fence around the ground on which a house was in process of construction, in the Rue de Reuilly found on that plot the torn fragment of a letter on which were still legible the following lines:--
The committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the sections for the different societies.
And, as a postscript:--
We have learned that there are guns in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere, No. 5 [bis], to the number of five or six thousand, in the house of a gunsmith in that court.
The section owns no arms.
What excited the carpenter and caused him to show this thing to his neighbors was the fact, that a few paces further on he picked up another paper, torn like the first, and still more significant, of which we reproduce a facsimile, because of the historical interest attaching to these strange documents:--