French Literature – Children Books – Émile Zola – The Downfall (La Débâcle) – Contents
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PART III
Chapter VIII
THE BURNING OF BABYLON—THE BITTER END
When after innumerable stoppages the train coming from Sedan at last reached the St. Denis station at about nine o’clock, a great red blaze was already lighting up the sky towards the south, as though all Paris were on fire. This glow had begun to spread as the night fell and was now slowly covering the horizon, ensanguining a flight of little clouds which were travelling eastward into the gloom which the contrast rendered more intense.
Henriette was the very first to spring out of the train, all anxiety at sight of those fiery reflections, which the passengers had perceived across the black fields, from the windows of their carriages, as they came nearer and nearer to the capital. Moreover, some Prussian soldiers who had occupied the station were compelling everybody to alight, whilst a couple of them continued shouting in guttural French: ‘Paris is burning! The train goes no farther, all out here—Paris is burning! Paris is burning!’
Henrietta’s anguish was terrible. Good Heavens! had she arrived too late, then? Maurice not having answered her last two letters, the alarming reports from Paris had filled her with mortal anxiety, and she had abruptly made up her mind to leave Remilly. She had been growing sadder and sadder during the last few months at uncle Fouchard’s; the soldiery occupying the district had become more and more harsh and exacting as Paris prolonged its resistance; and now that the regiments were one by one returning to Germany, the constant passage of troops again sorely tried both the towns and the villages. That morning, on rising at daybreak to go and take the train at Sedan, she had found the courtyard of the farm full of cavalry soldiers who had slept there, lying pell-mell on the ground, wrapped in their long cloaks. They were so numerous that it was hardly possible to cross the yard. Then, as a bugle suddenly sounded, they all rose up in silence, draped in the long folds of their mantles and in such serried array that she fancied she was witnessing some resurrection on a battlefield in response to the call of the last trump. And now she found more Prussians at St. Denis distressing her with their repeated shouts: ‘All out here, the train goes no farther; Paris is burning, Paris is burning!’
Quite beside herself, Henriette darted out of the carriage carrying her little valise, and asked for information. For two days past fighting had been going on in Paris, the railway line was cut, and the Prussians were posted on the look-out. Nevertheless she was determined to reach the city, and noticing, on the platform, the Prussian captain in command of the company which occupied the station, she ran up to him and said: ‘I wish, to join my brother, whom I am very anxious about, sir. Enable me to continue my journey I beg of you——’ And then she stopped short in surprise, for she had just recognised the captain, on whose face the light of a gas lamp was falling. ‘What! is it you, Otto? Help me, I beg of you, since chance has again brought us together.’
Otto Gunther—Weiss’s cousin—had not changed. Tightly buttoned up in his captain’s uniform, he was still the same stern, well-groomed, smart officer. On his side, he did not at first recognise that slight, little woman with the fair hair and gentle face partially hidden by a crape bonnet. But at last, by the brave, frank light of her eyes, he remembered her and made a gesture of surprise.
‘You know that I have a brother who is a soldier,’ continued Henriette in a feverish voice. ‘He has remained in Paris, and I am afraid he may have become mixed up in that horrible struggle, so I beg of you, Otto, enable me to continue my journey.’
He then made up his mind to answer: ‘But I assure you that I can do nothing. The trains have not been running since yesterday. I think the rails have been taken up near the ramparts. And I have neither vehicle nor horse nor man to drive you——’
She looked at him, stammering plaintive words in her grief at finding him so callous, so determined not to assist her. ‘Oh, God! so you won’t do anything? Oh, God! whom shall I apply to?’
Yet these Prussians were still the all-powerful masters; with a word they could have turned the town topsy-turvy, have requisitioned a hundred vehicles, have caused a thousand horses to be brought from their stables! But nevertheless he refused assistance with that haughty air of the conqueror whose rule it was not to intervene in the affairs of the vanquished, deeming them unclean and of a nature to tarnish his lately won laurels.
‘At all events,’ resumed Henriette at last, striving to calm herself—’at all events you know what is happening, and can surely tell me.’
A slight, barely perceptible smile passed over his lips. ‘Paris is burning. Come over here, it can be seen plainly.’
He walked before her, passed out of the station, and followed the rails for a hundred paces or so, until they reached a little iron foot-bridge crossing the line. And when they had climbed its narrow stairway and found themselves up above, leaning over the handrail, the whole vast level plain was spread out before them.
‘You see, Paris is burning.’
It might have been about half-past nine. The red glow setting the sky on fire was still spreading. The little ruddy clouds in the east had now vanished, and in the zenith all was inky blackness save for occasional reflections of the distant flames. The whole line of the horizon was on fire; but here and there could be distinguished conflagrations of greater intensity than others, sheaves of bright purple flames spurting up continuously amid great whirling smoke-clouds and streaking the darkness with their fearful splendour. And it seemed, too, as though the conflagrations were marching on and on, as though some gigantic forest were catching fire from tree to tree, as though the earth itself would end by blazing, set alight by that huge pile of Paris.
‘There,’ explained Otto, ‘that black mass standing out against the red background is Montmartre. Nothing is burning as yet on the left, at La Villette and Belleville. It is the central quarters which must have been set alight, and the fire keeps on gaining ground. Look there, on the right! There’s another conflagration breaking out! You can see the flames, a mass of seething flames from which a fiery smoke is rising. And see too, over there are other fires, and others, others still!’
He did not raise his voice or display any excitement, and the enormity of his quiet delight quite terrified Henriette. Ah! those Prussians who gazed upon that awful spectacle! She divined all the insulting significance of his calmness and his faint smile; they undoubtedly implied that he had long foreseen and been waiting for this unparalleled disaster.
At last Paris was burning; Paris, whose water-spouts the German shells had merely managed to chip off! All his rancour was satisfied now; he had his revenge for the inordinate duration of the siege, the bitter cold, the ever-recurring difficulties of the war, the memory of which still filled his countrymen with irritation. Whatever might be the glory of the triumph, with its conquered provinces and its indemnity of five milliards, all paled before this spectacle of the destruction of Paris—Paris seized with furious madness, burning itself down and flying away in flame and smoke during that clear spring-tide night.
‘Ah! it was a certainty!’ he added in a lower voice. ‘A big business!’
At sight of the immensity of the catastrophe, increasing grief was oppressing Henriette almost to the point of suffocation. For a few minutes she forgot her personal misfortunes; what were they beside this expiation of an entire people? The thought of the human lives which would be destroyed by the devouring flames, the sight of the city blazing on the horizon, casting around it the hellish glow of accursed capitals doomed to destruction for their sins, wrung involuntary cries of anguish from her heart. Clasping her hands she asked: ‘What can we have done, O God! to be punished thus?’
Otto immediately raised his arm with an apostrophic gesture. He was about to speak with all the vehemence of that stern, frigid, military Protestantism so prone to quoting the Scriptures. But on glancing at the young woman and meeting her beautiful, clear, reasoning eyes, he stayed his tongue. Besides, his gesture had sufficed; it had expressed all his racial hatred, his conviction that he was there in France as a justiciar sent by the God of Battles to chastise a perverted people. Paris was burning in punishment of its centuries of evil life, its long career of crime and lust. Once again would the Teutons save the world, sweeping away the final specks of Latin corruption.
He let his arm fall and simply said: ‘It is the end of everything. Another district is lighting up, over there, on the left—you see it, don’t you?—that long line spreading out like a stream of live embers.’
Then both ceased speaking; a terrified silence prevailed. Waves of flame were now incessantly rising, streaming and spurting high into the heavens. Not a moment went by but that sea of fire extended its limits—an incandescent tossing, billowy ocean it was, with smoke arising from its midst, and gathering over the city in a huge, dark coppery pall, which a faint wind wafted across the black night. And as it slowly travelled across the sky it barred the vault above with an abominable rain of soot and cinders.
All at once Henriette started as though awakening from a nightmare; and, again seized with anguish at the thought of her brother, she for the last time addressed the captain in a tone of entreaty: ‘So you can do nothing for me; you refuse to help me to get into Paris?’
With another wave of his arm Otto swept the horizon. ‘What would it avail you, since there will be nothing but ruins left there to-morrow morning?’
And that was all; without even saying a word of farewell she descended from the foot-bridge, fleeing with her little valise; whilst he remained there motionless for a long time yet, his slim, stiff figure barely distinguishable in the darkness, as with a sensation of monstrous enjoyment he feasted his eyes upon that spectacle of Babylon in flames.
As Henriette was leaving the station she was lucky enough to come across a stout woman who had just arranged with a flyman to drive her into Paris; and Henriette pleaded so piteously and shed such touching tears that this person at last consented to take her with her. The flyman, a dark little fellow, whipped up his horse and drove them away without opening his lips during the whole journey. The stout woman, however, did not cease chattering, telling Henriette that on closing and leaving her shop in the Rue de Richelieu a couple of days previously she had unwisely left some shares and debentures there, in a secret hiding-place in a wall. And as a natural consequence, ever since the city had begun flaming a couple of hours previously, she had been possessed by the desire to go back again, and secure those valuable papers, even though she might have to march through the fire to do so. When they reached the city gate, where they found a party of sleepy National Guards, the vehicle was allowed to pass on without much difficulty, especially as the stout woman unblushingly declared that she had merely been to St. Denis to fetch her niece to assist her in nursing her husband, who had been wounded by the Versaillese. Once in the Paris streets, however, they encountered terrible obstacles; at each moment they came upon barricades barring the roadways and were obliged to take a circuitous course. At last, on reaching the Boulevard Poissonnière the driver would go no further, and the two women were forced to continue their journey on foot, along the Rue du Sentier and the Rue des Jeûneurs and through the district of the Bourse. Whilst they were drawing near to the fortifications, the fiery sky had illumined their road with as vivid a light as that of daytime. And therefore, in the quarter of the city which they had now reached they were astonished to find the streets dim and deserted, with nothing to disturb their stillness save the vague echo of a distant roar. Near the Bourse, however, they heard some reports of fire-arms, and had to glide along cautiously close beside the house-fronts. And when they reached the Rue de Richelieu and the stout woman found her shop standing, altogether undamaged, she was so delighted that she insisted upon showing Henriette her way along the Rue du Hasard and the Rue Sainte-Anne. In the latter street, which a battalion of Federals still occupied, some of the men would not at first allow them to pass, and it was four o’clock and already light, when Henriette, exhausted with emotion and fatigue, at last reached the old house in the Rue des Orties and found its door wide open.
Maurice, meantime, on the barricade of the Rue du Bac, had managed to raise himself to his knees between the two sandbags, and Jean, who feared that he had pinned him to the ground, was suddenly buoyed up again by hope. ‘Are you still alive, my poor youngster?’ said he. ‘Shall I have that luck, dirty brute that I am? Wait a moment, let me look at you.’
Then, by the vivid light of the conflagrations, he cautiously examined the wound. The bayonet had transpierced the arm near the right shoulder, and the misfortune was that it had afterwards entered the body between two of the ribs, and had probably injured the lung. Still, the wounded man, whose arm hung down, inert, was apparently able to breathe without any great difficulty.
‘Don’t distress yourself like that, my poor old fellow,’ said Maurice. ‘I am quite content to die; I would rather have done with it all. You did quite enough for me whilst we were together. Had it not been for you I should long since have died like this by the roadside.’
On hearing him speak in this fashion, Jean was again seized with violent grief: ‘Will you be quiet? You saved me twice from the clutches of the Prussians. It was my turn to risk my life for you, and here I’ve been and massacred you. Thunder! I must have been fuddled not to recognise you, fuddled like a hog with having drunk too much blood.’
Tears had started from his eyes at memory of their leave-taking over yonder at Remilly, that parting when they had asked each other whether they would ever meet again, and if so where and under what circumstances of grief or joy. Had they, then, spent so many hungry days and sleepless nights together, with death staring them in the face, all to no avail? Had their hearts mingled during those weeks of valorous life simply that all might end in this abomination, this monstrous, senseless fratricide? No, no, Jean’s heart revolted at the thought.
‘Let me see to it, youngster,’ said he; ‘I must save you.’
First of all he must take him away, for the troops finished off all the wounded insurgents they found. They were alone together, fortunately; still there was not a moment to be lost. Taking his knife, he quickly ripped open the sleeve of Maurice’s uniform, and took the garment off him. Blood was flowing, so he made all haste to bandage the arm firmly with some strips of lining which he tore away from the tunic he had removed. Next he plugged the body-wound and fastened the arm tightly over it with a bit of cord which he fortunately found in his pocket. Barbarous as was this dressing, it was effective, for it rendered the injured parts immovable and prevented hæmorrhage.
‘Can you walk?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
Nevertheless, Jean did not dare to lead him away like that in his shirt-sleeves. And a sudden inspiration coming to him he ran off into an adjacent street, where he had seen the corpse of a soldier lying, and speedily came back with a military great-coat and cap. He threw the former upon Maurice’s shoulders, and helped him to pass his uninjured arm through the left sleeve. Then, when he had set the cap upon his head, he exclaimed: ‘There, now you are one of us! Where shall we go?’
That was the question, and all Jean’s anguish of mind returned again just as he was awakening to hope and courage. Where could he find a secure shelter-place? The houses were searched; all the Communists taken with arms in their hands or whose appearance indicated that they had been fighting were summarily shot. Moreover, neither of them knew a soul in that neighbourhood to whom they might apply for shelter, or any safe place in which they might hide their heads. ‘After all, my room would be the best,’ at last said Maurice; ‘the house is in a retired spot, and nobody is likely to come there. But it is on the other side of the river, in the Rue des Orties.’
In his irresolution and despair Jean continued mumbling oaths: ‘Thunder! how can we manage it?’
It was no use to think of crossing the Pont-Royal, which the conflagrations were lighting up as with a vivid noontide glow. On this point shots were at every moment being fired from either bank of the river. And besides, once across this bridge, they would have run against an impassable barrier—the Tuileries in flames, and the Louvre guarded and barricaded.
‘Then we are done for; there’s no means of crossing,’ declared Jean, who knew something of Paris, having lived there for six months or so on his return from the Italian war.[57]
Suddenly, however, an idea occurred to him. If, as in former times, there were any boats moored at the water’s edge near the Pont-Royal, they might embark in one of them, and in this wise cross the river. It would be a long and dangerous job, and by no means an easy one; but they had no choice in the matter, and must make up their minds at once. ‘Listen, youngster,’ said Jean; ‘let’s get away from here at any rate; it’s a dangerous spot. I shall account for my absence by telling my lieutenant that the Communards captured me, but that I managed to escape.’
Grasping Maurice’s uninjured arm, he helped him to walk to the end of the Rue du Bac, between the burning houses, which were now flaring from basement to garret like so many huge torches. A shower of burning brands fell upon them as they passed along, and the heat was so intense that all the hair upon their faces was singed. And when they came out on the quay, they stopped short for a moment, fairly blinded by the frightful blaze of the conflagrations, which were throwing up huge sheaves of flame upon both banks of the Seine.
‘There’s no lack of candles,’ growled Jean, worried by this broad light.
In fact, it was only when he had helped Maurice down the steps leading to the shore, just below the Pont-Royal, that he felt tolerably safe. Here, at the water’s edge, there was a clump of big trees which screened them from view, and during nearly a quarter of an hour they remained on this spot anxiously watching some black, shadowy forms which were flitting hither and thither on the quay across the river. Shots were being fired; all at once a loud shriek resounded, and then they heard a plunge, followed by a sudden spurt of foam. Plainly enough the bridge was guarded.
‘Suppose we spend the night in that shanty,’ suggested Maurice, pointing to a wooden hut used as an office of the navigation service.
‘Pooh! we should be caught to-morrow morning,’ said Jean, who clung to his idea. He had found there quite a flotilla of little boats, but they were moored to the quay by means of padlocked chains; and how would he be able to detach one of them and also procure some oars? At last he luckily found an old pair of sculls, and was even able to force open a padlock, which had no doubt been imperfectly secured. Thereupon, after helping Maurice to lie down in the bow of the boat, he cautiously shoved off, hugging the shore, in the shadow of the swimming baths and the pinnaces. Neither of them spoke, terrified as they were by the awful spectacle which now unfolded itself. The horror seemed to increase as they slowly floated down the stream and their horizon widened. By the time they had reached the Solferino bridge they could at one glance behold both flaming quays.
On the left, the Tuileries was burning. The Communists had fired both ends of the palace, the Pavillon de Flore and the Pavillon de Marsan, at nightfall; and the flames were now rapidly gaining the central Pavillon de l’Horloge, where a formidable mine had been prepared, barrels upon barrels of gunpowder being piled up in the Hall of the Marshals. At this moment the intervening buildings were belching from their shattered windows great whirling coils of ruddy smoke, through which darted blue flakes of fire. The roofs were kindling, riddled with fiery crevices, and opening like volcanic soil as the brazier within assailed them. No other portion of the palace, however, burnt like the Pavillon de Flore,[58] where the torch had been first applied, and which was flaring away, with a formidable roar, from its ground floor to its lofty roof. The petroleum with which the floorings and the hangings had been soaked imparted such intensity to the flames that the iron work of the massive balconies could be seen writhing and twisting, whilst the monumental chimneys, with their great sculptured suns, became red hot and burst asunder.
Then, on the right bank, came first of all the palace of the Legion of Honour, set on fire at five o’clock in the evening. It had now been alight for nearly seven hours, and was being consumed by a great blaze, like some huge pile of wood, every log of which is kindled, and fast burning to ashes. Next came the palace of the Council of State, the most enormous, the most frightful of those immense conflagrations, the whole gigantic parallelogram of stone, with its two colonnaded storeys, vomiting flame upon flame of lurid fire. The four blocks of building encompassing the spacious interior courtyard had been ignited at one and the same moment, and the petroleum poured by the cask-full upon the four staircases at the four corners had streamed down them, rolling perfect torrents of hell-fire from the highest to the lowest step. On the façade overlooking the river, the sharp line of the attic storey stood out blackly above the red tongues of flame which were licking its base; whilst the colonnades, the entablatures, the friezes, all the sculptured ornaments acquired startling vividness amid the blinding furnace-like glow beneath. Here especially there was such a rage, such a strength of fire, that the colossal monument was as though upheaved, and quaked and rumbled on its foundations; only the carcase of its massive walls being able to withstand this eruptive violence, which hurled the zinc of the roofs towards the sky. Then, near at hand, was the Orsay barracks, a whole side of which was burning in a lofty white column like a tower of light. And in the rear there were yet other conflagrations, seven houses in the Rue du Bac, two-and-twenty houses in the Rue de Lille, all setting the horizon aglow, with flames rising up in relief against other flames, in a sanguinary, endless sea of fire.
‘Good Lord, can it be possible!’ muttered Jean, with a grip at his throat; ‘the river itself will soon catch alight!’
It already seemed, indeed, as though the boat were floating down a burning stream. With the reflections of those huge braziers dancing in the water, it might have been thought that the Seine was rolling live coals. Red flashes darted fitfully over its surface, amid a great rippling of yellow brands. And they were still slowly going down stream between the flaming palaces, carried on by the current of that fiery water, as though journeying through some accursed city, burning upon either side of a highway of molten lava.
‘Ah!’ said Maurice in his turn, struck with madness again, at sight of the havoc he had longed for. ‘May everything blaze and everything blow up!’
But Jean silenced him with a gesture of terror as though he feared that such blasphemy might bring them misfortune. Was it possible that this young fellow whom he was so fond of, who was so highly educated, who had formerly displayed such delicate susceptibility, could have come to entertain such ideas as these? And he rowed on faster, for by this time he had passed the Solferino bridge, and found himself in a broad open space of water. The light had now become so intense that it seemed as though the river were illumined by the midday sunrays streaming down from overhead without casting a shadow. The pettiest details could be distinguished with wonderful precision—the ripples of the water, the heaps of gravel on the banks, the little trees planted along the quays. And the bridges shone out with a dazzling whiteness, so distinct that you might have counted their very stones. They looked like narrow gangways as yet undamaged, thrown across the fiery water from one conflagration to the other. Every now and then a loud crash would resound amid the continuous, roaring clamour. Squalls of soot were sweeping down; the wind was laden with pestiferous stenches. And the terror of it all was that Paris—the distant districts yonder along the Seine—had disappeared. The conflagrations on either hand blazed with such fierce, dazzling resplendency that beyond them, upstream and downstream alike, all was a black abyss. Only an enormous darkness, nihility, could be seen, as though the fire had already reached and devoured all the rest of Paris, as though the city had already vanished into eternal night. And the sky too was obliterated, destroyed; the flames climbed so high that they extinguished the stars.
Excited by the delirium of fever, Maurice raised a wild laugh: ‘A fine fête at the Council of State and the Tuileries! The façades have been illuminated, the chandeliers are sparkling, and the women dance. Ah! dance, dance in your smouldering skirts and your flaming chignons!’ With a wave of his uninjured arm he evoked the gala gatherings of Sodom and Gomorrah, the music, the flowers, the monstrous pleasures, the palaces bursting with such lust and debauchery, illumining their abominations with such a wealth of tapers that they set themselves ablaze! All at once there was a frightful uproar. It was the fire, coming from either end of the Tuileries, which was at last reaching the Hall of the Marshals.[59] The barrels of gunpowder caught alight, and the Pavillon de l’Horloge blew up with the violence of a powder-mill. An immense sheaf of fire arose, a plume which waved and spread over the black sky—the flaming ‘bouquet’ of those frightful fireworks.
‘Bravo, dancers!’ cried Maurice, as at the end of a spectacular performance when all becomes dark on the stage again.
Once more, in distracted phrases, did Jean stammeringly beseech him not to talk like that. No, no! one should never wish for evil. If this were the end of everything, would not they themselves perish? And he was now all eagerness to land and escape the terrible spectacle. Still he prudently rowed on until they had passed the Concorde bridge, so as to put into shore below the Quai de la Conférence, beyond the bend of the Seine. And at that critical moment, instead of allowing the boat to drift away, he lost some minutes in mooring it, such was his instinctive respect for other people’s property. His plan was to reach the Rue des Orties by way of the Place de la Concorde and the Rue St. Honoré. After making Maurice sit down on the shore, he climbed the steps of the quay to examine the surroundings, and was again seized with anxiety on realising the difficulty they would have to surmount all the obstacles assembled together on that point. Here indeed was the fortress which the Commune had deemed impregnable, the Tuileries terrace bristling with cannon, the Rue Royale, the Rue St. Florentin, and the Rue de Rivoli barred by lofty, massively built barricades. And the spectacle explained the tactics that had been adopted by the army of Versailles, whose lines that night formed an immense arc, having the Place de la Concorde for its vertex, and starting, on the right bank of the river, from the goods station of the Northern Railway Company, and on the left bank from a bastion of the ramparts near the Arcueil gate. Dawn, however, would now soon be rising, the Communists had evacuated the Tuileries and the barricades, and the troops had just taken possession of the district in the midst of other conflagrations—twelve more houses which had been burning ever since nine in the evening at the crossway of the Faubourg St. Honoré and the Rue Royale.
When Jean descended to the shore again he found Maurice drowsy, stupefied as it were by the reaction following upon his delirious outburst. ‘It won’t be easy,’ said the corporal. ‘Can you still walk, youngster?’
‘Yes, yes, don’t worry; I shall always get there, dead or alive.’
He had considerable difficulty, however, in climbing the stone steps; and once up above, on the quay, leaning on his companion’s arm, he walked on slowly with the step of a somnambulist. Although the daylight was not yet breaking, a kind of livid dawn—the light cast by the neighbouring conflagrations—illumined the vast Place. It was silent, deserted, and they crossed it with their hearts oppressed by the mournful spectacle of havoc they beheld. Beyond the Concorde bridge, and at the farther end of the Rue Royale, they could dimly discern the phantom-like piles of the Palais Bourbon and the Madeleine, battered by the cannonade. A portion of the Tuileries terrace also had fallen, breached by the guns. On the Place itself the bronze tritons, naiads, and dolphins of the fountains had been riddled with bullets, the colossal trunk of the statue of Lille lay upon the pavement, cut in halves by a shell; whilst the crape-veiled statue of Strasburg, near at hand, seemed to be mourning the ruin which surrounded it And in a trench, near the uninjured obelisk, there was a broken gas pipe, which had accidentally caught fire, and whence a long jet of flame was spurting with a strident sound.
Jean was careful not to approach the barricade blocking the entry of the Rue Royale, between the Ministry of Marine and the Garde-Meuble,[60] both of which had been preserved from the fire. He could hear the gruff voices of soldiers behind the barrels of earth and the sandbags of which this barricade was constructed. Its front was defended by a ditch, full of stagnant water, on which the corpse of a Federal was floating, and through an embrasure one could perceive the houses of the St. Honoré crossway still burning in spite of the fire-pumps[61] which had come in from the suburbs, and whose snorting could be plainly heard. To right and left, the little trees and the kiosks of the news vendors were broken, riddled with bullets, and all at once loud cries of horror arose, for, on descending into a cellar, the firemen had there discovered the charred corpses of seven inmates of one of the burning houses.
Although the lofty, skilfully built barricade barring the Rue St. Florentin and the Rue de Rivoli appeared yet more formidable than the other one, Jean somehow instinctively divined that it would be less difficult for him and Maurice to pass that way. Indeed, the barricade was evacuated, although the troops had not yet dared to occupy it. Heavy guns were slumbering there in abandonment. There was not a living thing left behind that invincible rampart, save a stray dog, which ran off in alarm. However, whilst Jean was hastily walking up the Rue St. Florentin sustaining Maurice, who had become very weak, his fears were suddenly realised, for they came upon a company of the 88th of the Line which had turned the barricade.
‘Sir,’ said Jean to the captain, ‘this is a comrade of mine whom those brigands have wounded. I’m taking him to the ambulance.’
The military great-coat thrown over Maurice’s shoulders saved him, and Jean’s heart was beating almost to the point of bursting as they at last turned into the Rue St. Honoré, along which they took their way. The dawn was scarcely breaking as yet, and the reports of fire-arms frequently resounded in the side streets, for fighting was still going on throughout the district. By a miracle, however, they managed to reach the corner of the Rue des Frondeurs without any other unpleasant meeting. And now they made way but slowly; those last three or four hundred yards seemed to be interminable. Whilst going up the Rue des Frondeurs they fell in with a band of Communards, who fortunately took to their heels in alarm, fancying that an entire regiment was at hand. And then they only had to take a few steps along the Rue d’Argenteuil to find themselves at last in the Rue des Orties.
Ah! that Rue des Orties! with what feverish impatience had Jean been longing to reach it during four interminable hours! It seemed to them like deliverance when they entered it at last. It was black, deserted, and silent, as though a hundred leagues away from the field of fratricidal battle. The house where Maurice lived, an old, narrow, lofty building, where there was no door-porter, was fast asleep, as still as the grave.
‘The keys are in my trousers pocket,’ stammered Maurice, ‘the big one is that of the street-door, the little one opens my room, right at the top of the stairs.’
Then he was overcome, and fainted away in the arms of Jean, whose anxiety and embarrassment were extreme. He was so upset, indeed, that he forgot to shut the street-door after him. And then he had to grope his way up those strange stairs, carrying Maurice in his arms and striving not to stumble for fear lest the noise should bring some of the lodgers to their doors. Then, up above, he lost himself, and had to seat the wounded man on a stair, and search for the door of his room with the help of some matches which he fortunately had about him. And when he had at last found the door and opened it, he came back to fetch Maurice, and carried him off, and laid him on the little iron bedstead, in front of the window, overlooking Paris, which he threw wide open in his need of air and light. The dawn was now breaking, and he dropped upon his knees beside the bed, sobbing, stunned, and strengthless, as the fearful thought awoke within him that he had killed his friend.
Several minutes must have elapsed, and, when he looked up, he hardly felt any surprise at beholding Henriette. After all, it was perfectly natural; her brother was dying, and she had come. He had not even seen her enter the room; for all he knew, she might have been there for hours. And now, sinking upon a chair, he watched her as she distractedly hovered here and there, stricken with mortal grief at sight of her brother lying on that bed, unconscious and covered with blood. Then all at once Jean’s memory came back to him and he asked: ‘Did you shut the street-door after you?’
She could not speak, her emotion was too great, but she nodded her head affirmatively; and then, as she at last stepped up to him to place her hands in his, in the need she felt of affection and help, he again spoke: ‘You know, it was I who killed him.’
She did not understand, did not believe him. He felt her little hands lying calmly in his own.
‘Yes, it was I who killed him—Yes, on a barricade over yonder. He was fighting on one side and I on the other.’
The little hands began to tremble.
‘We were all mad drunk as it were; we none of us knew what we were doing—and it was I who killed him.’
Then Henriette, quivering and ghastly pale, gazing at him fixedly with eyes of terror, withdrew her hands. O God! was everything to perish, would nothing survive in her crushed heart? Ah! that Jean, she had been thinking of him that very evening, happy in the vague hope that she might perhaps see him again. And it was he who had done that abominable thing; and yet he had again saved Maurice, since it was he who had brought him thither through so many dangers. She could no longer place her hands in his without a revolt of her whole being; but she raised a cry in which rang out the last hope of her warring heart: ‘Oh! I will cure him, I must cure him now!’
She had become very expert in nursing and dressing wounds during her long vigils at the ambulance of Remilly. And she at once wished to examine her brother, whom she undressed without rousing him from his fainting fit. But while she was unfastening the rude bandage, which Jean had devised, the young fellow began to stir, raising a faint cry as he opened his big feverish eyes. He at once recognised her and smiled at her: ‘So you are here! Ah! how glad I am to see you again before I die!’
She silenced him with a loving gesture of confidence. ‘Die, no, I won’t let you die, I mean you to live. Don’t talk, let me attend to you.’
Her face became clouded, however, and her eyes grew dim when she had examined his transpierced arm and injured ribs. Then, taking possession of the room, she searched about till she found a little oil, and began tearing some old shirts into bands, whilst Jean went down to fill a pitcher with water. He, poor fellow, no longer spoke a word, but watched her whilst she washed the wounds and skilfully dressed them, quite incapable of helping her, altogether annihilated as it were since her arrival. However, he observed her anxiety, and when she had finished he offered to go and fetch a doctor. But she had an acute perception of the position: no, no, not the first chance doctor, who might perhaps betray her brother. Then at last, upon Jean talking of rejoining his regiment, it was agreed that he should return as soon as he could manage and endeavour to bring a doctor with him.
Nevertheless, he did not take himself off; it was as though he could not make up his mind to leave that room, where all told of his unhappy deed. After being closed for a moment, the window had again been opened, and the wounded man, lying in bed, with his head propped up by pillows, could gaze out upon the roofs of Paris, whither the glances of the others also strayed, in the heavy silence which oppressed them.
From that height of the Butte des Moulins one half of the city lay stretched out below them—first, the central districts from the Faubourg St. Honoré to the Bastille, then the long sweep of the Seine and the distant buildings swarming on its left bank, a sea of roofs, tree-tops, steeples, domes and towers. The light was now growing stronger; the abominable night, one of the most frightful in history, was ended. But in the pure light of the rising sun, under the rosy sky, the fires continued blazing. In front of them they could see the Tuileries, which was still burning, the Orsay barracks, the palaces of the Council of State and the Legion of Honour, the flames from which, paling in the broad light, imparted a great quivering as it were to the heavens. And beyond the houses of the Rue de Lille and the Rue du Bac, other houses must now be flaring, for pillars of flakes were rising from the crossway of the Croix-Rouge, and from the Rue Vavin and the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, yet farther away. Close by, on the right, the conflagrations of the Rue St. Honoré were running their course, whilst on the left the fires tardily kindled at the Palais-Royal and the new Louvre, where the torch had not been applied until near morning, were prematurely dying out. And, at first, neither Maurice nor Jean could account for some thick black smoke which the westerly breeze was slowly driving past the window. Since three in the morning, however, the Ministry of Finances in the Rue de Rivoli had also been burning. No lofty flames shot up from it, everything was turning into dense, whirling masses of soot, so prodigious was the collection of papers of all kinds gathered together there, under the low ceilings of the lath-and-plaster partitioned rooms. And thus, if the tragic impression of the night—the fear of total destruction, the Seine rolling live embers and Paris blazing at its four corners—had passed away when the great city awoke, there was in lieu thereof a dreary, despair-fraught gloominess hanging over the districts that had yet been spared, a gloominess which slowly travelled along with that dense, continuous, ever-spreading smoke-cloud from the Ministry of Finances. And presently, the sun, which had risen bright and clear, was hidden by the cloud, and only that pall of mourning could be seen aloft in the tawny sky.
With a slow wave of the hand which embraced the boundless horizon, Maurice, again delirious, muttered: ‘Is everything burning? Ah! how long it takes!’
Tears were welling in Henriette’s eyes as though her burden of misery were rendered yet heavier by those immense disasters in which her brother had his share. And Jean, who dared neither take her hand again, nor even embrace his friend, thereupon hurried off like one who is losing his senses. ‘Good-bye; I will be back soon.’
He was only able to return, however, in the evening at about eight o’clock, after night had fallen. In spite of his great anxiety he was in some measure happy, for his regiment was no longer taking any part in the fighting, but had been transferred from the first to the second line, with orders to guard this very district. His company camping on the Place du Carrousel, he hoped that he would be able to run up every evening to see how Maurice was getting on. And he did not come back alone; as luck would have it, he had met the surgeon-major of his old regiment, the 106th, and having failed to find any other doctor he brought this one with him, reflecting that this terrible man with the lion’s head was, after all, a good and worthy fellow.
When Bouroche, not knowing what wounded man it was whom the corporal so pressingly begged him to succour, and growling at having had to climb so many flights of stairs, realised that he had a Communard before him, he at first flew into a violent passion: ‘Thunder! Are you playing the fool with me? Brigands who are weary of thieving, murdering, and burning! That bandit’s affair is clear enough; I’ll cure him precious quick, yes, with three bullets in his head!’
But on perceiving Henriette, so intensely pale in her black dress, and with her lovely fair hair falling over her shoulders, he suddenly became calm again. ‘It is my brother, sir,’ said she; ‘he was one of your soldiers at Sedan.’
Bouroche did not answer, but uncovered the wounds and examined them in silence; then, taking some phials from his pocket, he made a fresh dressing, explaining to the young woman what she would have to do. And then, in his gruff voice, he all at once asked the wounded man: ‘Why were you on the side of those ruffians? Why did you do such an abominable thing?’
Maurice had been gazing at him with glittering eyes, but without pronouncing a word. And now, amid his fever, he answered in a burning voice: ‘Because there is too much suffering in the world; too much iniquity and too much shame!’
Bouroche waved his arm as though to say that such ideas might carry a man very far indeed. Then he seemed to be on the point of speaking again, but decided to hold his peace. And as he went out he simply added: ‘I will come back again.’
On the landing, however, he told Henriette plainly that he could answer for nothing. The lung was seriously injured, and hæmorrhage might supervene and kill the wounded man in a moment. When Henriette returned into the room she strove to smile, despite the blow which the doctor’s words had dealt her in the heart. Would she not save him, would she not prevent that frightful thing, the eternal separation of all three of them, now gathered together in that chamber and ardently longing for life? Throughout the day she had not once left the little room, an old woman occupying a neighbouring attic having obligingly undertaken her errands. And now she came and resumed her seat on a chair beside the bed.
Giving way, however, to his feverish excitement, Maurice had begun to question Jean, anxious to learn what was happening. The corporal did not tell him everything; he avoided all allusion to the furious wrath which was rising up against the expiring Commune throughout delivered Paris. It was now Wednesday, and for two long days, since the Sunday evening, the inhabitants had been living in their cellars quaking with fear. And on the Wednesday morning, when they were at last able to venture out, the spectacle they beheld—the streets torn up, the remnants of barricades, the corpses, the pools of blood, and especially the awful conflagrations—inflamed them with vengeful fury. The chastisement was to prove a terrible one. The houses were searched, all suspicious characters of either sex were at once handed over to the firing parties to be summarily shot. By six o’clock on the evening of that day the army of Versailles was in possession of one half of the city, its lines running from the park of Montsouris to the Northern Railway station by way of the main thoroughfares. And the remaining members of the Commune, some twenty men or so, had now been compelled to take refuge at the municipal offices of the Eleventh Arrondissement, on the Boulevard Voltaire.
Silence fell, and at last, as Maurice gazed at the city through the open window, by which the warm night air streamed into the room, he muttered: ‘At all events, the work goes on—Paris still burns!’
He spoke truly: the flames had shone out once more as soon as night had fallen, and a villainous glow was again tinging the sky with a purple hue. During the afternoon, the powder magazine near the Luxembourg palace had exploded with so frightful a crash, that a rumour had spread that it was the Panthéon crumbling into the Catacombs. Moreover, the fires of the previous night had continued burning throughout the day—the palace of the Council of State and the Tuileries were still flaming, whilst the Ministry of Finances still belched its wreathing clouds of smoke. Over and over again had it been necessary to close the window, in order to shut out a cloud of black butterflies, scraps upon scraps of charred paper, which the violence of the fire whirled upward into the sky, whence they fell again in a fine rain. All Paris was covered with these fragments,[62] some of which, carried off by the wind, were picked up even in Normandy, twenty leagues away. And now not merely were the western and southern quarters flaring—the houses of the Rue Royale, those of the Croix-Rouge crossway, and of the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs—but all the eastern side of the city also seemed to be in flames. The huge brazier of the Hôtel-de-Ville glowed on the horizon with a gigantic sacrificial pyre. And flaring like torches in the same direction there were the municipal offices of the Fourth Arrondissement, the Lyric theatre, and over thirty houses in adjacent streets; to say nothing of the Porte-St. Martin theatre, which on the north shone out all alone, ruddy with fire, like a rick standing out in the midst of dusky fields. Here and there private vengeance was busy at work, and desperate efforts were made to hasten the destruction of various buildings in order that certain records preserved in them might be annihilated. But among the majority of the insurgents there was no longer any question of defending themselves, or of arresting the advance of the troops by the fires. Madness reigned, conflagrations were kindled in haphazard fashion, for the mere sake of destroying; and the cathedral of Notre Dame, the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, and the Palais de Justice were only saved by a lucky chance.
‘Ah! War! hateful War!’ said Henriette in an undertone, as she gazed on that city of havoc, suffering, and agony.
Was not this indeed the inevitable last act of the tragedy—the outbreak of that madness which had germinated on those fatal fields of defeat around Sedan and Metz; the outbreak too of that epidemic of destructiveness engendered by the siege of Paris, the supreme convulsion of a nation threatened with dissolution amid butchery and ruin? Maurice, however, without taking his eyes off the burning districts over yonder, stammered with difficulty: ‘No, no, don’t curse War—War is good, it has its task——’
But Jean interrupted him with a cry of mingled hatred and remorse: ‘Good God! you talk like that when I see you lying there, all through my fault. No, no, you mustn’t defend War again; it is an abominable thing!’
The wounded man feebly waved his hand: ‘What does it matter about me? There are plenty of others. This blood-letting was perhaps necessary. War is life, and there can be no life unless there be death also.’
Then Maurice closed his eyes, exhausted by the effort which these few words had cost him. Henriette signed to Jean not to continue arguing. Calm though her nature was, the nature of a feeble yet a valiant woman, with limpid eyes in which the heroic soul of her grandfather lived anew, she also was now upheaved by a feeling of protest, of anger with the suffering human race.
Two more days, Thursday and Friday, went by amid the same scenes of conflagration and massacre. The uproar of the cannonade was incessant. The batteries of Montmartre captured by the army of Versailles were now firing without a pause upon those which the Federals had established at Belleville and the Père-Lachaise cemetery; and the latter were on their side firing at random upon Paris. Shells had fallen both in the Rue de Richelieu and on the Place Vendôme. On the evening of the 25th the whole of the city on the left bank of the Seine was in the hands of the troops; but on the right bank the barricades on the Place du Château d’Eau and the Place de la Bastille were still holding out. There were, on these points, two veritable fortresses defended by a galling, incessant fire. At twilight, amid the disbanding of the last members of the Commune, Delescluze took his cane, and, like a promenader out for a stroll, came quietly to the barricade blocking the Boulevard Voltaire to fall and die there like a hero. At dawn on the morrow, May 20, the Château d’Eau and the Bastille positions were carried by the troops, and then only La Villette, Belleville, and Charonne remained in the power of the Communists, who were becoming less and less numerous, until there remained at last merely a handful of brave men resolved to die. And during two more days these prolonged their resistance, fighting with the fury of despair.
On the Friday evening, while Jean, having managed to get away from the Place du Carrousel, was on his way to the Rue des Orties, he witnessed, in the lower part of the Rue de Richelieu, a summary execution which filled him with horror. Two courts-martial had been sitting since the Wednesday, one at the Luxembourg palace, the other at the Châtelet theatre. The men condemned by the former tribunal were executed in the palace gardens, whilst those sentenced by the latter were dragged to the Lobau barracks, where firing parties, kept under arms throughout the day, shot them down almost at point-blank range, in the inner courtyard. And here especially did the butchery prove frightful: men, mere boys, condemned to death on the flimsiest evidence—because their hands were black with powder, or simply because they were wearing regulation shoes; innocent men, too, falsely denounced, victims of private malice shouting out explanations to which their military judges would not listen; droves of prisoners huddled together pell-mell in front of the gun-barrels, so many poor wretches brought in for execution at the same time, that the men of the firing-party had not bullets enough for all of them, and despatched those whom their discharge had merely wounded with the butt-ends of their guns. From morning till evening blood streamed and tumbrils carried away the corpses. And then, too, here and there through the conquered city, amid the frequent outbursts of vengeful fury, there were other executions in front of the barricades, against the blank walls of deserted streets, and on the steps of the public buildings.
It was under such circumstances that Jean saw some inhabitants of the neighbourhood dragging a woman and two men before the officers of a detachment of troops guarding the Théâtre Français. The civilian population indeed showed itself even more ferocious than the soldiers, and the newspapers that had resumed publication clamoured for extermination. The violent throng which Jean encountered was especially wrathful with the woman, a pétroleuse it was said, one of those creatures the fear of whom now haunted the public imagination, who were accused of prowling about in the evening, slinking along past the houses of well-to-do people and flinging canfuls of flaming petroleum into the cellars. This one, so the crowd shouted, had been surprised whilst crouching before a vent-hole in the Rue St. Anne. And despite her protests and her sobs she was flung with the two men into the ditch of a barricade, which had not yet been filled up; and there, in that black hole, all three of them were shot like wolves caught in a trap. Promenaders stood by looking on; among them a lady leaning on her husband’s arm, whilst a pastry-cook’s boy, who was carrying a pie to some house in the neighbourhood, lingered whistling a hunting refrain.[63]
As Jean, with his heart frozen, was hastening on towards the Rue des Orties a sudden recollection dawned upon him. Was not that Chouteau, formerly of his squad in the 106th, whom he had seen watching that execution—clad in the honest white blouse of a workman and waving his arm in an approving fashion? Jean knew what part that bandit, traitor, robber, and murderer had played! For a moment he felt inclined to retrace his steps, denounce the scoundrel, and have him shot upon the corpses of the three others. How sad to think that the most guilty should ever escape punishment, and air their impunity in the sunlight, whilst thousands of innocents lie rotting in the ground!
Hearing his steps upon the stairs, Henriette came to meet him on the landing: ‘Be prudent, he is in a state of terrible excitement to-day,’ said she; ‘the major has been again and gives me but little hope.’ Bouroche indeed had shaken his head ominously, declaring that he was as yet unable to promise anything. Still, perhaps the sufferer’s youth would triumph over the complications which he feared.
‘Ah! it’s you,’ said Maurice feverishly as soon as he caught sight of Jean. ‘I was waiting for you to come. What is going on? How do matters stand?’ And sitting up in bed, with his back resting on the pillow, in front of the window which he had compelled his sister to re-open, he pointed to the city, which another furnace-like glow was now illumining: ‘It’s beginning again, eh? Paris is burning, and this time it will all burn.’
Since sunset, indeed, all the distant districts up the Seine had been illumined by the conflagration of the Grenier d’Abondance.[64] At the Tuileries and the Council of State, the roofs and ceilings must have been falling in, imparting fresh vigour to the braziers of smouldering beams, for here and there the fires burst forth again, and flakes and sparks arose. In this way, too, many houses where it was thought the fires had gone out suddenly began flaming again once more. For three days past, the night had no sooner gathered in, than the city kindled afresh; it seemed as though the darkness breathed upon the paling embers, fanning them again into flames, which it scattered to the four corners of the horizon. Ah! that hellish city, which began to redden as soon as the twilight came, burning and burning for seven days, illumining with its monstrous torches the nights of the Bloody Week! And on that Friday night, when the magazines of La Villette burned down, so intense was the light thrown over the immense city, that one might have thought it fired upon every side, invaded and submerged by the flames. Under the ensanguined sky, the lurid districts rolled their waves of shimmering roofs as far as the eye could see.
‘The end has come,’ repeated Maurice. ‘Paris is burning!’
He excited himself with these words, repeating them a score of times in the febrile longing to talk that had come over him after the heavy somnolence which for three days had kept him almost mute. However, the sound of stifled sobbing made him turn his head.
‘What! Is it you, little sister, you so brave? You are crying because I am about to die?’
She interrupted him, protesting: ‘No, no, you will not die.’
‘Yes, it is better so, it is necessary! Ah! nothing of much account will be lost in me. Before the war I caused you so much worry. I cost you dearly both in heart and purse. All those senseless things I was guilty of—all those acts of folly I committed and which would have brought me to a bad end, perhaps—who knows?—to imprisonment, the gutter——’
Again did she violently interrupt him: ‘Be quiet, be quiet! You have atoned for it all!’
He became silent and reflected for a moment: ‘Well, yes, I shall have atoned, perhaps—when I am dead. Ah! my old Jean, you all the same rendered us a first-rate service when you gave me that bayonet thrust——’
But Jean, whose eyes were swollen with tears, also protested: ‘Don’t say that. Do you want me to go and batter my brains out against a wall?’
In a burning voice, Maurice continued: ‘Do you remember what you said to me after Sedan, that it sometimes benefited one to receive a good blow? And you added, too, that when there was any rottenness anywhere, when one had a diseased limb past healing, it was far better to lop it off with an axe than to die of it as one dies of the cholera. I have often thought of those words since then, since I have been alone, shut up in this mad, miserable Paris. And you see, it’s I that am the rotten limb that you have lopped off——’
His excitement was increasing; he no longer listened to the entreaties of Henriette and Jean, whom he altogether terrified. Amid his fever he continued talking almost deliriously, with a profusion of symbolical terms and vivid imagery. It was the healthy portion of France, that which was endowed with common-sense and a well-balanced mind, the peasant portion, which had remained nearest to the soil, which was now suppressing the crazed, exasperated portion—that which the Empire had corrupted, which had been driven mad by enjoyment and senseless fancies; and it had been necessary that France should thus carve into her own flesh, thus mutilate herself, scarce knowing what she was doing. Yes, that bath of blood, of French blood, had been necessary; it was the abominable holocaust, the living sacrifice offered up amidst purifying fire. And now the Calvary was ascended, the most awful of agonies had been reached, the crucified nation was expiating its sins and was about to be born again.
‘And you, my old friend Jean, you are the one with the simple mind and the stout heart. Go, go; take your pick and take your trowel, go and turn the soil over in the fields, and build the house anew! But as for me, you have done well to lop me off, since I was the ulcer clinging to your bones!’
He was again delirious, and wished to rise and lean out of the window. ‘Paris is burning,’ he gasped once more; ‘nothing of it will remain. Ah! I desired it, longed for it; that flame which carries everything away, which heals everything—it is doing good work. Let me go down; let me help finish the work of humanity and liberty!’
Jean had the greatest difficulty in getting him back into bed again, whilst Henriette in tears spoke to him of their childhood, and entreated him, in the name of their affection, to be calm. And meantime the fiery glow above the vast city had spread even farther; the sea of flames was now gaining the dark, distant limits of the horizon, and the sky looked like the vaulted roof of some giant, red-hot oven. Meantime, athwart the lurid light of the fires, the dense smoke rising from the Ministry of Finances, which since two days previously had been stubbornly burning without a flame, still slowly travelled by like a sombre pall of mourning.
On the morrow, which was Saturday, a sudden improvement took place in Maurice’s condition; he was much calmer, the fever had subsided, and Jean was greatly delighted to find Henriette smiling, and again dreaming of their intimacy in the happy future, which seemed still possible. Was Destiny indeed about to pardon? She spent her nights in watching; she did not stir from that room where her active Cinderella-like gentleness, her nimble, silent ministrations were like a continuous caress. And, that evening, Jean lingered in the company of his friends, with a pleasure that astonished him and made him tremble. The troops had captured Belleville and the Buttes-Chaumont during the day, so that the Père-Lachaise cemetery, transformed into an entrenched camp, was now the only point where the resistance continued. It seemed to Jean that the whole terrible business was now over, and he even asserted that no more prisoners were being shot. He merely alluded to the flocks of captives who were being despatched to Versailles. Passing along the quay that morning, he had met one of those convoys—men in blouses, men in coats, and men in their shirt-sleeves, with women of every age, some with the wrinkled, scraggy visages of furies, and others in the flower of their youth, girls barely fifteen, but all blended in a great, long, rolling wave of wretchedness and revolt, which the soldiers urged along in the bright sunlight, and which the good folks of Versailles, it was said, greeted with jeering and hooting, and belaboured with sticks and parasols.
On the Sunday, however, Jean was terrified. It was the last day of that hateful week. Since the triumphal rising of the sun on that warm, clear holiday morning he had felt the thrill of the supreme convulsion passing through the city. It was only now that people learned of the repeated massacres of the hostages—the archbishop, the priest of the Madeleine, and the others who had been shot at La Roquette on the Wednesday; the Dominican monks of Arcueil, who had been picked off on the run like hares on the Thursday; the other priests and the gendarmes, who, to the number of forty-seven, had been despatched on the ramparts near the Rue Haxo on the Friday; and now the fury of the reprisals had burst forth once more, and the troops were executing en masse the last prisoners that they made. Throughout that beautiful Sunday, the sound of platoon firing rang out without cessation from the courtyard of the Lobau barracks, where all was blood and smoke and groaning. At La Roquette two hundred and twenty-seven poor wretches, captured here and there, were shot down in a heap. At the Père-Lachaise cemetery, bombarded for four days and at last conquered tomb by tomb, one hundred and forty-eight captives were flung against a wall, the plaster of which was bespattered with big tears of blood; and three of these men, who had been merely wounded by the discharge were promptly recaptured and finished off, when they endeavoured to escape. Among those twelve thousand unhappy beings who lost their lives through the Commune, how many innocents there were for each rogue who met his deserts! It was said that orders to stop the executions had come from Versailles; but the butchery still continued, and Thiers, amid all the pure glory he achieved by the Liberation of the Territory, was to become, for many, the legendary Assassin of Paris; whilst Marshal MacMahon, the beaten general of Frœschweiler, whose proclamation of victory was to be seen on every wall, was to pass into history as the Conqueror of Père-Lachaise. And Paris, strolling forth into the bright sunshine in its Sunday best, put on that day a festive air; dense crowds obstructed the reconquered streets, promenaders strolled cheerfully to view the smoking ruins, and mothers, holding their little children by the hand, stopped for a moment and listened with an expression of interest to the deadened reports of the firing at the Lobau barracks.
When, on the Sunday evening, just as daylight was waning, Jean climbed the dark staircase of the house in the Rue des Orties, a frightful presentiment was oppressing his heart.
He entered the room and at once saw that the inevitable end had come. Maurice lay dead upon the little bed, killed by hæmorrhage, as Major Bouroche had feared. The red farewell of the setting sun was stealing in by the open window, and two candles were already burning on the table near the head of the bed. And Henriette, on her knees, in her widow’s robe which she had not quitted, was weeping there in silence.
Hearing the door open, she raised her head and shuddered as she saw Jean come in. He, in his despair, darted forward to take her hands that he might in a loving grasp mingle his own grief with hers. But he felt that the little hands were trembling, that all her quivering form was recoiling from him in revolt, that she was tearing herself away from him for ever. Was it not indeed all over between them now? Maurice’s grave parted them like a bottomless abyss. And then he also could only fall upon his knees at the bedside, sobbing softly.
However, after a brief silence, Henriette spoke: ‘I had turned my back,’ she said, ‘and was holding a bowl of broth, when all at once he gave a cry—I only had time to rush up to him and he died, calling me and calling you amid a stream of blood.’
Her brother, O God! Her fondly loved Maurice, adored prior to birth even, her second self, whom she had reared, saved, her sole affection since she had seen her poor Weiss fall riddled with bullets against that wall at Bazeilles! So War was taking her whole heart; she was to remain alone in the world, a widow, brotherless, with none to love her!
‘Ah! good Lord!’ cried Jean sobbing, ‘it’s my fault. My dear little fellow, for whom I would have laid down my life, and whom I killed like the brute I am! What will become of us? Can you ever forgive me?’
And at that moment their eyes met and they were overwhelmed by that which they now, at last, could clearly read in them. All the past arose: the secluded little room at Remilly where they had spent such sad and yet such pleasant days. He bethought himself of that dream of his, that dream which had stolen upon him quite unconsciously, which even later had been barely outlined—life together over yonder, marriage, a little house, a field to till, which would suffice for the needs of a couple of modest, simple tastes. And now the dream had become an ardent desire, a penetrating conviction that with such a woman as she was, so loving and so industrious, life would have proved an earthly Paradise. And she who had had no inkling of this dream in the chaste, unconscious bestowal of her heart, could now clearly see and understand everything. That remote marriage, she herself had unknowingly desired it. The germinating seed had covertly sprouted, and now it was love that she felt for that man by the side of whom she had at first merely felt comforted. And their eyes told it to them, and they now loved openly, at the moment when they must part for ever! That frightful sacrifice had yet to be accomplished, the last rending, their happiness—still possible the day before—now crumbling to ashes like everything else, swept away by the stream of blood which had just carried off their brother.
With a long and painful effort of the knees Jean raised himself to his feet again. ‘Farewell!’ Henriette remained motionless on the tiled floor. ‘Farewell!’
However, Jean had drawn near to Maurice, that he might look upon him for the last time. He gazed upon his lofty forehead, which seemed loftier still in death, his long thin face and his sightless eyes, once rather wild but whence all the madness had now departed. Jean longed to embrace his dear little fellow, as he had so often called him, but dared not. He beheld himself covered with his brother’s blood, and recoiled before the horror of Destiny. Ah! what a death amid the Downfall of a world! On that last day, when nothing but a few shreds was left of the expiring Commune, this additional victim had been required! Thirsting for Justice, the poor fellow had departed amid the supreme convulsion of his great black dream: that grandiose, monstrous conception of the destruction of the old social system, of Paris burnt, of the soil turned up and purified so that there might spring from it the idyll of another Golden Age!
With his heart full of anguish Jean turned to the window and looked out on Paris. The beautiful day was serenely drawing to its close, and the sun, now on a level with the horizon, was illumining the city with a bright red glow. It looked not unlike a sun of blood poised upon a boundless sea. The panes of thousands of windows were scintillating as though on fire, inflamed by invisible bellows; the roofs glowed like beds of live coals; yellow walls, lofty rust-coloured monuments flared and sparkled in the evening air like brisk faggot fires. And was not this the final pyrotechnical sheaf, the gigantic purple ‘bouquet’—all Paris burning like a giant hurdle, like some ancient forest of dead, dry trees, fleeting away into the heavens in soaring flames and sparks. The fires were burning still, volumes of ruddy smoke continued to rise, and a loud confused clamour could be heard, perhaps the last groans of the men shot down at the Lobau barracks, or perhaps the gay chatter of the women and the laughter of the children dining in the open air outside the wine-shops, after their pleasant promenade. From the pillaged houses and public buildings, from the torn-up streets, from the depths of all the havoc and suffering, the buzz and stir of life still sounded amidst the blaze of that regal sunset, whilst Paris was dwindling into embers.
And Jean then experienced an extraordinary sensation. It seemed to him even in the slowly declining light as though another aurora were already rising above the flaming city. And yet this was apparently the end of all, for Destiny had proved implacable, accumulating disaster upon disaster, such as no nation had ever before experienced: the continual defeats; the lost provinces; the milliards to be paid; the most frightful of civil wars drowned in a flood of gore; street after street in ruins and littered with corpses; no money left, no honour left, a whole world to be built afresh. And in it all he, for his own part, was losing his lacerated heart—no Maurice left, no Henriette, all the happy life that might have been swept away in the storm. And yet beyond the furnace, roaring still, in the depths of the great tranquil heavens so supremely limpid, perennial hope was rising once more. ‘Twas the certainty of rejuvenescence, the rejuvenescence of eternal nature and of eternal humanity, the renewal promised unto those who hope and toil; the tree which throws out a new and powerful stem when the rotten branch, whose poisonous sap was blighting the leaves, has been lopped away.
‘Farewell!’ Jean repeated in a sob.
Henriette did not raise her head; her face was hidden by her joined hands: ‘Farewell!’
The ravaged field was lying waste, the burnt house was level with the ground; and Jean, the most humble and the most woeful, went off marching towards the future—to the great and laborious task of building up a new France.
THE END
< < < Chapter VII
Notes > > >
French Literature – Children Books – Émile Zola – The Downfall (La Débâcle) – Contents
Copyright holders – Public Domain Book
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