The streets swarmed with the populace troops as they passed to their
destination. Among those of the Mobiles who especially caught the eye
were two companies in which Enguerrand de Vandemar and Victor de Mauleon
commanded. In the first were many young men of good family, or in the
higher ranks of the bourgeoisie, known to numerous lookers-on; there was
something inspiriting in their gay aspects, and in the easy carelessness
of their march. Mixed with this company, however, and forming of course
the bulk of it, were those who belonged to the lower classes of the
population; and though they too might seem gay to an ordinary observer,
the gaiety was forced. Many of them were evidently not quite sober; and
there was a disorderly want of soldiership in their mien and armament
which inspired distrust among such vieux moustaches as, too old for other
service than that of the ramparts, mixed here and there among the crowd.
But when De Mauleon's company passed, the _vieux moustaches_ impulsively
touched each other. They recognised the march of well-drilled men; the
countenances grave and severe, the eyes not looking on this side and that
for admiration, the step regularly timed; and conspicuous among these men
the tall stature and calm front of the leader.
"These fellows will fight well," growled a _vieux moustache_, "where did
they fish out their leader?"
"Don't you know?" said a bourgeois_. "Victor de Mauleon. He won the
cross in Algeria for bravery. I recollect him when I was very young; the
very devil for women and fighting."
"I wish there were more such devils for fighting and fewer for women,"
growled again _le vieux moustache_.
One incessant roar of cannon all the night of the 29th. The populace had
learned the names of the French cannons, and fancied they could
distinguish the several sounds of their thunder. "There spits
'Josephine'!" shouts an invalid sailor. "There howls our own
'Populace'!" cries a Red Republican from Belleville.
[The "Populace" had been contributed to the artillery,
_sou d sou_, by the working class.]
"There sings 'Le Chatiment'!" laughed Gustave Rameau, who was now become
an enthusiastic admirer of the Victor Hugo he had before affected to
despise. And all the while, mingled with the roar of the cannon, came,
far and near from the streets, from the ramparts, the gusts of song--song
sometimes heroic, sometimes obscene, more often carelessly joyous. The
news of General Vinoy's success during the early part of the day had been
damped by the evening report of Ducrot's delay in crossing the swollen
Marne. But the spirits of the Parisians rallied from a momentary
depression on the excitement at night of that concert of martial music.
During that night, close under the guns of the double redoubt of Gravelle
and La Faisanderie, eight pontoon-bridges were thrown over the Marne; and
at daybreak the first column of the third army under Blanchard and
Renoult crossed with all their artillery, and, covered by the fire of the
double redoubts, of the forts of Vincennes, Nogent, Rossuey, and the
batteries of Mont Avron, had an hour before noon carried the village of
Champingy, and the first echelon of the important plateau of Villiers,
and were already commencing the work of intrenchment, when, rallying from
the amaze of a defeat, the German forces burst upon them, sustained by
fresh batteries. The Prussian pieces of artillery established at
Chennevieres and at Neuilly opened fire with deadly execution; while a
numerous infantry, descending from the intrenchments of Villiers, charged
upon the troops under Renoult. Among the French in that strife were
Enguerrand and the Mobiles of which he was in command. Dismayed by the
unexpected fire, these Mobiles gave way, as indeed did many of the line.
Enguerrand rushed forward to the front: "On, _mes enfans_, on! What will
our mothers and wives say of us if we fly? _Vive la France_!--On!"
Among those of the better class in that company there rose a shout of
applause, but it found no sympathy among the rest. They wavered, they
turned. "Will you suffer me to go on alone, countrymen?" cried
Enguerrand; and alone he rushed on towards the Prussian line--rushed, and
fell, mortally wounded, by a musket-ball. "Revenge, revenge!" shouted
some of the foremost; "Revenge!" shouted those in the rear; and, so
shouting, turned on their heels and fled. But ere they could disperse
they encountered the march, steadfast though rapid, of the troop led by
Victor de Mauleon. "Poltroons!" he thundered, with the sonorous depth of
his strong voice, "halt and turn, or my men shall fire on you as
deserters."
"Va, citoyen," said one fugitive, an officer-popularly elected, because
he was the loudest brawler in the club of the Salle Favre,--we have seen
him before--Charles, the brother of Armand Monnier;--"men can't fight
when they despise their generals. It is our generals who are poltroons
and fools both."
"Carry my answer to the ghosts of cowards," cried De Mauldon, and shot
the man dead.
His followers, startled and cowed by the deed, and the voice and the look
of the death-giver, halted. The officers, who had at first yielded to
the panic of their men, took fresh courage, and finally led the bulk of
the troop back to their, post "enlevis a la baionette," to use the phrase
of a candid historian of that day.
Day, on the whole, not inglorious to France. It was the first, if it was
the last, really important success of the besieged. They remained
masters of the ground, the Prussians leaving to them the wounded and the
dead.
That night what crowds thronged from Paris to the top of the Montmartre
heights, from the observatory on which the celebrated inventor Bazin had
lighted up, with some magical electric machine, all the plain of
Gennevilliers from Mont Valerien to the Fort de la Briche! The splendour
of the blaze wrapped the great city;--distinctly above the roofs of the
houses soared the Dome des Invalides, the spires of Notre Dame, the giant
turrets of the Tuileries;--and died away on resting on the _infames
scapulos Acroceraunia_, the "thunder crags" of the heights occupied by
the invading army.
Lemercier, De Breze, and the elder Rameau--who, despite his peaceful
habits and grey hairs, insisted on joining in the aid of _la patrie_--
were among the National Guards attached to the Fort de la Briche and the
neighbouring eminence, and they met in conversation.
"What a victory we have had!" said the old Rameau.
"Rather mortifying to your son, M. Rameau," said LeMercier.
"Mortifying to my son, sir!--the victory of his countrymen. What do you
mean?"
"I had the honour to hear M. Gustave the other night at the club de la
Vengeance."
"Bon Dieu! do you frequent those tragic reunions?" asked De Breze.
"They are not at all tragic: they are the only comedies left us, as one
must amuse one's self somewhere, and the club de la Vengeance is the
prettiest thing of the sort going. I quite understand why it should
fascinate a poet like your son, M. Rameau. It is held in a _salle de
cafe chantant_--style _Louis Quinze_--decorated with a pastoral scene
from Watteau. I and my dog Fox drop in. We hear your son haranguing.
In what poetical sentences he despaired of the Republic! The Government
(he called them _les charlatans de l'Hotel de Ville_) were imbeciles.
They pretended to inaugurate a revolution, and did not employ the most
obvious of revolutionary means. There Fox and I pricked up our ears:
what were those means? Your son proceeded to explain: 'All mankind were
to be appealed to against individual interests. The commerce of luxury
was to be abolished. Clearly luxury was not at the command of all
mankind. Cafes and theatres were to be closed for ever--all mankind
could not go to cafes and theatres. It was idle to expect the masses to
combine for anything in which the masses had not an interest in common.
The masses had no interest in any property that did not belong to the
masses. Programmes of the society to be founded, called the Ligue
Cosmopolite Democratique, should be sent at once into all the States of
the civilised world--how? by balloons. Money corrupts the world as now
composed: but the money at the command of the masses could buy all the
monarchs and courtiers and priests of the universe.' At that sentiment,
vehemently delivered, the applauses were frantic, and Fox in his
excitement began to bark. At the sound of his bark one man cried out,
'That's a Prussian!' another, 'Down with the spy!' another, 'There's an
aristo present--he keeps alive a dog which would be a week's meal for a
family!' I snatch up Fox at the last cry, and clasp him to a bosom
protected by the uniform of the National Guard.
"When the hubbub had subsided, your son, M. Rameau, proceeded, quitting
mankind in general, and arriving at the question in particular most
interesting to his audience--the mobilisation of the National Guard; that
is, the call upon men who like talking and hate fighting to talk less and
fight more. 'It was the sheerest tyranny to select a certain number of
free citizens to be butchered. If the fight was for the mass, there
ought to be _la levee en masse_. If one did not compel everybody to
fight, why should anybody fight?' Here the applause again became
vehement, and Fox again became indiscreet. I subdued Fox's bark into a
squeak by pulling his ears. 'What!' cries your poet-son, '_la levee en
masse_ gives us fifteen millions of soldiers, with which we could crush,
not Prussia alone, but the whole of Europe. (Immense sensation.) Let
us, then, resolve that the charlatans of the _Hotel de Ville_ are
incapable of delivering us from the Prussians; that they are deposed;
that the _Ligue_ of the _Democratie Cosmopolite_ is installed; that
meanwhile the Commune shall be voted the Provisional Government, and
shall order the Prussians to retire within three days from the soil of
Paris.'
"Pardon me this long description, my dear M. Rameau, but I trust I have
satisfactorily explained why victory obtained in the teeth of his
eloquent opinions, if gratifying to him as a Frenchman, must be
mortifying to him as a politician."
The old Rameau sighed, hung his head, and crept away. While, amid this
holiday illumination, the Parisians enjoyed the panorama before them, the
_Freres Chretiens_ and the attendants of the various ambulances were
moving along the battle-plains; the first in their large-brimmed hats and
sable garbs, the last in strange motley costume, many of them in
glittering uniform--all alike in their serene indifference to danger;
often pausing to pick up among the dead their own brethren who had been
slaughtered in the midst of their task. Now and then they came on
sinister forms apparently engaged in the same duty of tending the wounded
and dead, but in truth murderous plunderers, to whom the dead and the
dying were equal harvests. Did the wounded man attempt to resist the
foul hands searching for their spoil, they added another wound more
immediately mortal, grinning as they completed on the dead the robbery
they had commenced on the dying.
Raoul de Vandemar had been all the earlier part of the day with the
assistants of the ambulance over which he presided, attached to the
battalions of the National Guard in a quarter remote from that in which
his brother had fought and fallen. When those troops, later in the day,
were driven from the Montmedy plateau, which they had at first carried,
Raoul repassed towards the plateau at Villiers, on which the dead lay
thickest. On the way he heard a vague report of the panic which had
dispersed the Mobiles of whom Enguerrand was in command, and of
Enguerrand's vain attempt to inspirit them. But his fate was not known.
There, at midnight, Raoul is still searching among the ghastly heaps and
pools of blood, lighted from afar by the blaze from the observatory of
Montmartre, and more near at hand by the bivouac fires extended along the
banks to the left of the Marne, while everywhere about the field flitted
the lanterns of the _Frere Chretiens_. Suddenly, in the dimness of a spot
cast into shadow by an incompleted earthwork, he observed a small
sinister figure perched on the breast of some wounded soldier, evidently
not to succour. He sprang forward and seized a hideous-looking urchin,
scarcely twelve years old, who held in one hand a small crystal locket,
set in filigree gold, torn from the soldier's breast, and lifted high in
the other a long case-knife. At a glance Raoul recognised the holy relic
he had given to Enguerrand, and, flinging the precocious murderer to be
seized by his assistants, he cast himself beside his brother. Enguerrand
still breathed, and his languid eyes brightened as he knew the dear
familiar face. He tried to speak, but his voice failed, and he shook
his head sadly, but still with a faint smile on his lips. They lifted
him tenderly, and placed him on a litter. The movement, gentle as it
was, brought back pain, and with the pain strength to mutter, "My mother
---I would see her once more."
As at daybreak the loungers on Montmartre and the ramparts descended into
the streets--most windows in which were open, as they had been all night,
with anxious female faces peering palely down-they saw the conveyances of
the ambulances coming dismally along, and many an eye turned wistfully
towards the litter on which lay the idol of the pleasure-loving Paris,
with the dark, bareheaded figure walking beside it,--onwards, onwards,
till it reached the Hotel de Vandemar, and a woman's cry was heard at the
entrance--the mother's cry, "My son! my son!"