THE DELUGE
One brilliant afternoon in July, five years later, all Paris went
crazy. Vast multitudes surged through the streets cheering, laughing,
shouting, singing, for were not the days of glory to be repeated? War
was declared on Prussia, and, after more than fifty years, the eagles
of France were to take their majestic course across the Rhine; again
the soldiers of France were to bivouac in every capital in Europe, for
once started upon the path of conquest, France has ever been impossible
to stop, so thought everybody in Paris that July day.
The streets were like great rivers of humanity, with wild whirlpools
and clamoring cataracts, all drifting toward the ocean, and that
ocean was the Palace of the Tuilleries. Bands rent the air with the
Marseillaise, the great battle hymn of liberty. Often wrested to
unworthy purposes, often sung and played by those who hate liberty and
love anarchy, the mighty hymn ever remained the battle-cry of those
who would be free. Troops were marching along, splendid hussars and
chasseurs trotting gayly through the sunlit streets, steady, red-legged
infantry swinging along to their barracks, Zouaves in baggy trousers
and hanging caps sauntered and swaggered. Officers clattered along
joyously as they made a brilliant streak of color in the great river
of men and women. Everywhere a uniform was seen a ringing cheer went
up from men and women, young and old, palpitating with pride and joy
in these men called to repeat the glories of their ancestors. As the
Emperor had said, whatever road they took across the frontier they
would find glorious traces of their fathers. Wherever the French had
crossed in days past, they had left a trail of glory behind them.
Many groups of soldiers loitered along the streets, or stopped to
laugh and joke on the street comers. Men clapped them on the back,
and handsome young women smiled and waved their hands at them, and
gray-haired grandmothers blessed them. Great ladies in their carriages
stopped and laughed and talked with private soldiers; even the beggars
forgot to beg, and hobnobbed with everybody. A beggar was as good as
the best, provided only he were French.
All was sunshine, a splendor of hope, magnificence, joy. Once more
France would “gird her beauteous limbs with steel,” and smite with her
mailed hand those who would oppress her.
What were her resources? Every man who could carry a musket. What
was her matériel? All the iron, all the steel, all the lead, all the
gunpowder in France. What were her soldiers? Heroes, backed up by all
her old men, her children, her maidens, and her matrons.
The crowd was most dense in the splendid open space before the
Tuilleries gardens, and extended for a long distance on either side of
the palace. The air was drenched with perfume from the gardens; the
river ran red like wine, in the old Homeric phrase; the windows of
the palace blazed in the afternoon light. On a balcony occasionally
appeared the Emperor, who bore the magic name of Napoleon, the Empress,
a dream of smiling beauty, and the Prince Imperial, a mere lad, but
who was to go out on the firing line along with the veterans.
All the gorgeous carriages and all the graceful horsemen and horsewomen
that were usually found at that hour on the Bois de Boulogne formed a
great procession moving at a snail’s pace, and often stopped by the
congestion in the broad Rue de Rivoli and all the fine streets adjacent.
From many points could be seen the Place Vendôme with the great column
made from captured Prussian guns surmounted by the statue of the
immortal man who made Europe tremble at his nod.
The police were good-natured, the crowd was amiable; there was
tremendous excitement, but no disorder. At the slightest incident,
multitudes burst into cheering. The ladies sitting back in their
victorias clapped their delicate, gloved hands and waved their filmy
handkerchiefs, laughing at the soldiers who paid them bold compliments
ten inches away from their faces. The cavaliers and ladies on horseback
exchanged patriotic chaff with those who surged about them.
Among the crowd directly in front of the Tuilleries was Jean Leroux,
not the Jean Leroux of that winter in Bienville five years before,
but another Jean, well dressed, well mannered, successful, but modest
withal.
As the carriages moved slowly past, going a few feet and then stopping,
blockaded by the crowd, a pretty victoria, well horsed, came directly
abreast of Jean Leroux. In it sat Diane, whom he had often seen on the
stage in those five years, but to whom he had never had the courage to
speak; for if Jean was successful, Diane was a hundred times more so.
She was on that day the most popular music-hall artist in Paris. Like
Jean, she was Diane and yet not Diane. Her beautiful, mysterious dark
eyes were unchanged, her frank, sweet smile was the same, but she was
Mademoiselle Dorian, not merely Diane, or worse still, Skinny; that
expressed it all. She had eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; she
knew the great, ugly, beautiful, laughing, weeping, snarling, generous,
wicked, pious world; she was able to take care of herself; she could
stand upon her feet and look the ferocious human race in the eye as Una
faced the lion.
She wore a charming white gown and a lovely flower-crowned hat, and
carried a tiny white lace parasol as if she were accustomed to lace
parasols. Her white kid gloves were dainty, and a great bunch of white
and crimson roses combined with the blue cornflower made a tricolor in
her lap, while on her breast was pinned a tricolor rosette.
As her carriage stopped, the crowd recognized her, and a huge shout
went up:
“La Dorian! La Dorian!”
Diane was used to this cry. She bowed and smiled prettily, like the
experienced actress she was, but that was not what the crowd wanted.
“Sing us La Marseillaise!” they shouted; “you can sing it as no one
else can! Sing it, sing it to us!”
Diane stood up in the carriage holding her tricolor bouquet, and a
great roar of cheering a thousand times greater than she had ever heard
before, stormed the air. Diane stood erect, with her head thrown back.
At last there was silence, and Diane, pointing with her white gloved
hand straight at Jean not ten feet away, cried in her clear,
practised, penetrating voice:
“There is a man who can sing La Marseillaise better than I can. Bring
him here, and make him sing it, too.”
The crowd, cheering and laughing, immediately seized Jean, and, in
spite of his modest protests, hurled him into the carriage, where he
sat down protesting and embarrassed. While the multitude was quieting
down, Diane and he exchanged a few words.
“Why haven’t you been to see me in all these years?” said Diane.
“Because you were too grand,” said Jean. “I didn’t want to thrust
myself upon a great artist. You might have thought that I wanted you to
do something for me, or to get me an engagement. But I have often gone
to the music-halls to hear you.”
“You were always a goose about some things, Jean Leroux!” was Diane’s
reply.
And then the silence was complete, and the multitudes that packed the
streets a mile on either hand waited to hear the first word of the hymn
of battle.
As Diane stood up in the carriage, her slim figure grew taller, and
her blood turned to fire in her veins; her voice cleft the air like
a silver trumpet, sweet and penetrating, and vibrant with patriotic
passion. When she proclaimed,
“The day of glory has arrived!”
the effect was like Jeanne d’Arc striking her spear upon her shield.
Then came the great refrain,
“Aux armes! Aux armes!”
One voice arose--the voices of tens of thousands, united in one vast
ringing call to victory, one great demand for the rights of man, one
last appeal to the God of Battles. The mighty echo rose from earth to
heaven; it seemed for a time to fill the universe, and then to leave
the universe listening for it.
The chorus ceased--a chorus greater than ever mortal ear had heard
since first the men of Marseilles marched to the thunder of their
battle hymn--and Jean Leroux stood up and sang the second verse. His
was the voice of a man ready to march and to fight. The artist’s soul
within Diane quivered as she heard Jean’s splendid basso like the
tones of the organ of Notre Dame pealing out. Again the refrain was
thundered from the multitudes that filled miles of streets, and the
sound seemed to shake the towers of the Tuilleries palace. Then it was
Diane’s turn to sing the third verse. The nation that produced Jeanne
d’Arc respects the patriotism of its women; they are as ready to die
for their country as are the men. At the lines,
“Great God! By these our fettered hands,
Our brows beneath the open yoke,”
Diane lifted her eyes to Heaven, and raised her clasped hands above her
head. It was like Charlotte Corday demanding God’s blessing, while she
armed to do Him service by killing the enemy of His children. Again did
the voice of the people make the splendid refrain sound like a great
Amen. Men were weeping and clasping each other in their arms. Women
with upraised hands prayed for France. The meanest and lowest among
them were made respectable by love of country. Never again were any of
those who heard the song of the nation sung on that July afternoon,
to hear it so sung. They knew it not, but it was for them the last
triumphant singing of the hymn of triumph.
Diane and Jean sang the hymn through to the end. Then Jean, looking at
Diane, saw that she was as pale as death, and she was trembling like an
aspen leaf, while floods of tears ran down her cheeks. He spoke to a
policeman at the carriage wheel.
“Get us out of here as quickly as you can. This has been too much for
Mademoiselle Dorian.”
A couple of brawny policemen, recovering their senses a little, got the
horses out of the line, forced back the crowd, and the carriage rattled
down one of the small streets leading toward the Champs-Elysées.
“Home,” said Jean to the coachman.
He thought the sooner Diane was in some quiet spot the better. He had
no idea where she lived.
The horses trotted briskly along, the coachman avoiding the great,
thronged thoroughfares. As they drove along, Diane’s composure
gradually returned. The color came back to her lips and cheeks, and her
tremors stopped.
“It was enough to shake anybody,” said Jean; “I, myself, felt as weak
as a cat when I sat down. We have never in our lives heard anything
like that. It has not been heard since before Waterloo.”
Diane said little except some murmured reproaches to Jean for not
coming to see her.
“All of you forgot me,” she said. “I suppose it was because that tall,
red-cheeked, awkward creature who took my place, absorbed you so there
was no place even in your memories for me.”
Jean smiled. This was the same Diane.
“No,” he said, “your going seemed to finish up everything. Mademoiselle
Rose was not a success. The public did not like her.”
Diane gave a little gasp of vindictive joy.
“That was bad, of course, for the Grandins,” continued Jean,
“particularly as they lost François the same night they lost you.”
“How?”
“God knows. After the performance, when François acted miserably, and
was hissed and hit on the head by a cabbage thrown at him--and he
deserved it for his bad acting, and nearly breaking Madame Grandin’s
neck in his acrobatic turn--he disappeared. Grandin owed him some
money, too. All we could ever find out was, that François was seen
during the night on board the old boat, tied up on the riverside.
The police saw a man with a lantern moving about the boat. They went
on board, and found it was François, and they drove him off. Oddly
enough, not two hours later, there was a fire on the dock, and the
wind blew the sparks to the boat, and it was burned to the water’s
edge. You may imagine, with you and François gone, and Mademoiselle
Rose a flat failure, and the boat burned up, it was pretty serious for
Grandin. They had a little money, you know, and so they gave up the
show business and went to a little town in the French Alps and took
to raising chickens. It was as if, with your going, the old life and
everything melted away like a dream.”
“And then, what did you do?”
“Oh, I got an engagement in the Bienville theatre that took me through
the season. I got on very well, and in two years I came to Paris.”
“And how about that scamp, the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel?” asked
Diane in a perfectly natural voice.
“I didn’t like to mention him,” answered Jean; “I thought you
might--perhaps--well, I--”
“You needn’t mind,” promptly responded Diane; “I was a great fool,
of course, but no more so than any other inexperienced girl in my
position. I thought I loved him. I know now that he was nothing
more than a peg to hang my emotions on. It sounded so grand to be a
marquise!”
She laughed so naturally and unaffectedly, that a great load was lifted
from Jean’s heart. The Marquis was rightly appraised by Diane, and she
had no regrets for such a scoundrel. Then she kept on, still laughing:
“I should have been perfectly ridiculous as a marquise!”
“He was kicked out of the army,” said Jean.
“Served him right,” replied Diane, vigorously. “One thing rejoices
me--that awful whack I let him have in the face, and I shall always
love you, Jean, for the beating you gave him. He deserved it all for
his treatment of his wife and child. What became of the poor lady?”
“She went to the Marquis’ colonel and told him the whole story. The
Marquis made a stiff fight because he had powerful family connections,
but they got rid of him. It was really true, though, that he meant to
marry you and commit bigamy.”
“Oh, Jean,” cried Diane with the deepest feeling, “how often have I
though of poor François’ saying, that God takes care of women and fools
and drunken people! If I had married the Marquis, I should have killed
him, certainly.”
“But tell me,” said Jean, “how did you get up in the world so quickly?”
“Because I am a woman and a fool,” answered Diane with great
simplicity. “I had a hundred and fifty-two francs--”
“After you had given half you had to the other woman,” interjected
Jean.
“And I travelled third class to Paris. On the train I bought a
newspaper and looked out for all the advertisements of singing teachers
whose terms were reasonable. I found one in a musician and his wife.
They took me to live in their house for what board I could pay. The
singing master said at once that I had a better voice than I supposed,
and he got me into the chorus at the Opera. That paid me something,
and I worked, I can tell you, at my singing. The first engagement I
had was at a cheap place on the other side of the river, but I went on
steadily, earning more money and more people knowing me. I didn’t visit
Bohemia, nor go out to supper, nor do any of those crazy things that
ruin the voice. I think my singing teacher valued my voice above my
soul, but at all events, the time came when I was able to pay him well
for his trouble, and began to lay up something comfortable for myself.
And here I am.”
“And buy diamonds,” suggested Jean. “I saw you blazing with them.”
Diane laughed scornfully.
“No you didn’t,” she said. “They were pure paste. I am not half such a
fool in some ways as you think. But why, why didn’t you come to see me?
How could you look at me when I was singing and not think enough of the
old days to seek me out?”
“Because you were too grand,” replied Jean. “I took the paste things
for real diamonds.”
Presently they reached in a quiet street a small, pretty house with
a charming little garden. Jean was surprised; he expected to find
something much grander, and plainly said so.
“No indeed,” answered Diane, dismissing the coachman and showing Jean
the way through the drawing-room by glass doors down the steps into the
pretty garden. “I think I am of a saving turn. I know what very few
singers do, and that is, one day my voice will be gone, so I am saving
my money now, that I may be able to live here always, and have you to
tea with me in the summer afternoons. I always knew I would see you,
Jean, and tell you this.”
Jean scowled fiercely at Diane. She was making fun of him and his
honest and modest love, but he did not think she ought to say such
things to any man. So he declined to notice Diane’s speech. When they
took their seats on the iron chairs in the garden before the little
tea-table, Diane continued her confidences:
“When the foolish men would send me diamonds, I would coolly exchange
them for paste and pocket the difference. No indeed, I have heard of
music-hall artists with a great many diamonds who were sold out by
their creditors.”
Jean looked at Diane with admiration.
“I didn’t think you had so much sense, Diane,” he said.
Then the maid brought the tea, and they sat in the sunny garden until
the purple dusk came and a new moon smiled at them from a sky half ruby
and half sapphire.
They talked much of the coming war. Jean, who was a capital shot, was
to join the franc-tierurs.
“I could not keep on singing, you know, when I could be potting the
Prussians.”
“As for me,” replied Diane, “I shall keep on singing as a patriotic
duty. These Parisians look upon their theatres and operas and
music-halls as a barometer. As long as these are open and we sing and
dance and play for this great tyrant, Paris, so long will she believe
that all is going well, but let us once stop, and she will become
panic-stricken. However, I expect to sing before our Emperor in Berlin
next season.”
This seemed quite natural and reasonable to Jean, and Diane, laughing,
but wholly in earnest, promised him an engagement to sing with her.
“For you know, Jean, you would have been just as high up as I am,
except that I had more impudence. Now that you have had your tea, come
into the drawing-room and let us sing together some of the old songs
and do some of the old tricks. I have a companion who can thump the
piano a little for us.”
Diane ran into the drawing-room, called for her companion, a decorous
and withered person, Madame Dupin, who sat down to the piano and
managed the accompaniment while Diane and Jean sang some of the old
songs together with immense spirit. Then Diane proposed to do their
singing act together, which meant a love scene and a quarrel that had
always brought down the house in the cheap music-hall in Bienville.
Jean remembered it well enough--only too well. The memory of the pangs
he suffered when Diane, after she met the Marquis, would hold away from
him and would not throw herself into his arms as a real actress should,
was vivid and painful. But in the pretty drawing-room with Madame Dupin
playing away at the piano, Diane hurled herself into Jean’s arms and
acted as if inspired. When the quarrel came, it was acted so naturally
that Diane’s man-servant, who was peeping through the door, suddenly
rushed in and, seizing Jean by the collar, shouted:
“I will report you to the police for abusing and insulting my lady!”
This amused Diane so much that she threw herself on the sofa convulsed
with laughter, and Jean laughed as he had not done since he last saw
Diane, while the man-servant, when the circumstances were explained,
ran away sheepishly, to be the laughing-stock of his fellow-servants.
It was all so merry and free, and like a last look at a happy past,
when before one lies victory, but with it, war and guns and wounds and
death.
Jean gave himself barely time to hurry back in a cab to his music-hall,
while Diane rushed upstairs to make ready for her own performance.
Great as had been Diane’s fame before, it grew greater in those days
when France marched forth to conquer Europe again, and was smitten on
every hand.
In August and September, when disaster followed disaster, and the
universe seemed tumbling to pieces, Diane still sang La Marseillaise
every night at the music-hall. It seemed to comfort and put new
courage into the hearts of her listeners, mostly striplings and
weaklings and old men who could not go to fight the Prussians, and
could only hate them from afar. The music-hall did a rushing business;
many persons skimped their daily bread to save a couple of francs that
would take them into the music-hall where Diane with her glorious
singing would reanimate their fainting souls. Not even when the siege
began did Diane cease her singing. The prices were then put down, and
the hall was not so full, but all came who could.
Jean was gone. He was in the armies that were defeated, or that melted
away, or that never existed except on paper. But he was never captured.
Two or three times in those frightful months, Diane got a brief line
from him. Once he wrote:
“Whom do you think I have seen? François! And François decorated on
the field, too! But the next day, he was found dead drunk--he had sold
his boots for liquor--so he disappeared. We had some talk, however. He
asked about you, and said he always knew Skinny would come into her
own. I inquired what he had been doing for a living in the last five
years, and he said he had been picking flowers off century plants for
his living. You see, he is the same François, but as brave as if he
were honest.”
One morning in January, every door and window in Paris was closed and
barred. The Prussians were marching in through the Arc de Triomphe,
and the gayest city in the world lay as if dead in her grave-clothes
on that winter morning. Not a wheel turned in Paris that day; even
the dead remained unburied. No theatre or music-hall opened that
evening, nor was there a note of music heard in the whole city. Paris
was indeed the city of Dreadful Night. Then, after a little breathing
spell like that given a man when shackles are put on his feet and
handcuffs on his wrists, Paris, the conquered city, sat in her
sackcloth bewailing herself for her lost glory. And presently, in her
wretchedness and despair, some of her children were turned to devils
and fought and mocked her and lacerated her and dragged her shrieking
and blood-covered in the mire of disgrace. The frightful orgie of the
Commune was an episode in hell for the great, beautiful, miserable,
burning, starving, shrieking city.
Through it all Diane sang, not with the rich, full voice of a well-fed,
well-sleeping woman, but with diminished volume and a little off the
key; for in those days it was remarked that all voices were raised a
semitone higher.
How the months passed when the Commune, that concentration of
wickedness, that collection of fiends who sought to murder their
country in her hour of misery, few who lived through it could describe;
certainly Diane could not. Food and money were scarce enough, though
there was not actual starvation as during the siege, but the guns from
Montmartre thundered incessantly, and those who were to rescue Paris
had to surround her and fight their way inch by inch.
It was in the springtime, and the horse chestnuts in the Champs-Elysées
were pushing out their green leaves through their pale pink sheaths,
and the insensate sky was blue and gold by day and black and silver
by night. From the beginning it was bad enough, but as the sun grew
warmer and the days more halcyon in their beauty, the hell made by
men grew worse, the roaring of the guns more constant. The frightful
disorders in the streets, murders and horrible orgies, were more
frequent. The Commune died hard, as wild boars do. The great city had
no defenders within her lines, and lay at the mercy of fiends. The
few men who had crept back from the battle-fields could do nothing,
and when the Communards in their dirty National Guard uniforms began
to be pressed hard and caught in their traps like rats, they began to
throw barricades across the streets and fight behind them, wildly and
foolishly.
Diane still lived in her small house, although the neighborhood was
daily growing more dangerous; the tide of fighting was pouring that
way, and the quiet street resounded with the rattle of ammunition
wagons and the yells and shouts of drunken National Guards, who were
yet not too drunk to fight. The small house remained closed, and the
two women within it--Diane and old Marie, a faithful creature whom
Diane had picked up some years before--lived in two cellar rooms.
There, they were reasonably safe. They dwelt in darkness, because they
had few candles, and would have been afraid to show lights if they
could. When the one dim candle was lighted, all windows, doors, cracks,
and crannies were tightly closed to give the idea of an uninhabited
house. The upstairs had long been dismantled, and there was little
there to steal.
In those terrible spring days, neither Diane nor the old woman ever so
much as showed themselves in the garden, and only stole forth by night
to buy such meagre supplies as they could afford. For Diane was no
longer well off. She had given freely of her store to her country, and
unless she could once more sing to crowded audiences, she would die as
poor as when she first set foot in Paris with her hundred and fifty-two
francs in her pocket.
One afternoon in the last of May when the fighting had grown fiercer,
the incessant booming of the guns nearer, and the sharp crack of the
mitrailleuse louder and more frequent, a great crash resounded in the
street before Diane’s house. The mob of National Guards had upset a
cart-load of stones, and were beginning to tear up the pavement to
make one of those simple but effective barricades that were sometimes
better than a good many fortifications. It only took a couple of hours
to build this fort in the street, and it was one of the best barricades
so built in Paris, because it was directed by a man trained as a
soldier, who had once been called the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel.
Diane’s first view of him after she had slapped his face was as he
stood or walked about the narrow street, now crowded and noisy with
disorderly National Guards.
The Marquis had changed considerably for the worse in his appearance.
Six years before he had been of superb figure and handsome face,
and dressed with military elegance. Now, he was red and bloated and
slouchy and dirty. His voice had once been sweet and persuasive. Now,
it was a bellow of rage and drink, but enough sense was left amid his
degradation yet to do some harm to his fellow-men, and the barricade
would have been a credit to an engineer.
Many persons had warned Diane to leave her house and seek refuge
somewhere else, but this she refused. Now it was too late. For any
woman to show herself was to court death and horrors unspeakable.
Against a house on the opposite side of the street was piled wood
enough to start a fire when the Communards were ready, for, if they
could no longer defend a point, they set fire to the surrounding
buildings. Meanwhile, the real French soldiers rigidly carried out
their plan to surround and overwhelm the Communards without destroying
the city, and ever the cordon tightened. On this May morning it drew
closer around the barricaded spot, and there was fighting in the
near-by street. But seeing the danger of fire, the French commander in
that quarter played a waiting game.
In the afternoon the day grew dark, and in the evening came a small,
fine rain with the darkness. An adventurous young officer tried to
carry the barricade under the cover of night, but Colonel Egmont, as
the Marquis now called himself, had enough of the devil’s wit left in
him to drive off the attacking party.
Diane, peering through the chinks of a closed jalousie, saw in the
darkness the red-legged soldiers retiring, carrying off with them
a couple of dead men and some wounded ones. In the dense shadows,
however, two French soldiers remained who were not missed. One was
a small man lying flat on his face with a bullet wound through his
leg and another in his shoulder. The other was a big man with blood
dripping from the back of his neck, who scrambled to his feet and knelt
over the little man whose head rested against the tall iron door that
led into Diane’s garden. In a minute or two the door was softly opened
and Diane whispered:
“Come in quickly before you are seen. There is a cellar to the house
where you can be safe for a little while, at least.”
The big man picked the small man up in his arms and slipped within the
garden, Diane softly locking and barring the iron door behind him, and,
running around to the back of the house, lifted the lid of a cellar
door, showing some narrow stone steps that led down into the black cave
of the cellars. As she did this, she recognized Jean in the big man,
and François in the small man he was carrying, and Jean recognized her.
François’ soul was not in this world at that moment, although it was
shortly to return to his body.
Jean and Diane wasted no time in polite inquiries after each other’s
health.
“Can you carry his legs?” asked Jean in a whisper.
“Yes,” replied Diane, slipping down the stairs and taking hold of
François’ legs, for she could step backward, knowing the stairs well.
The next minute they found themselves in the cellars. There were two
small rooms. The windows were tightly closed so that no gleam of light
should betray that the place was inhabited. A handful of charcoal
burned in a little brazier, for the spring night was sharp and the
cellar was cold, and one solitary candle in the outer room merely
revealed the gulf of darkness. Huddled over the brazier was the figure
of old Marie, the cook; in all cataclysms of one’s life, some one is
found who is faithful.
There was something like comfort in the place. A carpet was spread upon
the stone floor, and a couple of pallets in the inner room accommodated
the mistress and the maid. On one of these they laid François,
breathing heavily. Jean stripped off François’ shoes, and Diane,
producing a pair of scissors, cut away the clothing from his leg below
the knee. A horrid wound was spurting blood. Marie ran and fetched some
water from a barrel in the corner, and Diane unceremoniously, in the
presence of Jean, divested herself of her white cambric petticoat, a
thing of filmy ruffles and lace, and tore it into strips to bind up
François’ wounds. Again, with her deft scissors she cut away a part
of his coat and shirt. Old Marie washed the wound in his shoulder,
and Jean, with his rude surgery, bound it up with a part of Diane’s
petticoat. When this was over, François opened his eyes, and looking
about him whispered in a weak voice, and with a weak grin:
“I think I must be out of my head still, because I see the face of
Diane. Give me something to drink.”
Old Marie gave him water which he drank as men do out of whose veins
much blood has run, and who are parched with that terrible thirst.
Diane, going to a wine rack where there were many long-necked bottles
lying head downward, picked up one and gouged out the cork with her
scissors.
Then she poured out in a tin cup some bubbling champagne.
“Is this good for him, do you think?” she asked Jean.
“In the name of God, I do not know,” replied Jean, shaking his head.
“But I know,” responded the patient in a somewhat stronger voice. “Good
champagne will put life into the ribs of death.”
Diane kneeled down by François and tremblingly gave him the champagne,
which he drank, smacking his lips meanwhile.
“I feel like another man,” he said, “and that other man wants another
swig at the champagne.”
But Diane shook her head.
“You can’t have any more,” she answered.
“And now,” said François in a much stronger voice, “I know that I am
not wool-gathering, but it is really you, Diane Dorian, otherwise
Skinny, because you are so obstinate, just as in the old days.”
While Diane was speaking, she noticed that Jean had sunk on a low
bench from which he slipped softly to the floor, his eyes closed and
his face gray. Diane ran to him, and catching his head to keep it
from striking the floor, found blood upon her hand. Jean’s neck was
bleeding--François was not the only wounded man.
Diane, with her lately gained experience and assisted by old Marie,
turned back Jean’s collar and shirt and found there a wound almost
as bad as François’. That, too, was washed and bound with strips of
Diane’s white petticoat, and then Jean came to himself, and asked, as
all wounded men do, for water.
“Give him some champagne,” said François, feebly, from his pallet.
This Diane did, and then, with Marie’s help, laid Jean upon her own
pallet.
Then began for the two women a silent vigil that lasted more than a
week. They took turns in watching and sleeping. By extreme good fortune
both of their patients progressed wonderfully, the wounds healing with
the first intention. At the end of the week Jean was able to walk about
the inner room, while François, though unable to walk, could sit up in
the one chair which the cellars possessed.
Still were darkness and silence maintained within the cellars, although
there was noise enough outside. The barricade had become almost a
fortress, and as the Communards were hemmed in closer and closer, the
barricade was extended. The sound of fighting grew nearer and fiercer,
the shouts and cries of men, the rattle of ammunition wagons over the
stones, the cracking of the mitrailleuse, the crash of bullets; the
beating of the rappel, sounded by night as well as by day.
After night had fallen, old Marie would creep out, and by devious and
winding streets would find her way to places where for much money a
little coarse food could be bought. There was, however, champagne in
plenty, and François had no hesitation in declaring in a whisper that
his recovery and that of Jean depended upon the quantity of champagne
they drank, and that Diane was delaying their convalescence by not
letting them have all they wished.
The hours, instead of being long, were extraordinarily short because
there was no sunrise or sunset, no day nor night, only a vivid darkness
pierced with the light of a single candle. There was nothing to read by
the light of the single candle that burned night and day; there was no
conversation above a whisper. Familiarity with danger and long immunity
made them all forget their fears, but not their prudence.
Old Marie, who had the tireless industry of her class, managed to
keep employed by incessant knitting, after she had done the work of
the two cellars. Diane, a worker by nature and habit, put strong
compulsion on herself to sit still for hours and hours, her hands in
her lap. Jean and François, conquered by their weakness, also remained
still and quiet. Through the open door Diane could not see their eyes
constantly fixed upon her in the little circle of light made by the
one candle. She took them their food, and helped them with all the
natural helpfulness of a tender and capable woman. That was her sole
employment. She often wished in that strange procession of time which
could not be called days or weeks, that she had fifty wounded men to
attend to instead of two.
At last, one night, Jean said to Diane:
“It’s time for me to be going. I feel strong enough to carry a musket,
and I shall feel stronger still when I get into the fresh air.”
Diane said no word; she was the last woman on earth to detain a man
from his duty.
François, who was then able to walk about with a stick made from a
broom handle, protested in a whisper:
“Who is to chaperon Diane and me,” he asked, “when old Marie goes out
at night?”
As he spoke, Jean slipped cautiously to the stone steps and lifted up
the cellar door about an inch, showing the black night without. A great
wave of smoke and an odor of flame rushed in, and through the crack
thus made was seen a sky on fire with the luridness of miles of burning
buildings. Paris had been set on fire by the Communards.
As Diane, leaning over Jean’s shoulder, caught a glimpse of the blazing
sky, there was a crash of doors and windows overhead, a trampling of
feet, drunken men and women shouting, laughing, swearing, fighting. In
the midst of the uproar they could hear the grand piano, the only piece
of furniture left in the house, dragged across the drawing-room floor,
and the crash of music as it was pounded to accompany ribald songs.
Jean quickly dropped the cellar door. They had no arms except each a
pistol out of which their bullets had been fired, and there were no
more bullets to be had.
As the drunken crew overhead grew more noisy and numerous, they
overflowed into the garden, trampling the neglected flower beds and
laughing like demons. Presently they rushed to the cellar door and
lifted it up wide. They saw no light within, but a woman’s voice
shrieked:
“If there is any champagne, it’s in the cellar!”
Then a torch was brought, and a man seizing it jumped down the steps
holding the torch above his head, and came face to face with Diane.
Half a dozen men and women followed him, and, catching sight of the
wine bin, flew toward it with shouts of devilish joy, and began to hand
out the bottles to those above them.
The man with the torch stuck it into an empty bottle, and the light
revealed, not only Diane, but old Marie and Jean and François. The
invader wore the uniform of a colonel of the National Guard, and was he
who had once been known as the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel.