Eleven years later, in 1870, we were grown men. Louis had reached the
rank of captain. Julien, after various beginnings, had settled down to
the idle, ever-occupied life of those wealthy Parisians who frequent
literary and artistic society without themselves ever touching pen or
paint brush.
There was great excitement at the first report of a war with Germany.
People’s brains were fevered: there was talk about our natural frontier
on the Rhine, and about avenging Waterloo, which had remained a weight
on our hearts. If the campaign had been opened by a victory, France
would certainly have blessed this war which she ought to have cursed.
Paris certainly would have felt disappointed if peace had been
maintained, after the stormy sittings of the Corps Legislatif. On the
day when conflict became inevitable, all hearts beat high. I am not
speaking now of the scenes which took place in the evenings on the
boulevards, of the shrieking crowds, or the shouts of men who may have
been paid, as, later on, it was declared that they had been. I only
say that, among sober citizens, the greater number were marking out on
maps the different stages of our army as far as Berlin. The Prussians
were to be driven back with the butt end of the rifle. This absolute
confidence of victory was our inheritance from the days in which our
soldiers had passed, always conquering, from one end of Europe to
the other. Nowadays we are thoroughly cured of that very dangerous
patriotic vanity.
One evening when I was on the Boulevard des Capucines, watching hordes
of men in blouses who passed along, yelling, “_À Berlin! À Berlin_,”
I felt someone touch me on the shoulder. It was Julien. He was very
gloomy. I reproached him with his lack of enthusiasm.
“We shall be beaten,” said he, quietly.
I protested, but he shook his head, without giving any reasons. He felt
it, he said. I spoke of his brother. Louis was already at Metz with his
regiment, and Julien showed me a letter which he had received the night
before, a letter full of gaiety, in which the captain declared that he
should have died of barrack-life if the war had not come to lift him
out of it. He vowed that he would come home a colonel, with a medal.
But when I tried to use this letter as an argument against Julien’s
dark prognostications, he merely repeated:
“We shall be beaten.”
Paris’s time of anxiety began once more. I knew that solemn silence
of the great city; I had witnessed it in 1859 before the first
hostilities of the Italian campaign. But this time the silence seemed
more tremulous. No one seemed in doubt about the victory; yet sinister
rumours were current, coming no one knew whence. Surprise was felt that
our army had not taken the initiative and carried the war at once into
the enemy’s territory.
One afternoon on the Exchange a great piece of news broke forth; we had
gained an immense victory, taken a considerable number of cannons, and
made prisoners a whole division. Houses were actually beginning to be
decorated, people were embracing one another in the street, when the
falsehood of the news had to be acknowledged. There had been no battle.
The victory had not seemed natural in the expected order of events,
but the sudden contradiction, the trick played on a populace that had
been too ready with its rejoicings and had to put off its enthusiasm to
another day, struck a chill to my heart. All at once I felt an immense
sadness, I felt the quivering wing of some unexampled disaster passing
over us.
I shall always remember that ill-omened Sunday. It was a Sunday again,
and many people must have remembered the radiant Sunday of Magenta. It
was early in August; the sunshine had not the young brightness of June.
The weather was heavy, great flags of stormcloud weighed upon the city.
I was returning from a little town in Normandy, and I was particularly
struck by the funereal aspect of Paris. On the boulevards, people were
standing about in groups of three or four, and talking in low tones. At
last I heard the horrible news: we had been defeated at Wörth, and the
torrent of invasion was flowing into France.
I never beheld such deep consternation. All Paris was stupefied.
What! Was it possible? We were conquered! The defeat seemed to us
unjust and monstrous. It not only struck a blow at our patriotism; it
destroyed a religion in us. We could not yet measure all the disastrous
consequences of this reverse, we still hoped that our soldiers might
avenge it; and yet we remained as it were annihilated. The despairing
silence of the town was full of a great shame.
That day and that evening were frightful. The public gaiety of
victorious days was not. Women no longer wore that tender smile, nor
did people pass from group to group making friends. Night fell black on
this despairing populace. Not a firework in the street; not a lamp at a
window. Early on the morrow I saw a regiment going down the boulevard.
People were pausing with sad faces, and the soldiers passed, hanging
their heads, as if they had had their share in the defeat. Nothing
saddened me so much as that regiment, applauded by no one, passing over
the same ground where I had seen the army from Italy marching past amid
rejoicings that shook the houses.
Then began the days cursed with suspense. Every two or three hours I
used to go to the door of the Mairie in the ninth _arrondissement_,
which is in the Rue Drouot, where the telegrams were put up. There
were always people gathered there, waiting, to the number of a hundred
or so. Often the crowd would extend right to the boulevard. There was
nothing noisy about these crowds. People spoke in low tones, as if
they were in a sick-room. Directly a clerk appeared to put a telegram
on the board, there was a rush. Soon the news ran from mouth to mouth.
But the news had long been persistently bad, and public consternation
grew. Even to-day I cannot pass along the Rue Drouot without thinking
of those days of mourning. There, on that pavement, the people of Paris
had to undergo the most awful of torments. From hour to hour we could
hear the gallop of the German armies drawing nearer to Paris.
I saw Julien very often. He did not boast to me of having foreseen
the defeat. He only seemed to think what had happened was natural and
in the order of things. Many Parisians shrugged their shoulders when
they heard talk of a siege of Paris. Could there be a siege of Paris?
And others would demonstrate mathematically that Paris could not be
invested. Julien, by a sort of foreknowledge, which struck me later,
declared that we should be surrounded on September 15th. He was still
the schoolboy to whom physical exercises were strangely repulsive. All
this war, upsetting all his customary ways, put him beside himself.
Why, in the name of God, did people want to fight? And he would lift
up his hands with a gesture of supreme protestation. Yet he read the
telegrams greedily.
“If Louis were not out there,” he would repeat, “I might make verses
while we are waiting for the end of the commotion.”
At long intervals letters came to him from Louis. The news was
terrible, the army was getting discouraged. On the day when we heard of
the battle of Borny I met Julien at the corner of the Rue Drouot. Paris
had a gleam of hope that day. There was talk of a success. He, on the
other hand, seemed to me gloomier than usual. He had read, somewhere,
that his brother’s regiment had done heroically, and that its losses
had been severe.
Three days later a common friend came to tell me the terrible news. A
letter had brought word to Julien the night before of his brother’s
death. He had been killed at Borny by the bursting of a shell. I
immediately hurried to go to the poor fellow, but I found no one at his
lodging. The next morning, while I was still in bed, a young man came
in dressed as a _franc-tireur_. It was Julien. At first I hardly knew
him. Then I folded him in my arms and embraced him heartily, while my
eyes were full of tears. He did not weep. He sat down for a moment and
made a sign to stop my condolences.
“There,” said he, quietly, “I wanted to say ‘good-bye’ to you. Now that
I am alone I could not endure to do nothing.... So as I found that a
company of _franc-tireurs_ was going, I joined yesterday. That will
give me something to do.”
“When do you leave Paris?” I asked him.
“Why, in a couple of hours. Good-bye.”
He embraced me in his turn. I did not dare to ask him any more
questions. He went, and the thought of him was always with me.
After the catastrophe of Sedan, some days before the surrounding of
Paris, I had news of him. One of his comrades came to tell me that
this young fellow, so pale and slender, fought like a wolf. He kept up
a savage warfare against the Prussians, watching them from behind a
hedge, using a knife rather than his gun. Whole nights long he would
be on the hunt, watching for men as for his prey, and cutting the
throat of anyone who came within his reach. I was stupefied. I could
not think that this was Julien; I asked myself whether it was possible
that the nervous poet could have become a butcher.
Then Paris was isolated from the rest of the world, and the siege
began with all its fits of sleepiness and of fever. I could not go out
without remembering Aix on a winter evening. The streets were dark
and empty, the houses were shut up early. There were, indeed, distant
sounds of cannon and of shots, but the sounds seemed to get lost in
the dull silence of the vast town. Some days, breaths of hope would
come over, and then the whole population would awake, forgetful of the
long standing at the baker’s door, the rations, the cold chimneys,
the shells showering upon some districts of the left side of the
river. Then the crowd would be struck dumb by some disaster, and the
silence began again--the silence of a capital in the death agony.
Yet, in the course of this long siege, I saw little glimpses of quiet
happiness; people who had a little to live on, who kept up their daily
“constitutional” in the pale wintry sunshine, lovers smiling at each
other in some out of the way nook and never hearing the cannonade. We
lived from day to day. All our illusions had fallen; we counted on some
miracle, help from the provincial armies, or a sortie of the whole
populace, or some prodigious intervention to arise in its due time.
I was at one of the outposts, one day, when a man was brought in, who
had been found in a trench. I recognised Julien. He insisted on being
taken to a general, and gave him sundry pieces of information. I stayed
with him, and we spent the night together. Since September he had never
slept in a bed, but had given himself up obstinately to his vocation as
a cut-throat. He seemed chary of details, shrugged his shoulders, and
told me that all expeditions were alike; he killed as many Prussians
as he could, and killed them how he could: with a gun or with a knife.
According to him it was after all a very monotonous life, and much less
dangerous than people thought. He had run no real danger, except once
when the French took him for a spy and wanted to shoot him.
The next day he talked of going off again, across fields and woods. I
entreated him to stay in Paris. He was sitting beside me, but did not
seem to listen to me. Then he said, all at once:
“You are right, it is enough--I have killed my share.”
Two days later he announced that he had enlisted in the
Chasseurs-à-pied. I was stupefied. Had he not avenged his brother
enough? Had the idea of his country awakened in him? And, as I smiled
in looking at him, he said quietly:
“I take Louis’ place. I cannot be anything but a soldier. Oh, powder
intoxicates! And one’s country, you see, is the earth where they lie,
whom we loved.”
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