The last book closed with the success of the Parisian sortie on the 30th
of November, to be followed by the terrible engagements no less
honourable to French valour, on the 2nd of December. There was the
sanguine belief that deliverance was at hand; that Trochu would break
through the circle of iron, and effect that junction with the army of
Aurelles de Paladine which would compel the Germans to raise the
investment;--belief rudely shaken by Ducrot's proclamation of the 4th, to
explain the recrossing of the Marne, and the abandonment of the positions
conquered, but not altogether dispelled till von Moltke's letter to
Trochu on the 5th announcing the defeat of the army of the Loire and the
recapture of Orleans. Even then the Parisians did not lose hope of
succour; and even after the desperate and fruitless sortie against Le
Bourget on the 21st, it was not without witticisms on defeat and
predictions of triumph, that Winter and Famine settled sullenly on the
city.
Our narrative reopens with the last period of the siege.
It was during these dreadful days, that if the vilest and the most
hideous aspects of the Parisian population showed themselves at the
worst, so all its loveliest, its noblest, its holiest characteristics--
unnoticed by ordinary observers in the prosperous days of the capital--
became conspicuously prominent. The higher classes, including the
remnant of the old noblesse, had, during the whole siege, exhibited
qualities in notable contrast to those assigned them by the enemies of
aristocracy. Their sons had been foremost among those soldiers who never
calumniated a leader, never fled before a foe; their women had been among
the most zealous and the most tender nurses of the ambulances they had
founded and served; their houses had been freely opened, whether to the
families exiled from the suburbs, or in supplement to the hospitals. The
amount of relief they afforded unostentatiously, out of means that shared
the general failure of accustomed resource, when the famine commenced,
would be scarcely credible if stated. Admirable, too, were the fortitude
and resignation of the genuine Parisian bourgeoisie,--the thrifty
tradesfolk and small rentiers,--that class in which, to judge of its
timidity when opposed to a mob, courage is not the most conspicuous
virtue. Courage became so now--courage to bear hourly increasing
privation, and to suppress every murmur of suffering that would discredit
their patriotism, and invoke "peace at any price." It was on this class
that the calamities of the siege now pressed the most heavily. The
stagnation of trade, and the stoppage of the rents, in which they had
invested their savings, reduced many of them to actual want. Those only
of their number who obtained the pay of one-and-a-half franc a day as
National Guards, could be sure to escape from starvation. But this pay
had already begun to demoralise the receivers. Scanty for supply of
food, it was ample for supply of drink. And drunkenness, hitherto rare
in that rank of the Parisians, became a prevalent vice, aggravated in the
case of a National Guard, when it wholly unfitted him for the duties he
undertook, especially such National Guards as were raised from the most
turbulent democracy of the working class.
But of all that population; there were two sections in which the most
beautiful elements of our human nature were most touchingly manifest--
the women and the priesthood, including in the latter denomination all
the various brotherhoods and societies which religion formed and
inspired.
It was on the 27th of December that Frederic Lemercier stood gazing
wistfully on a military report affixed to a blank wall, which stated that
"the enemy, worn out by a resistance of over one hundred days," had
commenced the bombardment. Poor Frederic was sadly altered; he had
escaped the Prussian's guns, but not the Parisian winter--the severest
known for twenty years. He was one of the many frozen at their posts--
brought back to the ambulance with Fox in his bosom trying to keep him
warm. He had only lately been sent forth as convalescent,--ambulances
were too crowded to retain a patient longer than absolutely needful,--and
had been hunger-pinched and frost-pinched ever since. The luxurious
Frederic had still, somewhere or other, a capital yielding above three
thousand a year, and of which he could not now realise a franc, the
title-deeds to various investments being in the hands of Duplessis, the
most trustworthy of friends, the most upright of men, but who was in
Bretagne, and could not be got at. And the time had come at Paris when
you could not get trust for a pound of horse-flesh, or a daily supply of
fuel. And Frederic Lemercier, who had long since spent the 2000 francs
borrowed from Alain (not ignobly, but somewhat ostentatiously, in
feasting any acquaintance who wanted a feast), and who had sold to any
one who could afford to speculate on such dainty luxuries,--clocks,
bronzes, amber-mounted pipes,--all that had made the envied garniture of
his bachelor's apartment--Frederic Lemercier was, so far as the task of
keeping body and soul together, worse off than any English pauper who can
apply to the Union. Of course he might have claimed his half-pay of
thirty sous as a National Guard. But he little knows the true Parisian
who imagines a seigneur of the Chaussee d'Antin, the oracle of those with
whom he lived, and one who knew life so well that he had preached
prudence to a seigneur of the Faubourg like Alain de Rochebriant,
stooping to apply for the wages of thirty sons. Rations were only
obtained by the wonderful patience of women, who had children to whom
they were both saints and martyrs. The hours, the weary hours, one had
to wait before one could get one's place on the line for the distribution
of that atrocious black bread, defeated men,--defeated most wives if only
for husbands, were defied only by mothers and daughters. Literally
speaking, Lemercier was starving. Alain had been badly wounded in the
sortie of the 21st, and was laid up in an ambulance. Even if he could
have been got at, he had probably nothing left to bestow upon Lemercier.
Lemercier gazed on the announcement of the bombardment, and the Parisian
gaiety, which some French historian of the siege calls _douce
philosophie_, lingering on him still, he said, audibly, turning round to
any stranger who heard: "Happiest of mortals that we are! Under the
present Government we are never warned of anything disagreeable that can
happen; we are only told of it when it has happened, and then as rather
pleasant than otherwise. I get up. I meet a civil gendarme. 'What is
that firing? which of our provincial armies is taking Prussia in the
rear? 'Monsieur,' says the gendarme, 'it is the Prussian Krupp guns.'
I look at the proclamation, and my fears varuish,--my heart is relieved.
I read that the bombardment is a sure sign that the enemy is worn out."
Some of the men grouped round Frederic ducked their heads in terror;
others, who knew that the thunderbolt launched from the plateau of Avron
would not fall on the pavements of Paris, laughed and joked. But in
front, with no sign of terror, no sound of laughter, stretched, moving
inch by inch, the female procession towards the bakery in which the
morsel of bread for their infants was doled out.
"_Hist, mon ami_," said a deep voice beside Lemercier. "Look at those
women, and do not wound their ears by a jest."
Lemercier, offended by that rebuke, though too susceptible to good
emotions not to recognise its justice, tried with feeble fingers to turn
up his moustache, and to turn a defiant crest upon the rebuker. He was
rather startled to see the tall martial form at his side, and to
recognise Victor de Mauleon. "Don't you think, M. Lemercier," resumed
the Vicomte, half sadly, "that these women are worthy of better husbands
and sons than are commonly found among the soldiers whose uniform we
wear?"
"The National Guard! You ought not to sneer at them, Vicomte,--you whose
troop covered itself with glory on the great days of Villiers and
Champigny,--you in whose praise even the grumblers of Paris became
eloquent, and in whom a future Marshal of France is foretold."
"But, alas! more than half of my poor troop was left on the battle-field,
or is now wrestling for mangled remains of life in the ambulances. And
the new recruits with which I took the field on the 21st are not likely
to cover themselves with glory, or to insure their commander the baton of
a marshal."
"Ay, I heard when I was in the hospital that you had publicly shamed some
of these recruits, and declared that you would rather resign than lead
them again to battle."
"True; and at this moment, for so doing, I am the man most hated by the
rabble who supplied those recruits." The men, while thus conversing, had
moved slowly on, and were now in front of a large cafe, from the interior
of which came the sound of loud bravos and clappings of hands.
Lemercier's curiosity was excited. "For what can be that applause?" he
said; "let us look in and see." The room was thronged. In the distance,
on a small raised platform, stood a girl dressed in faded theatrical
finery, making her obeisance to the crowd.
"Heavens!" exclaimed Frederic--"can I trust my eyes? Surely that is the
once superb Julie: has she been dancing here?"
One of the loungers, evidently belonging to the same world as Lemercier,
overheard the question and answered politely: "No, Monsieur: she has been
reciting verses, and really declaims very well, considering it is not her
vocation. She has given us extracts from Victor Hugo and
De Musset: and crowned all with a patriotic hymn by Gustave Rameau,--her
old lover, if gossip be true." Meanwhile De Mauleon, who at first had
glanced over the scene with his usual air of calm and cold indifference,
became suddenly struck by the girl's beautiful face, and gazed on it with
a look of startled surprise.
"Who and what did you say that poor fair creature is, M. Lemercier?"
"She is a Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin, and was a very popular
_coryphee_. She has hereditary right to be a good dancer, as the
daughter of a once more famous ornament of the ballet, _la belle_ Leonie
--whom you must have seen in your young days."
"Of course. Leonie--she married a M. Surville, a silly _bourgeois
gentilhomme_, who earned the hatred of Paris by taking her off the stage.
So that is her daughter I see no likeness to her mother--much handsomer.
Why does she call herself Caumartin?"
"Oh," said Frederic, "a melancholy but trite story."
"Leonie was left a widow, and died in want. What could the poor young
daughter do? She found a rich protector, who had influence to get her an
appointment in the ballet: and there she did as most girls so
circumstanced do--appeared under an assumed name, which she has since
kept."
"I understand," said Victor, compassionately. "Poor thing! she has
quitted the platform, and is coming this way, evidently to speak to you.
I saw her eyes brighten as she caught sight of your face."
Lemercier attempted a languid air of modest self-complacency as the girl
now approached him. "_Bonjour_, M. Frederic! Ah, mon Dieu! how thin you
have grown! You have been ill?"
"The hardships of a military life, Mademoiselle. Ah, for the _beaux
fours_ and the peace we insisted on destroying under the Empire which we
destroyed for listening to us! But you thrive well, I trust. I have
seen you better dressed, but never in greater beauty."
The girl blushed as she replied, "Do you really think as you speak?"
"I could not speak more sincerely if I lived in the legendary House of
Glass."
The girl clutched his arm, and said in suppressed tones, "Where is
Gustave?"
"Gustave Rameau? I have no idea. Do you never see him now?"
"Never,--perhaps I never shall see him again; but when you do meet him,
say that Julie owes to him her livelihood. An honest livelihood,
Monsieur. He taught her to love verses--told her how to recite them.
I am engaged at this cafe--you will find me here the same hour every day,
in case--in case--You are good and kind, and will come and tell me that
Gustave is well and happy even if he forgets me. _Au revoir_! Stop, you
do look, my poor Frederic, as if--as if--pardon me, Monsieur Lemercier,
is there anything I can do? Will you condescend to borrow from me? I am
in funds."
Lemercier at that offer was nearly moved to tears. Famished though he
was, he could not, however, have touched that girl's earnings.
"You are an angel of goodness, Mademoiselle! Ah, how I envy Gustave
Rameau! No, I don't want aid. I am always a--_rentier_."
"_Bien_! and if you see Gustave, you will not forget."
"Rely on me. Come away," he said to De Mauleon; "I don't want to hear
that girl repeat the sort of bombast the poets indite nowadays. It is
fustian; and that girl may have a brain of feather, but she has a heart
of gold."
"True," said Victor, as they regained the street. "I overheard what she
said to you. What an incomprehensible thing is a woman! how more
incomprehensible still is a woman's love! Ah, pardon me; I must leave
you. I see in the procession a poor woman known to me in better days."
De Mauleon walked towards the woman he spoke of--one of the long
procession to the bakery--a child clinging to her robe. A pale grief-
worn woman, still young, but with the weariness of age on her face, and
the shadow of death on her child's.
"I think I see Madame Monnier," said De Mauleon, softly.
She turned and looked at him drearily. A year ago, she would have
blushed if addressed by a stranger in a name not lawfully hers.
"Well," she said, in hollow accents broken by cough; "I don't know you,
Monsieur."
"Poor woman!" he resumed, walking beside her as she moved slowly on,
while the eyes of other women in the procession stared at him hungrily.
"And your child looks ill too. It is your youngest?"
"My only one! The others are in Pere la Chaise. There are but few
children alive in my street now. God has been very merciful, and taken
them to Himself."
De Mauleon recalled the scene of a neat comfortable apartment, and the
healthful happy children at play on the floor. The mortality among the
little ones, especially in the quartier occupied by the working classes,
had of late been terrible. The want of food, of fuel, the intense
severity of the weather, had swept them off as by a pestilence.
"And Monnier--what of him? No doubt he is a National Guard, and has his
pay?"
The woman made no answer, but hung down her head. She was stifling a
sob. Till then her eyes seemed to have exhausted the last source of
tears.
"He lives still?" continued Victor, pityingly: "he is not wounded?"
"No: he is well--in health; thank you kindly, Monsieur."
"But his pay is not enough to help you, and of course he can get no work.
Excuse me if I stopped you. It is because I owed Armand Monnier a little
debt for work, and I am ashamed to say that it quite escaped my memory in
these terrible events. Allow me, Madame, to pay it to you," and he
thrust his purse into her hand. "I think this contains about the sum I
owed; if more or less, we will settle the difference later. Take care of
yourself."
He was turning away when the woman caught hold of him.
"Stay, Monsieur. May Heaven bless you!--but--but tell me what name I am
to give to Armand. I can't think of any one who owed him money. It must
have been before that dreadful strike, the beginning of all our woes.
Ah, if it were allowed to curse any one, I fear my last breath would not
be a prayer."
"You would curse the strike, or the master who did not forgive Armand's
share in it?"
"No, no,--the cruel man who talked him into it--into all that has changed
the best workman, the kindest heart--the--the--" again her voice died in
sobs.
"And who was that man?" asked De Mauleon, falteringly.
"His name was Lebeau. If you were a poor man, I should say 'Shun him.'"
"I have heard of the name you mention; but if we mean the same person,
Monnier cannot have met him lately. He has not been in Paris since the
siege."
"I suppose not, the coward! He ruined us--us who were so happy before;
and then, as Armand says, cast us away as instruments he had done with.
But--but if you do know him, and do see him again, tell him--tell him
not to complete his wrong--not to bring murder on Armand's soul. For
Armand isn't what he was--and has become, oh, so violent! I dare not
take this money without saying who gave it. He would not take money as
alms from an aristocrat. Hush! he beat me for taking money from the good
Monsieur Raoul de Vandemar--my poor Armand beat me!"
De Mauleon shuddered. "Say that it is from a customer whose rooms he
decorated in his spare hours on his own account before the strike,--
Monsieur --------;" here he uttered indistinctly some unpronounceable
name and hurried off, soon lost as the streets grew darker. Amid groups
of a higher order of men-military men, nobles, _ci-devant_ deputies--
among such ones his name stood very high. Not only his bravery in the
recent sorties had been signal, but a strong belief in his military
talents had become prevalent; and conjoined with the name he had before
established as a political writer, and the remembrance of the vigour and
sagacity with which he had opposed the war, he seemed certain, when peace
and order became established, of a brilliant position and career in a
future administration: not less because he had steadfastly kept aloof
from the existing Government, which it was rumoured, rightly or
erroneously, that he had been solicited to join; and from every
combination of the various democratic or discontented factions.
Quitting these more distinguished associates, he took his way alone
towards the ramparts. The day was closing; the thunders of the cannon
were dying down.
He passed by a wine-shop round which were gathered many of the worse
specimens of the _Moblots_ and National Guards, mostly drunk, and loudly
talking in vehement abuse of generals and officers and commissariat. By
one of the men, as he came under the glare of a petroleum lamp (there was
gas no longer in the dismal city), he was recognised as the commander who
had dared to insist on discipline, and disgrace honest patriots who
claimed to themselves the sole option between fight and flight. The man
was one of those patriots--one of the new recruits whom Victor had
shamed and dismissed for mutiny and cowardice. He made a drunken plunge
at his former chief, shouting, "A bas Pai-isto! Comrades, this is the
coquin De Mauleon who is paid by the Prussians for getting us killed: a
la lanterne!" "A la lanterne!" stammered and hiccupped others of the
group; but they did not stir to execute their threat. Dimly seen as the
stern face and sinewy form of the threatened man was by their drowsied
eyes, the name of De Mauleon, the man without fear of a foe, and without
ruth for a mutineer, sufficed to protect him from outrage; and with a
slight movement of his arm that sent his denouncer reeling against the
lamp-post, De Mauleon passed on:--when another man, in the uniform of a
National Guard, bounded from the door of the tavern, crying with a loud
voice, "Who said De Mauleon?--let me look on him:" and Victor, who had
strode on with slow lion-like steps, cleaving the crowd, turned, and saw
before him in the gleaming light a face, in which the bold frank,
intelligent aspect of former days was lost in a wild, reckless, savage
expression--the face of Armand Monnier.
"Ha! are you really Victor de Mauleon?" asked Monnier, not fiercely, but
under his breath,--in that sort of stage whisper which is the natural
utterance of excited men under the mingled influence of potent drink and
hoarded rage.
"Certainly; I am Victor de Mauleon."
"And you were in command of the -- company of the National Guard on the
30th of November at Champigny and Villiers?"
"I was."
"And you shot with your own hand an officer belonging to another company
who refused to join yours?"
"I shot a cowardly soldier who ran away from the enemy, and seemed a
ringleader of other runaways; and in so doing, I saved from dishonour the
best part of his comrades."
"The man was no coward. He was an enlightened Frenchman, and worth fifty
of such aristos as you; and he knew better than his officers that he was
to be led to an idle slaughter. Idle--I say idle. What was France the
better, how was Paris the safer, for the senseless butchery of that day?
You mutinied against a wiser general than Saint Trochu when you murdered
that mutineer."
"Armand Monnier, you are not quite sober to-night, or I would argue with
you that question. But you no doubt are brave: how and why do you take
the part of a runaway?"
"How and why? He was my brother, and you own you murdered him: my
brother--the sagest head in Paris. If I had listened to him, I should
not be,--bah!--no matter now what I am."
"I could not know he was your brother; but if he had been mine I would
have done the same."
Here Victor's lip quivered, for Monnier griped him by the arm, and looked
him in the face with wild stony eyes. "I recollect that voice! Yet--
yet--you say you are a noble, a Vicomte--Victor de Mauleon, and you shot
my brother!"
Here he passed his left hand rapidly over his forehead. The fumes of
wine still clouded his mind, but rays of intelligence broke through the
cloud. Suddenly he said in a loud, and calm, and natural voice:
"Mons. le Vicomte, you accost me as Armand Monnier--pray how do you know
my name?"
"How should I not know it? I have looked into the meetings of the 'Clubs
rouges.' I have heard you speak, and naturally asked your name. _Bon
soir_ M. Monnier! When you reflect in cooler moments, you will see that
if patriots excuse Brutus for first dishonouring and then executing his
own son, an officer charged to defend his country may be surely pardoned
for slaying a runaway to whom he was no relation, when in slaying he
saved the man's name and kindred from dishonour--unless, indeed, you
insist on telling the world why he was slain."
"I know your voice--I know it. Every sound becomes clearer to my ear.
And if--"
But while Monnier thus spoke, De Mauleon had hastened on. Monnier looked
round, saw him gone, but did not pursue. He was just intoxicated enough
to know that his footsteps were not steady, and he turned back to the
wine-shop and asked surlily for more wine. Could you have seen him then
as he leant swinging himself to and fro against the wall,--had you known
the man two years ago, you would have been a brute if you felt disgust.
You could only have felt that profound compassion with which we gaze on a
great royalty fallen. For the grandest of all royalties is that which
takes its crown from Nature, needing no accident of birth. And Nature
made the mind of Armand Monnier king-like; endowed it with lofty scorn of
meanness and falsehood and dishonour, with warmth and tenderness of heart
which had glow enough to spare from ties of kindred and hearth and home,
to extend to those distant circles of humanity over which royal natures
would fain extend the shadow of their sceptre.
How had the royalty of the man's nature fallen thus? Royalty rarely
falls from its own constitutional faults. It falls when, ceasing to be
royal, it becomes subservient to bad advisers. And what bad advisers,
always appealing to his better qualities and so enlisting his worser, had
discrowned this mechanic?
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," says the old-fashioned poet.
"Not so," says the modern philosopher; "a little knowledge; is safer than
no knowledge." Possibly, as all individuals and all communities must go
through the stage of a little knowledge before they can arrive at that of
much knowledge, the philosopher's assertion may be right in the long-run,
and applied to humankind in general. But there is a period, as there is
a class, in which a little knowledge tends to terrible demoralisation.
And Armand Monnier lived in that period and was one of that class. The
little knowledge that his mind, impulsive and ardent, had picked up out
of books that warred with the great foundations of existing society, had
originated in ill advices. A man stored with much knowledge would never
have let Madame de Grantmesnil's denunciations of marriage rites, or
Louis Blane's vindication of Robespierre as the representative of the
working against the middle class, influence his practical life. He would
have assessed such opinions at their real worth; and whatever that worth
might seem to him, would not to such opinions have committed the conduct
of his life. Opinion is not fateful: conduct is. A little knowledge
crazes an earnest, warm-blooded, powerful creature like Armand Monnier
into a fanatic. He takes an opinion which pleases him as a revelation
from the gods; that opinion shapes his conduct; that conduct is his fate.
Woe to the philosopher who serenely flings before the little knowledge of
the artisan dogmas as harmless as the Atlantis of Plato if only to be
discussed by philosophers, and deadly as the torches of Ate if seized as
articles of a creed by fanatics! But thrice woe to the artisan who makes
himself the zealot of the Dogma!
Poor Armand acts on the opinions he adopts; proves his contempt for the
marriage state by living with the wife of another; resents, as natures so
inherently manly must do, the Society that visits on her his defiance of
its laws; throws himself, head foremost, against that society altogether;
necessarily joins all who have other reasons for hostility to Society; he
himself having every inducement not to join indiscriminate strikes--high
wages, a liberal employer, ample savings, the certainty of soon becoming
employer himself. No; that is not enough to the fanatic: he persists on
being dupe and victim. He, this great king of labour, crowned by Nature,
and cursed with that degree of little knowledge which does not comprehend
how much more is required before a schoolboy would admit it to be
knowledge at all,--he rushes into the maddest of all speculations--that
of the artisan with little knowledge and enormous faith--that which
intrusts the safety and repose and dignity of life to some ambitious
adventurer, who uses his warm heart for the adventurer's frigid purpose,
much as the lawyer-government of September used the Communists,--much as,
in every revolution of France, a Bertrand has used a Raton--much as, till
the sound of the last trumpet, men very much worse than Victor de Mauleon
will use men very much better than Armand Monnier, if the Armand Monniers
disdain the modesty of an Isaac Newton on hearing that a theorem to which
he had given all the strength of his patient intellect was disputed: "It
may be so;" meaning, I suppose, that it requires a large amount of
experience ascertained before a man of much knowledge becomes that which
a man of little knowledge is at a jump-the fanatic of an experiment
untried.