“Shut up, you old communard!” said he.
Georges Frémont actually was an old communard. A Parisian, the son
of a furniture maker in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and a pupil at
the Beaux-Arts, he was twenty at the time of the German invasion, and
had enlisted in a regiment of _francs-tireurs_ who never saw service.
For this slight Frémont had never forgiven Trochu. At the time of the
capitulation he was one of the most excited, and shouted with the
rest that Paris had been betrayed. But he was no fool, and really
meant that Paris had been badly defended, which was true enough, of
course. He was for war to the knife. When the Commune was proclaimed,
he declared for it. On the proposition of one of his father’s old
workmen, a certain citizen Charlier, delegate for the Beaux-Arts, he
was appointed assistant sub-director of the Museum of the Louvre.
It was an honorary appointment and he performed his duties booted,
with cartridges in his belt, and on his head a Tyrolese hat adorned
with cock feathers. At the beginning of the siege the canvases had
been rolled up, put into packing-cases and carried away to warehouses
from which he never succeeded in unearthing them. The only duty that
remained to him was to smoke his pipe in galleries that had been
transformed into guard-rooms and to gossip with the National Guard, to
whom he denounced Badinguet for having destroyed the Rubens pictures by
a cleaning process which had removed the glaze. He based his grounds
for this accusation on the authority of a newspaper article, backed up
by M. Vitet’s opinion. The federalists sat on the benches and listened
to him, with their guns between their legs, whilst they drank their
pints of wine in the palace precincts, for it was warm weather. When,
however, the people of Versailles forced their way into Paris by the
broken-down Porte du Point-du-Jour and the cannonade approached the
Tuileries, Georges Frémont was much distressed to see the National
Guard of the federalists rolling casks of petroleum into the Apollo
gallery. It was with great difficulty that he at length succeeded in
dissuading them from saturating the wainscoting to make it blaze. Then,
giving them money for drink, he got rid of them. After they had gone,
he managed, with the assistance of the Bonapartist guards, to roll
these dangerous casks to the foot of the staircase and to push them
as far as the bank of the Seine. When the colonel of the federalists
was informed of this, he suspected Frémont of betraying the popular
cause and ordered him to be shot. But as soon as the Versailles mob
was approaching and the smoke of the blazing Tuileries rising into the
air, Frémont fled, cheek by jowl with the squad that had been ordered
out to execute him. Two days later, being denounced to the Versailles
party, he was a fugitive from the military tribunal for having taken
part in a rebellion against the established Government. And it was
perfectly certain that the Versailles party was in direct succession,
since having followed the Empire on September 4th, 1870, it had adopted
and retained the recognised procedure of the preceding Government,
whilst the Commune, which had never succeeded in establishing those
telegraphic communications that are absolutely essential to a
recognised government, found itself undone and destroyed—and, in
fact, very much in the wrong. Besides, the Commune was the outcome of
a revolution carried out in face of the enemy, and this the Versailles
administration could never forgive, for its origin recalled their
own. It was for this reason that a captain of the winning side, being
employed in shooting rebels in the neighbourhood of the Louvre, ordered
his men to search for Frémont and shoot him. At last, after remaining
in hiding for a fortnight with citizen Charlier, a member of the
Commune, under a roof in the Place de la Bastille, Frémont left Paris
in a smock-frock, with a whip in his hand, behind a market-gardener’s
cart. And whilst a court-martial at Versailles was condemning him to
death, he was earning his livelihood in London by drawing up a complete
catalogue of Rowlandson’s works for a rich City amateur. Being an
intelligent, industrious and honourable man, he soon became well known
and respected among the English artists. He loved art passionately,
but politics scarcely interested him at all. He remained friendly
towards the Commune through loyalty alone and in order to avoid the
shame of deserting vanquished friends. But he dressed well and moved
in good society. He worked strenuously and, at the same time, knew how
to profit by his work. His _Dictionnaire des monogrammes_ not only
established his reputation, but brought him in some money. After the
amnesty had been passed and the last fluttering rags of civil strife
had blown away, there landed at Boulogne, after Gambetta’s motion, a
certain gentleman, haughty and smiling, yet not unsociable. He was
youngish, but a little worn by work, and with a few grey hairs; he was
correctly dressed in a travelling costume and carried a portmanteau
packed with sketches and manuscripts. Establishing himself in modest
style at Montmartre, Georges Frémont quickly became intimate with
the artist colony there. But the labours upon the emoluments from
which he had mainly supported himself in England only brought him the
satisfaction of gratified vanity in France. Then Gambetta obtained
for him an appointment as inspector of museums, and Frémont fulfilled
his duties in this department both conscientiously and skilfully.
He had a true and delicate taste in art. The nervous sensitiveness
which had moved him deeply in his youth before the spectacle of his
country’s wounds, still affected him, now that he was growing old,
when confronted by unhappy social conditions, but enabled him, too,
to derive delight from the graceful expression of human thought, from
exquisite shapes, from the classic line, and the heroic cast of a face.
With all this he was patriotic even in art, never jesting about the
Burgundian school, faithful to political sentiment, and relying on
France to bring justice and liberty to the universe.
“You old communard!” repeated M. Worms-Clavelin.
“Hold your tongue, Worms! Your soul is ignoble and your mind obtuse.
You have no meaning in yourself, but, in the phrase of to-day, you are
a representative type. Just Heavens! how many victims were butchered
during a whole century of civil war just that M. Worms-Clavelin might
become a republican _préfet_! Worms, you are lower in the scale than
the _préfets_ of the Empire.”
“The Empire!” exclaimed M. Worms-Clavelin. “Blast the Empire! First of
all it swept us all into the abyss, and then it made me an official.
But, all the same, wine is made, corn is grown, just as in the time
of the Empire; they bet on the Bourse, as under the Empire; one eats,
drinks, and makes love, as under the Empire. At bottom, life is just
the same. How could government and administration be different?
There are certain shades of difference, I grant you. We have more
liberty; we even have too much of it. We have more security. We enjoy
a government which suits the ideals of the people. As far as such a
thing is possible, we are the masters of our fate. All the social
forces are now held in just balance, or nearly so. Now just you show me
what there is that could be changed. The colour of our postage stamps
perhaps ... and after that!... As old Montessuy used to say, ‘No, no,
friend, short of changing the French, there is nothing in France to
change.’ Of course, I am all for progress. One must talk about moving,
were it only in order to dispense with movement. ‘Forward! forward!’
The _Marseillaise_ must have been useful in _not_ carrying one to the
frontier!...”
The look which Georges Frémont turned on the _préfet_ was full of deep,
affectionate, kindly, thoughtful scorn:
“Everything is as perfect as it can be, then, Worms?”
“Don’t make out that I speak like an utter dolt. Nothing is perfect,
but all things cling together, prop one another up, dovetail with one
another. It is just like père Mulot’s wall which you can see from here
behind the orangery. It is all warped and cracked and leans forward.
For the last thirty years that fool of a Quatrebarbe, the diocesan
architect, has been stopping dead in front of Mulot’s house. Then, with
his nose in air, his hands behind his back and his legs apart, he says:
‘I really don’t see how that holds together!’ The little imps coming
out from school stand behind him and shout in mockery of his gruff
tones: ‘I really don’t see how that holds together!’ He turns round
and, seeing nobody, looks at the pavement as though the echo of his
voice had risen from the earth. Then he goes away repeating, ‘I really
don’t see how that holds together!’ It holds together because nobody
touches it; because père Mulot summons neither masons nor architects;
above all, because he takes good care not to ask M. Quatrebarbe for his
advice. It holds together because up till now it has held together. It
holds together, you old dreamer, because they neither revise the taxes
nor reform the Constitution.”
“That is to say, it holds together through fraud and iniquity,” said
Georges Frémont. “We have fallen into a cauldron of shame. Our finance
ministers are under the thumb of the cosmopolitan banking-houses.
And, sadder still, it is France—France, of old the deliverer of
the nations—that has no care in European politics save to avenge
the rights of titled sovereigns. Without even daring to shudder, we
permitted the massacre of three hundred thousand Christians in the
East, although, by our traditions, we had been constituted their
revered and august protectors. We have betrayed not only the interests
of humanity, but our own; and now you may see the Republic floating in
Cretan waters among the Powers of Europe, like a guinea-fowl amid a
flock of gulls. It was to this point, then, that our friendship with
our ally was to lead us.”
The _préfet_ protested:
“Don’t attack the Russian entente, Frémont. It’s the very best of all
the electioneering baits.”
“The Russian alliance,” replied Frémont, waving his fork, “I hailed
the birth of it with joyful expectation. But, alas, did it not, at the
very first test, fling us into the arms of that assassin the Sultan and
lead us to Crete, there to hurl melinite shell at Christians whose only
fault was the long oppression they had suffered? But it was not Russia
that we took such pains to humour, it was the great bankers interested
in Ottoman bonds. And you saw how the glorious victory of Canea was
hailed by the Jewish financiers with a burst of generous enthusiasm.”
“There you go,” cried the _préfet_, “that’s just sentimental politics!
You ought to know, at any rate, where that sort of thing leads. And why
the deuce you should be excited about the Greeks, I don’t see. They’re
not at all interesting.”
“You are right, Worms,” said the inspector of fine arts. “You are
perfectly right. The Greeks are not interesting, for they are poor.
They have nothing but their blue sea, their violet hills and the
fragments of their statues. The honey of Hymettus is never quoted
on the Bourse. The Turks, on the contrary, are well worthy of the
attention of European financiers. They have internal dissensions; above
all they have resources. They pay badly and they pay much. One can do
business with them. Stocks rise. All is well then. Such are the ideals
of our foreign policy!”
M. Worms-Clavelin interrupted him hurriedly, and casting on him a
reproachful look, said:
“Ah, now! Georges, don’t be disingenuous. You know well enough that we
neither have, nor can have, any foreign policy.”