THE HONEYMOON OF THE REPUBLIC
THE ENGLISHMAN IN THE FUR-JACKET—THE DUC DE NOAILLES—FREEDOM AND HER BUST
IN MARSEILLES—THE ABBÉ SIBOUR AND THE UNIVERSAL REPUBLIC IN AVIGNON
‘_To-morrow we are going to Paris; I am leaving Rome full of life and
excitement. What will come of it all? Can it last? The sky is not free
from clouds; at times there is a chilly blast from the sepulchral vaults
bringing the smell of death, the odour of the past; the historical_
tramontano _is strong, but whatever happens I am grateful to Rome for the
five months I have spent there. The feelings I have passed through remain
in the soul, and the reaction will not extinguish quite everything._’
This is what I wrote at the end of April 1848, sitting at my window in
the Via del Corso and looking out into the ‘People’s square,’ in which I
had seen and felt so much.
I left Italy in love with her and sorry to leave her: there I had met not
only great events but also the very nicest people—but still I went. It
would have seemed like being faithless to all my convictions not to be in
Paris when there was a republic there. Doubts are apparent in the lines
I have quoted, but faith got the upper hand, and with inward pleasure I
looked in Cività at the consul’s seal on my visa on which was engraved
the imposing words, ‘République Française’—I did not reflect that the
very fact that a visa was needed showed that France was not a republic.
We went by a mail steamer. There were a great many passengers on
board, and as usual they were of all sorts: there were passengers from
Alexandria, Smyrna, and Malta. One of the terrible winds common in
spring blew up just after we passed Leghorn: it drove the ship along
with incredible swiftness and with insufferable rolling; within two or
three hours the deck was covered with sea-sick ladies; by degrees the
men too succumbed, except a grey-headed old Frenchman, an Englishman
from Canada in a fur-jacket and a fur-cap, and myself. The cabins, too,
were full of sufferers, and the stuffiness and heat in them were enough
alone to make one ill. We three sat at night on our portmanteaus, covered
with our overcoats and railway rugs, in the howling of the wind and the
splashing of the waves, which at times broke over the fore-deck. I knew
the Englishman; the year before I had travelled in the same steamer with
him from Genoa to Cività Vecchia. It happened we were the only two at
dinner; he did not say a word all through the meal, but over the dessert,
softened by the marsala and seeing that I on my side had no intention of
entering upon a conversation, he gave me a cigar and said that he had
brought his cigars himself from Havana. Then we talked: he had been in
South America and California, and told me that he had long been intending
to visit Petersburg and Moscow, but should not go until there were
_proper_ means of communication and a direct route between London and
Petersburg.[1]
‘Are you going to Rome?’ I asked, as we approached Cività.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered.
I said no more, supposing that he considered my question impertinent, but
he immediately added:
‘That depends on whether I like the climate in Cività.’
‘Then you are stopping here?’
‘Yes; the steamer leaves to-morrow.’
At that time I knew very few Englishmen, and so I could hardly conceal
my laughter, and was quite unable to do so when I met him next day,
walking by the hotel in the same fur-coat, carrying a portfolio, a
field-glass, and a little dressing-case, followed by a servant laden with
his portmanteau and various belongings.
‘I am off to Naples,’ he said as he came up to me.
‘Why, don’t you like the climate?’
‘It’s horrid.’
I forgot to mention that on our first journey together he occupied the
berth which was directly over mine. On three occasions during the night
he almost killed me, first from fright, and then with his feet; it was
fearfully hot in the cabin, he went several times to have a drink of
brandy and water, and each time, climbing down and climbing up, he trod
on me and shouted loudly, in alarm: ‘Oh—beg pardon—_J’ai avais soif._’
‘_Pas de mal!_’
Consequently we met this time like old friends; he spoke with the
greatest approbation of my immunity from sea-sickness, and offered me his
Havana cigars. As was perfectly natural, the conversation soon turned on
the revolution of February. The Englishman, of course, looked upon the
revolution in Europe as an interesting spectacle, as a source of new and
curious observations and experiences, and he described the revolution in
New Colombia.
The Frenchman took a different interest in these matters ... within
five minutes an argument had sprung up between him and me: he answered
evasively, cleverly, and with the utmost courtesy, yielding nothing,
however. I defended the republic and revolution. Without directly
attacking it, the old gentleman championed the traditional forms of
government as the only ones durable, popular, and capable of satisfying
the just claims of progress and the necessity of settled security.
‘You cannot imagine,’ I said to him in joke, ‘what a peculiar
satisfaction you give me by your implied criticisms. I have been for
fifteen years speaking about the monarchy just as you speak about
the republic. The parts are changed; in defending the republic, I am
the conservative, while you, defending the legitimist monarchy, are a
_perturbateur de l’ordre politique_.’
The old gentleman and the Englishman laughed. A tall, gaunt gentleman,
whose nose has been immortalised by _Charivari_[2] and Philipon, the
Comte d’Argout,[3] came up to us. (_Charivari_ used to declare that
his daughter did not marry because she did not want to sign herself
‘So-and-so, _née d’Argout_.’) He joined in the conversation, addressed
the old gentleman with deference, but looked at me with a surprise not
far removed from repulsion; I noticed this, and began to be at least four
times as _red_ in my remarks.
‘It is a very remarkable thing,’ the grey-headed old Frenchman said to
me: ‘you are not the first Russian I have met of the same manner of
thinking. You Russians are either the most absolute slaves of your Tsar,
or—_passez-moi le mot_—anarchists. And it follows from that, that it will
be a long time before you are free.’ Our political conversation continued
in that strain.[4]
When we were approaching Marseilles and all the passengers were busy
looking after their luggage, I went up to the old gentleman and, giving
him my card, said that I should like to think that our discussion on the
swaying boat had left no unpleasant impression. The old gentleman said
good-bye to me very charmingly, delivered himself of another epigram
at the expense of the republicans whom I should see at last at closer
quarters, and gave me his card. It was the Duc de Noailles, the kinsman
of the Bourbons, and one of the leading counsellors of Henry the Fifth.[5]
Though this incident is quite unimportant, I describe it for the benefit
and education of our ‘dukes’ of the three highest ranks. If some senator
or privy councillor had been in Noailles’ place he would simply have
taken what I said for insolence and breach of discipline and would have
sent for the captain of the boat.
A Russian minister of the year 1850[6] sat with his family in his
carriage on the steamer to avoid all contact with passengers who were
common mortals. Can one imagine anything more ridiculous than sitting in
an unharnessed carriage ... and on the sea, too, and for a man double the
ordinary size into the bargain!
The arrogance of our great dignitaries is not due to aristocratic
feeling—the grand gentleman is dying out; it is the feeling of liveried
and powdered flunkeys in great houses, extremely abject on one side and
extremely insolent on the other. The aristocrat is a personality, while
our faithful servants of the throne are entirely without personality;
they are like Paul’s medals, which bear the inscription: ‘Not to us,
not to us, but to thy name.’ Their whole training leads up to this: the
soldier imagines that the only reason why he must not be beaten with
sticks is that he wears the Anna ribbon; the station superintendent
considers his position as an officer the barrier that protects his cheek
from the traveller’s hand; an insulted clerk points to his Stanislav or
Vladimir ribbon—‘not for ourselves, not for ourselves ... but for our
rank!’
On leaving the steamer at Marseilles, I met a great procession of the
National Guard, which was carrying to the Hôtel de Ville the figure
of Liberty, _i.e._ of a woman with immense curls and a Phrygian cap.
With shouts of ‘_Vive la République!_’ thousands of armed citizens were
marching in it, and among them workmen in blouses who had been enrolled
in the National Guard. I need hardly say that I followed them. When the
procession reached the Hôtel de Ville, the general, the mayor, and the
commissaire of the Provisional Government, Démosthène Ollivier, came
out into the portico. Démosthène, as might be expected from his name,
prepared to deliver an oration. An immense circle formed about him:
the crowd, of course, moved forward, the National Guards pressed it
back, the crowd would not yield; this offended the armed workmen, they
lowered their guns and, turning round, began with the butt-ends hitting
the toes of the people who stood in front; the citizens of the ‘one and
indivisible republic’ stepped back....
This proceeding surprised me the more because I was still completely
under the influence of the manners of Italy, and especially of Rome,
where the proud sense of personal dignity and the inviolability of the
person is fully developed in every man—not merely in the _facchino_
and the postman, but even in the beggar who holds out his hand for
alms. In Romagna such insolence would have been greeted with twenty
_coltellate_.[7] The French drew back—perhaps they had corns?
This incident made an unpleasant impression on me. Moreover, when I
reached the hotel I read in the newspapers what had happened at Rouen.[8]
What could be the meaning of it? Surely the Duc de Noailles was not
right?
But when a man wants to believe, his belief is not easily uprooted, and
before I reached Avignon I had forgotten the butt-ends at Marseilles and
the bayonets at Rouen.
In the diligence with us there was a thick-set, middle-aged abbé of
dignified deportment and attractive exterior. For appearance’ sake he
took up his breviary, but to avoid dropping asleep put it back soon
afterwards in his pocket and began talking charmingly and intelligently,
with the classical correctness of the language of Port-Royal and the
Sorbonne, and with many quotations and chaste witticisms.
Indeed, it is only the French who know how to talk. The Germans can make
declarations of love, confide their secrets, give lectures, and scold.
In England routs are so much liked just because they make conversation
impossible ... there is a crowd, no room to move, every one is pushing
and being pushed, no one knows anybody; while if people come together in
a small party they immediately have wretchedly poor music, singing out of
tune, or boring little games, or with extraordinary heaviness the hosts
and guests try to keep the ball of conversation rolling, with sighs and
pauses reminding one of the luckless horses who almost at their last gasp
under the whip drag a heavy-laden barge against the stream.
I wanted to taunt the abbé with the republic, but I did not succeed. He
was very glad that liberty had come without excesses, above all without
bloodshed and fighting, and looked upon Lamartine as a great man,
something in the style of Pericles.
‘And of Sappho,’ I added, without, however, entering upon an argument. I
was grateful to him for not saying a word about religion. So talking, we
arrived at Avignon at eleven o’clock at night.
‘Allow me,’ I said to the abbé as I filled his glass at supper, ‘to
propose a rather unusual toast: “To the republic, _et pour les hommes
d’église qui sont républicains_.”’ The abbé got up, and concluded some
Ciceronian sentences with the words: ‘À la République future en Russie.’
‘À la République universelle!’ shouted the conductor of the diligence and
three men who were sitting at the table. We clinked glasses.
A Catholic priest, two or three shopmen, the diligence conductor, and
Russians—we might well drink to the universal republic!
But it really was very jolly.
‘Where are you bound for?’ I inquired of the abbé, as we took our seats
in the diligence again, and I asked his pastoral blessing on a cigar.
‘For Paris,’ he answered; ‘I have been elected to the National Assembly.
I shall be delighted to see you if you will call; this is my address.’
He was the Abbé Sibour, _doyen_ of something or other and brother of the
Archbishop of Paris.[9]
A fortnight later there came the fifteenth of May, that sinister
_ritournelle_ which was followed by the terrible days of June. That all
belongs not to my biography but to the biography of mankind....
I have written a great deal about those days. I might end here like the
old captain in the old song:—
‘Ici finit tout noble souvenir,
Ici finit tout noble souvenir.’
But with those accursed days the last part of my life begins.
Appendix I
(_From ‘West European Sketches—Notebook I.’_)
I
THE DREAM
Do you remember, friends, how lovely was that winter day, bright and
sunny, when six or seven sledges accompanied us to Tchornaya Gryaz, when
for the last time we clinked glasses and parted, sobbing?
... Evening was coming on, the sledge crunched through the snow, you
looked mournfully after us and did not divine that it was a funeral and
a parting for ever. All were there but one, the dearest of all; he alone
was far away, and by his absence seemed to wash his hands of my departure.
That was the 21st of January 1847.
Seven years[10] have passed since then, and what years! Among them were
1848 and 1852.
All sorts of things happened in those years, and everything was
shattered—public and personal: the European revolution and my home, the
freedom of the world and my individual happiness.
Of the old life not one stone remained standing. At that time my powers
had reached their fullest development; the previous years had given
me pledges for the future. I left you full of daring and reckless
self-reliance, with haughty confidence in life. I was in haste to tear
myself away from the little group of people who had been so closely knit
together and had come so close to each other, bound by a deep love and
a common grief. I was lured by distance, space, open conflict, and free
speech. I was seeking an independent arena, I longed to try my powers in
freedom....
Now I expect nothing: after what I have seen and experienced, nothing
will move me to much wonder or to deep joy; joy and wonder are curbed by
memories of the past and fear of the future. Almost everything has become
a matter of indifference to me, and I desire as little to die to-morrow
as to live long years; let the end come as accidentally and senselessly
as the beginning.
And yet I have found all that I sought, even recognition from this old
self-complacent world—and at the same time I have lost all my faith, all
that was precious to me, have met with betrayal, treacherous blows from
behind, and indeed a moral corruption of which you in Russia have no
conception.
It is hard for me, very hard, to begin this part of my story; avoiding
it, I have written the preceding parts, but at last I am brought face to
face with it. But away with weakness: what one could live through, one
must have the strength to remember.
From the middle of the year 1848 I have nothing to tell of but agonising
experiences, unavenged insults, undeserved blows. My memory holds nothing
but melancholy images, my own mistakes and other people’s: mistakes of
individuals, mistakes of nations. When there was hope of salvation, death
crossed the path....
... The last days of our life in Rome conclude the happy part of my
memories, that begin with the awakening of thought in childhood and
youthful vows on the Sparrow Hills.
Alarmed by the Paris of 1847, I had opened my eyes to the truth for a
moment, but was carried away again by the current of events seething
about me. All Italy was ‘awakening’ before my eyes! I saw the King of
Naples tamed and the Pope humbly asking the alms of the people’s love—the
whirlwind which set everything in movement carried me, too, off my feet;
all Europe took up its bed and walked—in a fit of somnambulism which we
took for awakening. When I came to myself, all was over; la Sonnambula,
terrified by the police, had fallen from the roof; friends were scattered
or were furiously slaughtering one another.... And I found myself alone,
utterly alone, among the graves and the cradles—their guardian, defender,
avenger, and I could do nothing just because I tried to do more than the
common.
And now I sit in London where chance has flung me—and I stay here because
I do not know what to do. An alien race swarms about me and hurries
hither and thither, wrapped in the heavy breath of ocean; a world
dissolved into chaos, lost in a fog in which all outlines are blurred, in
which light becomes a murky glimmer.
... And that other land—washed by the deep blue sea under the canopy of
deep blue sky ... it is the one bright spot left on this side of the
grave.
O Rome, how I love to return to your deceptions, how gladly I recall day
by day the time when I was intoxicated with you!
... A dark night. The Corso is filled with people, here and there are
torches. It is a month since a republic has been proclaimed in Paris.
News has come from Milan—there they are fighting, the people demand war,
there is a rumour that Charles Albert is on the way with troops. The
talk of the angry crowd is like the intermittent roar of waves which
alternately break with a splash and pause for a breathing space. The
crowds form into ranks. They go to the Piedmont Ambassador to find out
whether war has been declared.
‘Fall in, fall in with us,’ shout dozens of voices.
‘We are foreigners.’
‘All the better; Santo Dio, you are our guests.’
We joined the ranks.
‘The front place for the guests, the front place for the ladies, _le
donne forestiere_!’
And with passionate shouts of approval the crowd parted to make way.
Ciceruacchio and with him a young Roman poet, the author of the people’s
songs, pushed their way forward with a flag, the tribune shook hands with
the ladies and with them stood at the head of ten or twelve thousand
people—and all moved forward in that majestic and harmonious order which
is peculiar to the Roman people.
The leaders went into the Palazzo, and a few minutes later the
drawing-room doors opened on the balcony. The ambassador came out to
appease the people and to confirm the news of war; his words were
received with frantic joy. Ciceruacchio was on the balcony in the glaring
light of torches and candelabra, and beside him under the Italian flag
stood four young women, all four Russians—was it not strange? I can see
them now on that stone platform, and below them the swaying multitude,
mingling with shouts for war and curses for the Jesuits, ‘_Evviva le
donne forestiere!_’
In England, they and we should have been greeted with hisses, abuse,
and perhaps stones. In France, we should have been taken for _agents
provocateurs_. But here the aristocratic proletariat, the descendants of
Marius and the ancient tribunes, gave us a warm and genuine welcome. We
were received by them into the European struggle ... and with Italy alone
the bond of love, or at least of warm memory, is still unbroken.
And was all that ... intoxication, delirium? Perhaps—but I do not envy
those who were not carried away by that beautiful dream. The sleep could
not last long in any case: the ruthless Macbeth of real life had already
raised his hand to murder sleep and....
_My dream was past—it has no further change._[11]
II
IN THE STORM
On the evening of the 24th of June, coming back from the Place Maubert,
I went into the Quai d’Orsay. A few minutes later I heard a discordant
shouting, and the sound came nearer and nearer. I went to the window:
a grotesque comic _banlieu_ marched in from the suburbs to the support
of order; clumsy, rascally fellows, half peasants, half shopkeepers, a
little bit drunk, in wretched uniforms and old-fashioned casques, they
moved rapidly but in disorder, with shouts of ‘_Vive Louis-Napoléon!_’
It was the first time I heard that ill-omened shout. I could not restrain
myself, and when they reached the café I shouted at the top of my voice:
‘_Vive la République!_’ Those standing near the windows shook their fists
at me, an officer muttered some word of abuse, brandishing his sword;
and for a long time afterwards I could hear the shouts of welcome to the
man who had come to strangle half the revolution, to destroy half the
republic, to inflict himself upon France, as a punishment for forgetting
in her hysteria both other nations and her own proletariat.
At eight o’clock in the morning of the 26th of June, Annenkov and I went
out to the Champs-Élysées. The cannonade we had heard in the night had
ceased; only from time to time there was an interchange of shots and
the beating of drums. The streets were empty, but the National Guards
stood on each side of them. On the Place de la Concorde there was a
detachment of the _Garde mobile_; near them some poor women with brooms,
some ragpickers and _concierges_ from the houses near, were standing. The
faces of all were gloomy and horror-stricken. A lad of seventeen leaning
on his gun was telling them something; we joined them. He and all his
comrades, boys like himself, were half drunk, their faces blackened with
gunpowder and their eyes bloodshot from sleepless nights and drink; many
were dozing with their chins resting on the muzzle of their gun....
‘And what happened then there’s no need to describe.’ After a pause he
went on: ‘Yes, and they fought well, too, but we paid them out for our
comrades! What lots of them fell! I stuck my bayonet up to the hilt in
five or six of them; they’ll remember us,’ he added, trying to assume the
air of a hardened criminal. The women were pale and silent; a man who
looked like a _concierge_ observed: ‘Serve them right, the blackguards!’
... but this savage comment evoked not the slightest response. They were
all of too ignorant a class to be moved to pity by the massacre and by
the wretched boy whom others had turned into a murderer.
Silent and mournful, we went on to the Madeleine. Here we were stopped by
the National Guards. At first, after searching our pockets, they asked
where we were going, and let us through; but the next cordon beyond the
Madeleine refused to let us through and sent us back; when we went back
to the first cordon, we were stopped again. ‘But you saw us pass here
just now!’ ‘Don’t let them pass,’ shouted an officer. ‘Are you laughing
at us, or what?’ I asked. ‘It’s no use your talking to me,’ answered the
shopman in uniform rudely. ‘Take them to the police: I know one of them’
(he pointed to me); ‘I have seen him more than once at meetings. I dare
say the other is the same sort too; they are neither of them Frenchmen,
I’ll answer for it—march.’ Two soldiers in front, two behind, and one
on each side escorted us. The first man we met was a _représentant du
peuple_ with the silly badge in his button-hole; it was De Tocqueville,
the writer on America. I appealed to him and told him what had happened:
it was not a joking matter; they kept people in prison without any sort
of trial, threw them into the cellars of the Tuileries, and shot them. De
Tocqueville did not even ask who we were; he very politely bowed himself
off, delivering himself of the following banality: ‘The legislative
authority has no right to interfere with the executive.’ He might well be
a minister under Napoleon III.!
The ‘executive authority’ led us down the boulevard to the Chaussée
d’Antin to the _commissaire de police_. By the way, it may not be out of
place to observe that neither when we were arrested, nor when we were
searched, nor when we were on our way, did I see a single policeman;
all was done by the bourgeois soldiers. The boulevard was completely
empty, all the shops were closed; the inmates rushed to their doors and
windows when they heard our footsteps, and kept asking who we were: ‘_Des
émeutiers étrangers_,’ answered our escort, and the worthy bourgeois
looked at us and gnashed their teeth.
From the police-station we were sent to the Hôtel des Capucines; the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs has its quarters there now, but at that
time there was some temporary police committee there. We went with our
escort into a large study. A bald old gentleman in spectacles, dressed
entirely in black, was sitting alone at a table; he asked us over again
all the questions that the commissaire had asked us. ‘Where are your
passports?’ ‘We never carry them with us when we go for a walk.’ He took
up some manuscript book and spent a long time looking in it, apparently
found nothing, and asked one of our convoy: ‘Why did you arrest them?’
‘The officer gave the order; he says that they are very suspicious
characters.’ ‘Very well,’ said the old man; ‘I will inquire into the
case; you can go.’
When the escort had gone, the old man asked us to explain the cause of
our arrest. I put the facts before him, adding that the officer might
perhaps have seen me on the fifteenth of May near the Assembly; and
then described the incident of the previous day. I had been sitting in
the Café Comartine when suddenly there was a false alarm, a squadron of
dragoons rushed by at full speed, the National Guard began to form ranks.
Together with some five people who happened to be in the café, I went
up to the window; a National Guard standing below shouted rudely, ‘Did
you hear that the windows were to be shut?’ His tone justified me in
supposing that he was not addressing me, and I did not take the slightest
notice of his words; besides, I was not alone, though I happened to be
standing in front. Then the defender of order raised his gun, and, as all
this took place in the _rez-de-chaussée_, tried to thrust at me with his
bayonet, but, seeing his movement, I stepped back and said to the others:
‘Gentlemen, you are witnesses that I have done nothing—is it the habit of
the National Guard to stick foreigners!’ ‘_Mais c’est indigne, mais cela
n’a pas de nom!_’ my neighbours chimed in. The panic-stricken café-keeper
rushed to shut the windows; a vile-looking sergeant commanded him to turn
every one out of the café—I fancied he was the same man who had ordered
us to be detained. Moreover, the Café Comartine was but a few steps from
the Madeleine.
‘So that’s how it is, gentlemen: you see what imprudence leads to. Why
walk out at such a time?—minds are exasperated, blood is flowing....’
At that moment a National Guard brought in a maidservant, saying that
an officer had caught her in the very act of trying to post a letter
addressed to Berlin. The old man took the envelope and told the soldier
he could go.
‘You can go home,’ he said to us; ‘only, please do not go by the same
streets as before, and especially not by the cordon which arrested you.
But stay, I will send some one to escort you; he’ll take you to the
Champs-Élysées—you can get through that way.’
‘And you,’ he said, addressing the servant, giving her back the letter,
which he had not touched, ‘post it in some letter-box further away.’
And so the police protected us from the armed bourgeois!
On the night between the 26th and the 27th of June, so Pierre Leroux
relates, he went to Sénart to beg him to do something for the prisoners
who were being suffocated in the cellars of the Tuileries. Sénart, a man
well known as a desperate conservative, said to Pierre Leroux: ‘And _who_
will answer for their lives on the way? The National Guard will kill
them. If you had come an hour earlier you would have found two colonels
here: I had the greatest difficulty in bringing them to reason, and
ended by telling them that if these horrors went on I should give up the
president’s chair in the Assembly and take my place in the barricades.’
Two hours later, on returning home, the _concierge_ made his appearance
accompanied by a stranger in a dress coat and four men disguised as
workmen, though they had the moustaches of _municipales_ and the
deportment of gendarmes. The stranger unbuttoned his coat and waistcoat
and, pointing with dignity to the tricoloured scarf, said that he was the
commissaire of police, Barlet (the man who on the 2nd of December, in
the National Assembly, took by the collar the man who had himself taken
Rome—General Oudinot), and that he had orders to search me. I gave him my
key, and he set to work exactly as Police-master Miller did in 1834.
My wife came in: the commissaire, like the officer of gendarmes who
once came to us from Dubbelt, began apologising. My wife looked calmly
and directly at him, and when at the end of his speech he begged her
indulgence, said: ‘It would be cruelty on my part not to enter into your
position; you are sufficiently punished by being forced to do what you
are doing.’
The commissaire blushed, but did not say a word. Rummaging among the
papers and laying aside a whole heap of them, he suddenly went up to
the fireplace, sniffed, touched the ashes, and, turning to me with an
important air, asked: ‘What was your object in burning your papers?’
‘I haven’t been burning papers.’
‘Upon my word, the ash is still warm.’
‘No, it is not warm.’
‘_Monsieur, vous parlez à un magistrat!_’
‘The ash is cold, all the same, though,’ I said, flaring up and raising
my voice.
‘Why, am I lying?’
‘What right have you to doubt my word? ... here are some honest workmen
with you, let them try it. Besides, even if I had burnt papers: in the
first place, I have a right to burn them; and in the second, what are you
going to do?’
‘Have you no other papers?’
‘No.’
‘I have a few letters besides, and very interesting ones; come into my
room,’ said my wife.
‘Oh, your letters....’
‘Please don’t stand on ceremony ... why, you are only doing your duty;
come along.’ The commissaire went in, glanced very slightly at the
letters, which were for the most part from Italy, and was about to go....
‘But you haven’t seen what is below—a letter from the Conciergerie, from
a convict, you see; don’t you want to take it with you?’
‘Really, Madame,’ answered the policeman of the republic, ‘you are so
prejudiced; I don’t want that letter at all.’
‘What do you intend to do with the Russian papers?’ I asked.
‘They will be translated.’
‘The point is, where you will take your translator from. If he is from
the Russian Embassy, it will be as good as betraying people to the
Russian Government; you will ruin five or six people. You will greatly
oblige me if you will mention at the _procès-verbal_ that I beg most
urgently that a Polish _émigré_ should be chosen as a translator.’
‘I believe that can be done.’
‘I thank you; and I have another favour to ask of you: do you know
Italian at all?’
‘A little.’
‘I will show you two letters; in them the word France is not mentioned.
The man who wrote them is in the hands of the Sardinian police; you will
see by the letters that it will go badly with him if they get into the
hands of the police.’
‘_Mais, ah ça!_’ observed the commissaire, his dignity as a man beginning
to be aroused; ‘you seem to imagine that we are connected with the police
of all the despotic powers. We have nothing to do with other countries.
We are unwillingly compelled to take measures at home when blood is
flowing in the streets and when foreigners interfere in our affairs.’
‘Very well, then, you can have that letter.’
The commissaire had not lied; he certainly did know _very little_
Italian, and so, after turning the letters over, he put them in his
pocket, promising to return them.
With that his visit ended. The Italian letters he gave back next day,
but my papers vanished completely. A month passed; I wrote a letter to
Cavaignac,[12] inquiring why the police did not return my papers nor say
what they had found in them—a matter of very little consequence to them,
perhaps, but of the greatest importance for my honour.
What gave rise to this last phrase was as follows. Several persons of my
acquaintance had intervened on my behalf, considering the visit of the
commissaire and the retention of my papers outrageous. ‘We wanted to make
certain,’ Lamoricière[13] told them, ‘that he was not _an agent of the
Russian Government_.’ This was the first time I heard of this abominable
suspicion; it was something quite new for me. My life had been as open,
as public, as though it were lived in a glass hive, and now all at once
this terrible accusation, and from whom?—from a republican government!
A week later I was summoned to the prefecture. Barlet was with me.
We were received in Ducou’s room by a young official very like some
Petersburg head-clerk of the free-and-easy type. ‘General Cavaignac,’ he
told me, ‘has charged me to return your papers without examination. The
information collected concerning you renders it quite superfluous; no
suspicion rests upon you; here is your portfolio. Will you please first
sign this?’
It was a receipt stating that all the papers had been returned to me
complete.
I stopped and asked whether it would not be more in order for me to look
through the papers first.
‘They have not been touched. Here is the seal, indeed.’
‘The seal has not been broken,’ observed Barlet soothingly.
‘My seal is not here. Indeed, it was not put on them.’
‘It is my seal, but you know you had the key.’
Not wishing to reply with rudeness, I smiled. This enraged them both: the
head-clerk became the head of a department; he snatched up a penknife
and, cutting the seal, said in a rather rude tone: ‘Pray look, if you
don’t believe, but I have no time to waste,’ and walked out with a
dignified bow. Their resentment convinced me that they really had not
looked at the papers, and so, after a cursory glance at them, I signed
the receipt and went home.