LA TRIBUNE DES PEUPLES—MICKIEWICZ AND RAMON DE LA SAGRA—THE CHORUS OF THE
REVOLUTION OF JUNE 13, 1848—CHOLERA IN PARIS—DEPARTURE
I left Paris in the autumn of 1847, without having formed any ties
there; I remained completely outside the literary and political circles.
There were many reasons for that. No direct occasion of contact with
them occurred, and I did not care to seek it. To visit them simply
in order to stare at celebrities, I thought unseemly. Moreover, I
particularly disliked the tone of condescending superiority which
Frenchmen assume with Russians: they approve of us, encourage us, commend
our pronunciation and our wealth; we put up with it all, and behave as
though we were asking them a favour, or even apologising for ourselves,
delighted when, from politeness, they affect to take us for Frenchmen.
The French overwhelm us with a flood of words, we cannot keep pace with
them; we think of an answer, but they do not care to hear it; we are
ashamed to show that we notice their blunders and their ignorance—they
take advantage of all that with hopeless self-complacency.
To get on to a different footing with them, one would have to impress
them with one’s consequence; to do so, one must possess all sorts of
privileges, which I had not at that time, and of which I took advantage
at once when they were at my disposal.
Moreover, it must be remembered that there are no people in the world
with whom it is easier to strike up a nodding acquaintance than the
French—and no people with whom it is more difficult to get on to really
intimate terms. A Frenchman likes to live in company, so as to display
himself, to have an audience, and in that respect he is as much a
contrast to the Englishman as in everything else. An Englishman is
always looking at people because he is bored; he looks at men as though
from a stall in a theatre; he makes use of people as an entertainment,
or as a means of obtaining information. The Englishman is always asking
questions, the Frenchman is always giving answers. The Englishman is
always wondering, always thinking things over; the Frenchman knows
everything for certain, he is finished and complete, he will go no
further: he is fond of preaching, talking, holding forth—about what, to
whom, he does not care. He feels no need for personal intimacy, the café
satisfies him completely. Like Repetilov in _Woe from Wit_, he does not
notice that Tchatsky is gone and Skalozub is in his place, that Skalozub
is gone and Zagoretsky is in his place—and goes on holding forth about
the Chamber, about the jury, about Byron (this he pronounces as though it
were a French name), and other important matters.
Coming from Italy, with the enthusiasm of the February revolution still
fresh in my heart, I stumbled on the 15th of May, then passed through
the agony of the June days and the state of siege. It was then that
I obtained a deeper insight into the _tigre-singe_ of Voltaire—and I
lost even the desire to become acquainted with the mighty ones of this
republic.
On one occasion a possibility arose of common work which would have
brought me into contact with many persons, but that did not come off.
Count Xaveri Branicki gave seven million francs for a magazine to deal
with foreign politics and other nations, and especially with the Polish
question. The usefulness and appropriateness of such a magazine were
obvious. French papers show little interest or knowledge in dealing with
what is happening outside France; during the republic, they thought it
sufficient to encourage from time to time all the nations of the world
with the phrase _solidarité des peuples_, and the promise that as soon
as they had time to turn round at home they would found a world-wide
republic resting upon universal brotherhood. With the means at the
disposal of the new magazine, which was to be called _La Tribune des
Peuples_, it might have been made the _Moniteur_ of the international
movement and progress. Its success was the more certain as there was no
other international periodical; there are sometimes excellent articles in
_The Times_ and the _Journal des Débats_ on special subjects, but they
are occasional and disconnected. The _Augsburg Gazette_ would be the most
international organ if its _black-and-yellow_ proclivities were not so
glaringly conspicuous.
But it seems that all the excellent projects of the year 1848 were doomed
to be prematurely born and to perish before cutting their first tooth.
The magazine turned out poor and feeble—and died at the slaughter of the
innocents after the 14th of June 1849.
When everything was ready and on the point of beginning, a house was
taken and fitted up with big tables covered with cloth and little
sloping desks; a lean French _littérateur_ was engaged to watch over
the international mistakes in spelling; to edit it, a committee was
nominated from former Polish nuncios and senators, and at the head of
this Mickiewicz was appointed, with Hoetsky as his assistant;—all that
was left to arrange was a triumphal opening ceremony, and what date could
be more suitable for that than the anniversary of February the 24th, and
what form could it more suitably take than that of a supper?
The supper was to take place at Hoetsky’s. When I arrived I found many
of the guests already there, and among them scarcely a single Frenchman;
on the other hand, other nationalities, from the Sicilians to the
Croats, were fully represented. I was really interested in one person
only—Adam Mickiewicz; I had never seen him before. He was standing by
the fireplace with his elbow on the mantelpiece. Any one who had seen his
portrait in the French edition of his works, taken, I believe, from the
medallion executed by David d’Angers,[14] could recognise him at once
in spite of the great change wrought by the years. Many thoughts and
sufferings had left their trace on his face, which was rather Lithuanian
than Polish. The whole impression made by his figure, his head, his
luxuriant grey hair and weary eyes, was suggestive of past suffering,
of acquaintance with spiritual pain, and of the exaltation of sorrow—he
was the plastic embodiment of the destiny of Poland. The same impression
was made on me later by the face of Worcell, though the features of the
latter, in spite of being even more expressive of suffering, were more
animated and gracious than those of Mickiewicz. It seemed as though
Mickiewicz were held back, preoccupied, distracted by something: that
something was the strange mysticism into which he retreated further and
further away.
I went up to him. He began questioning me about Russia: his information
was fragmentary; he knew little of the literary movement after Pushkin,
having stopped short at the time when he left Russia. In spite of
his leading idea of a fraternal league of all the Slavonic peoples—a
conception he was one of the first to develop—he retained some hostility
to Russia. And, indeed, it could hardly be otherwise after all the
atrocities perpetrated by the Tsar and his satraps; besides, we were
speaking at a time when the terrorism of Nicholas was worse than ever
before.
The first thing that surprised me disagreeably was the attitude to him
of the Poles, his followers: they approached him as monks approach an
abbot, with self-abasement and reverent awe; some of them kissed him on
the shoulder. I suppose he was accustomed to these expressions of servile
devotion, for he accepted them with the greatest _laisser aller_. To be
recognised by people of the same way of thinking, to have influence on
them, to see their affection, is desired by every one who is devoted,
body and soul, to his cause and lives in it; but external signs of
sympathy and respect I should not like to receive—they destroy equality
and consequently freedom. Moreover, in that respect we can never compete
with bishops, heads of departments, and colonels of regiments.
Hoetsky told me that at the supper he was going to propose a toast ‘to
the memory of the 24th of February 1848,’ that Mickiewicz would respond
with a speech in which he would expound his views and the spirit of the
new magazine; he wished me as a Russian to reply to Mickiewicz. Not being
accustomed to public speaking, especially without preparation, I declined
his invitation, but promised to propose the health of Mickiewicz and to
say a few words describing how I had drunk his health before in Moscow at
a public dinner given to Granovsky in the year 1843. Homyakov had raised
his glass with the words, ‘To the great Slavonic poet who is absent!’ The
name (which we dared not pronounce) was not needed; every one got up,
every one raised his glass and, standing in silence, drank to the health
of the exile. Hoetsky was satisfied. Having thus arranged our _extempore_
speeches, we sat down to the table. At the end of the supper, Hoetsky
proposed his toast. Mickiewicz got up and began speaking. His speech
was elaborate, clever, and extremely adroit—that is to say, Barbès[15]
and Louis-Napoleon could both have applauded it with perfect sincerity;
it made me wince. As he developed his thought I began to feel uneasy and
oppressed, and, that not the slightest doubt might be left, waited for
one word, one _name_—it was not slow to appear!
Mickiewicz worked up to the theme that democracy was now entering upon
a new open campaign, at the head of which stood France; that it would
_again_ hasten to the liberation of all oppressed nationalities under
the same eagles, under the same standards, at the sight of which all
principalities and powers had trembled; and that it would be led by a
member of that dynasty which has been crowned by the people, and, as
it seemed, ordained by Providence itself to guide revolution by the
well-ordered path of authority and victory.
When he had finished, except for two or three exclamations of his
adherents, a general silence followed. Hoetsky was very well aware of
Mickiewicz’s blunder, and, wishing to efface the impression of it as
quickly as possible, came up with a bottle and, as he filled my glass,
whispered to me, ‘Well?’ ‘I am not going to say a word after that
speech.’ ‘Please do say something.’ ‘Nothing will induce me.’
The silence continued; some people kept their eyes fixed on their plates,
others scrutinised their glasses, others fell into private conversation
with their neighbours. Mickiewicz’s face changed colour, he wanted to say
something more, but a loud ‘_Je demande la parole_’ put an end to the
painful position. Every one turned to the man who had risen to his feet.
A rather short man of seventy, with a fine vigorous face, stood with a
glass in his trembling hand; anger and indignation were apparent in his
large black eyes and his excited face. It was Ramon de la Sagra.[16] ‘To
the 24th of February,’ he said: ‘that was the toast proposed by our host.
Yes, to the 24th of February, and to the downfall of every despotism,
whether of king or emperor, of a Bourbon or a Bonaparte. I cannot share
the views of our friend Mickiewicz—he looks at things like a poet, and
is right from his own point of view; but I don’t want his words to pass
without protest in such a gathering’; and so he went on and on, with all
the fire of a Spaniard and the authority of an old man.
When he had finished, twenty glasses, among them mine, were held out to
clink with his.
Mickiewicz tried to retrieve his position, said a few words of
explanation, but they were unsuccessful. De la Sagra did not give way.
Every one got up from the table, and Mickiewicz went away.
There could scarcely have been a worse omen for the new journal; it
succeeded in existing after a fashion till the 13th of June, and its
disappearance was as little noticed as its existence. There could be no
unity in the editing of it. Mickiewicz had rolled up half of his imperial
banner _usé par la gloire_. The others did not dare to unfurl theirs;
hampered both by him and by the committee, many of the contributors
abandoned the journal at the end of the month; I never sent them a single
line. If the police of Napoleon had been more intelligent, the _Tribune
des Peuples_ would never have been prohibited on account of a few lines
referring to the 13th of June. With Mickiewicz’s name and devotion to
Napoleon, with its revolutionary mysticism and dream of the democracy
in arms, with the Bonapartes at its head, the journal might have been a
veritable treasure for the President, a clean organ of an unclean cause.
Catholicism, so alien to the Slavonic genius, has a shattering effect
upon it. When the Bohemians no longer had the strength to resist
Catholicism, they were crushed; in the Poles, Catholicism has developed
that mystical exaltation which keeps them perpetually in the world of
dreams. If they are not under the direct influence of the Jesuits, they
either create some idol for themselves, or give themselves up to the
influence of some visionary instead of working for freedom. Messianism,
that mania of Wronski’s, that delirium of Tovjanski’s, had turned the
brains of hundreds of Poles, among them of Mickiewicz himself. The
worship of Napoleon takes a foremost place in this insanity. Napoleon had
done nothing for them; he had no love for Poland, but he liked the Poles
who shed their blood for him with the poetic titanic courage displayed in
their famous cavalry attack of Sommo Sierra.[17] In 1812 Napoleon said to
Narbonne: ‘I want a camp in Poland, not a forum. I will not permit either
Warsaw or Moscow to open a club for demagogues’—and of him the Poles made
a military incarnation of God, setting him on a level with Vishnu and
Christ.
Late one winter evening in 1848, I was walking with one of the Polish
followers of Mickiewicz along the Place de la Vendôme. When we reached
the column the Pole took off his cap. ‘Good heavens!...’ I thought,
hardly daring to believe in such idiocy, and meekly asked what was his
reason for taking off his cap. The Pole pointed to the bronze figure
of the emperor. How can we expect men to refrain from domineering or
oppressing others when it wins so much devotion!
Mickiewicz’s private life was gloomy; there was something unfortunate
about it, something dark, some ‘visitation of God.’ His wife was for
a long time out of her mind. Tovjanski recited incantations over her,
and is said to have done her good; this made a great impression on
Mickiewicz, but traces of her illness remained ... things went badly with
them. The last years of the great poet, who outlived himself, were spent
in gloom. He died in Turkey while taking part in an absurd attempt to
organise a Cossack legion, which the Turkish Government would not permit
to be called Polish. Before his death he wrote a Latin ode to the honour
and glory of Louis-Napoleon.
After this unsuccessful attempt at journalism I withdrew even more
completely into a small circle of friends, enlarged by the arrival of
new exiles. At first I had sometimes visited a club, and taken part in
three or four banquets, _i.e._ had eaten cold mutton and drunk sour
wine, while I listened to Pierre Leroux or Father Cabet and joined in
the Marseillaise. Now I was sick of that, too. With deep pain I watched
and recorded the success of the forces of dissolution and the decadence
of the republic, of France, of Europe. From Russia came no gleam of
light in the distance, no good news, no friendly greeting: my people
had given up writing to me; personal, intimate, family relations were
suspended. Russia lay speechless, bruised as though dead, like an unhappy
peasant-woman at the feet of her master, beaten by his heavy fists.
She was then entering upon that terrible five years from which she is
emerging now to follow the coffin of Nicholas.[18]
Those five years were for me, too, the most unhappy period of my
life; I have no longer such treasures to lose, such convictions to be
shattered....
... The cholera raged in Paris; the heavy air, the sunless heat,
made one depressed; the sight of the luckless, terrified people, and
rows of funeral hearses which raced each other as they drew near the
cemeteries—all this was in harmony with the political events.
The victims of the epidemic fell near at hand, at one’s side. My mother
went to St. Cloud with a friend, a lady of five-and-twenty. As they
were coming back in the evening, the lady felt rather unwell; my mother
persuaded her to stay the night. At seven o’clock the next morning they
came to tell me that she had cholera. I went in to see her, and was
aghast. Not one feature was unchanged; she was still handsome; but all
the muscles of her face were drawn and contracted, dark shadows lay
under her eyes. With some difficulty I succeeded in finding Rayer[19] at
the Institute, and brought him home with me. After glancing at the sick
woman, Rayer whispered to me: ‘You can see for yourself all there is to
be done here.’ He wrote a prescription and went away.
The sick woman called me and asked: ‘What did the doctor say? He did tell
you something, didn’t he?’ ‘He sent for some medicine.’ She took my hand,
and her hand amazed me even more than her face: it had grown thin and
angular as though she had been seriously ill for a month: and fixing her
eyes upon me full of suffering and horror, she said: ‘Tell me, for God’s
sake, what he said ... is it that I am dying?... You are not afraid of
me, are you?’ she added. I felt fearfully sorry for her at that moment;
that terrible consciousness not only of death, but of the infectiousness
of the disease that was rapidly sapping her life, must have been
intensely painful. Towards the morning she died.
Ivan Turgenev was about to leave Paris, the lease of his flat was up; he
came to us for a night. After dinner he complained of the heat; I told
him that I had had a bathe in the morning; in the evening he too went for
a bathe. When he came back he felt unwell, drank some soda-water with a
little wine and sugar in it, and went to bed. In the night he woke me.
‘I am a lost man,’ he said; ‘it’s cholera.’ He really was suffering from
sickness and spasms; happily, he escaped with ten days’ illness.
After burying her friend, my mother went away to the Ville d’Avray.
When Turgenev was taken ill, I sent Natalie and the children to her and
remained alone with him, and when he was a great deal better I moved
there too.
On the morning of June the 12th, Sazonov came to see me there. He was
in a very enthusiastic mood: talked of the popular outbreak that was
impending, of the certainty of its being successful, of the glory
awaiting those who took part in it, and pressed me urgently to join in
reaping the laurels. I told him that he knew my opinion of the present
position—that it seemed to me stupid, without believing in it, to
co-operate with people with whom one had hardly anything in common.
To this the enthusiastic agitator replied that it was of course more
safe and peaceful to stay at home and write sceptical articles while
others were in the market-place championing the liberty of the world, the
solidarity of peoples, and many other good things.
A very despicable feeling, but one which has led and will lead many men
into making great mistakes—even committing crimes—impelled me to say:
‘What makes you imagine I am not going?’
‘I concluded that from what you have just said.’
‘No; I said it was stupid, but I did not say that I never do anything
stupid.’
‘That is just what I wanted! That’s what I like in you! Well, it’s no
use losing time; let us go to Paris. This evening the Germans and other
refugees are assembling at nine o’clock; let us go first to them.’
‘Where are they meeting?’ I asked him in the train.
‘In the Café Lamblin, in the Palais Royal.’
This was my first surprise.
‘In the Café Lamblin?’
‘The “reds” usually meet there.’
‘For that very reason I should have thought that they ought to meet
somewhere else.’
‘But they are all used to going there.’
‘I suppose the beer is very good!’
Various _habitués_ of the revolution were sitting with dignity at a
dozen little tables, gloomily and significantly looking about them from
under wide-brimmed felt hats and short-peaked caps. These were the
perpetual suitors of the revolutionary Penelope, the invariable actors
who take part in every popular demonstration and form its _tableau_,
its background, and who are as terrifying in the distance as the paper
dragons with which the Chinese tried to scare the English.
In the troubled times of social storms and reconstructions in which
states move out of their common routine for a long period, a new kind of
people spring up who may be called the chorus of the revolution; grown
on shifting and volcanic soil, nurtured in an atmosphere of anxiety when
every sort of work is suspended, they grow inured from their earliest
years to the conditions of political ferment, and like the theatrical
setting of it, its impressive and brilliant _mise en scène_. Just as to
Nicholas drill was the most important part of the military art, to them
the everlasting banquets, demonstrations, protests, collections, toasts,
banners, are the most important part of the revolution.
Among them there are good, valiant people, sincerely devoted and ready
to face a bullet; but for the most part they are very unintelligent and
extremely pedantic. Immovable conservatives in everything connected with
revolution, they stop short at some programme and never advance beyond it.
Discussing all their lives a small number of political ideas, they only
know their rhetorical side, so to speak, their ceremonial trappings,
_i.e._ the commonplaces which are invariably brought on the scene _à tour
de rôle_, like the ducks in a well-known children’s toy—in newspaper
articles, in speeches, at banquets and in parliamentary sallies.
In addition to the naïve people and the revolutionary doctrinaires,
unappreciated artists, unsuccessful literary men, students who finished
their studies without taking their degree, briefless barristers, actors
with no talents, persons of great vanity but of little capacity, with
vast pretensions but no perseverance or power of work, are all naturally
drawn into this circle. The external authority which guides the human
herd in ordinary times is weakened in times of revolution; people,
left to themselves, do not know what to do. The younger generation is
impressed with the apparent ease with which men attain celebrity in times
of revolution, and rushes into futile agitation; this accustoms the young
to violent excitements and destroys the habit of work. Life in the clubs
and cafés is attractive, full of movement, flattering to vanity and free
from restraint. There is no fear of being late, there is no need to work:
what is not done to-day may be done to-morrow, or may not be done at all.
The chorus of the revolution, like the chorus of a Greek play, is divided
into two halves; the botanical classification may be applied to them:
some of them may be called cryptogamous and others phanerogamous. Some
become eternal conspirators, are continually changing their lodgings
and the shape of their beards. They mysteriously invite one to some
extraordinarily important interview, if possible at night, or in some
inconvenient place. Meeting their friends in public, they do not like
saluting them with a bow, but greet them with a significant glance. Many
of them keep their address a secret, never tell one what day they are
going away, never say where they are going, write in cypher or invisible
ink news which is printed openly in the newspapers.
In the days of Louis-Philippe, so I was told by a Frenchman, E., who had
been mixed up in some political affair, was in hiding in Paris. With all
its attractions such a life becomes _à la longue_ wearisome and tedious.
Delessert,[20] a _bon vivant_ and a rich man, was at that time prefect;
he served in the police not from necessity but for the love of it, and
liked at times a festive dinner. He and E. had many friends in common.
One day ‘between the peas and the cheese,’ as the French say, one of
them said to him: ‘What a pity it is that you persecute poor E.! We are
deprived of a capital talker, and he is obliged to hide like a criminal.’
‘Upon my soul,’ said Delessert, ‘his case is completely forgotten! Why is
he in hiding?’
His friends smiled ironically.
‘I will try to convince him that it is all nonsense—and you, too.’
On reaching home he called one of his chief spies and asked him, ‘Is E.
in Paris?’ ‘Yes,’ answered the spy. ‘Is he in hiding?’ asked Delessert.
‘Yes,’ answered the spy. ‘Where?’ asked Delessert. The spy took out his
notebook, looked in it, and read E.’s address. ‘Well, then, go to him
to-morrow early in the morning and tell him that he need not be anxious,
that we are not looking for him, and he can live in peace at his flat.’
The spy carried out his task exactly, and two hours after his visit E.
mysteriously informed his friends that he was leaving Paris and would be
in hiding in a remote town, because the prefect had found out the place
where he was concealed!
Just as the conspirators try to conceal their secret with a transparent
veil of mystery and an eloquent silence, the phanerogamous try to display
and blurt out all they possess.
They are the permanent tribunes of the clubs and cafés; they are
perpetually dissatisfied with everything, they repeat everything—even
things that have not happened, while things that have happened are
by them squared and cubed and distorted out of all proportion, like
the mountains on a relief map. One is so used to seeing them that one
unconsciously looks for them in every row in the street, at every
demonstration, at every banquet.
... The spectacle at the Café Lamblin was still new to me; at that time
I was not familiar with the back premises of the revolution. It is
true that in Rome I had been in the Cafe delle Belli Arti and in the
square, I had been in the Circolo Romano and in the Circolo Popolare;
but the movement in Rome had not then that exotic character which became
particularly apparent after the failure of 1848. Ciceruacchio and his
friends had a _naïveté_ of their own, their southern expressiveness
which strikes one as affectation and their Italian phrases which seem
to us theatrical; but they were in a period of youthful enthusiasm,
they had not yet fully awakened from their three centuries of sleep.
_Il popolano_ Ciceruacchio was not in the least a political agitator by
trade; he liked nothing better than to retire in peace to his little
house in Strada Ripetta and to carry on his trade in wood and timber like
a _pater familias_ and free _civis romanus_.
The men surrounding him were free from all traces of that vulgar,
babbling pseudo-revolutionism, of that _taré_ character which is so
depressingly common in France.
I need hardly say that in speaking of the café agitators and
revolutionary lazzaroni I was not thinking of those mighty workers for
the emancipation of humanity, of those martyrs for the love of their
fellow-creatures and fiery champions of independence whose words could
not be suppressed by prison, nor exile, nor banishment, nor poverty—of
those creators of events, by whose blood and tears and words a new
historical order is established. I am talking about the stagnant margin
covered with barren weeds, to whom agitation itself is goal and reward,
who like the process of revolution for its own sake, as Tchitchikov’s
Petrushka[21] liked the process of reading, or as Nicholas liked drill.
There is nothing for reaction to rejoice at in this—it is overgrown with
worse weeds and toadstools, not only at the margin but everywhere. In
its ranks are whole multitudes of officials who tremble before their
superiors, scurrying spies, volunteer assassins ready to murder on either
side, officers of every loathsome kind from the Prussian junker to the
rapacious French Algerian, from the guard to the _page de chambre_—and
that is only touching on the secular side, saying nothing of the
mendicant fraternity, the intriguing Jesuits, the priests who act as
police, and the other members of the ranks of angels and archangels.
If there are among reactionaries any who resemble our dilettante
revolutionaries, they are the courtiers employed for ceremonies, the
people who are conspicuous at levees, christenings, royal weddings,
coronations, and funerals, the people who exist for the uniform, for gold
lace, who make up the aureole and fragrance of power.
In the Café Lamblin, where the desperate _citoyens_ were sitting over
their _petits verres_ and big glasses, I learned that they had no sort of
plan, that the movement had no real centre and no programme. They were
waiting for inspiration to descend upon them as the Holy Ghost descended
upon the heads of the apostles. There was only one point on which all
were agreed—_to come to the meeting-place unarmed_. After two hours of
empty chatter, we went off to the office of the _True Republic_, agreeing
to meet at eight o’clock next morning at the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle,
facing the Château d’Eau.
The editor was not at home: he had gone to the ‘montagnards’ for
instructions. About twenty people, for the most part Poles and Germans,
were in the big, grimy, poorly lighted and still more poorly furnished
room which served as an assembly hall and a committee room. Sazonov took
a sheet of paper and began writing something; when he had written it, he
read it aloud to us: it was a protest in the name of the _émigrés_ of all
nationalities against the occupation of Rome, and a declaration of their
readiness to take part in the movement. Those who wished to immortalise
their names by associating them with the glorious morrow he invited to
sign it. Almost all wished to immortalise their names, and signed it. The
editor came in, much dejected, anxious to impress on every one that he
knew a great deal but was bound to keep silent; I felt convinced that he
knew nothing at all.
‘_Citoyens_,’ he said, ‘_la Montagne est en permanence._’ Well, who
could doubt its success—_en permanence_! Sazonov gave the editor the
protest of the democracy of Europe. The editor read it through and said:
‘That’s splendid, splendid! France thanks you, _citoyens_; but why the
signatures? There are so few, that if we are unsuccessful our enemies
will vent all their anger upon you.’
Sazonov insisted on the signatures remaining; many agreed with him. ‘I
won’t take the responsibility for it,’ said the editor; ‘excuse me, I
know better the people we have to deal with.’ With that he tore off the
signatures and delivered the names of a dozen candidates for immortality
to the flame of the candle, while he sent the protest itself to the
printer.
It was daybreak when we left the office; groups of ragged boys and
wretched, poorly dressed women were standing, sitting, and lying on the
pavement near the various newspaper offices, waiting for the piles of
newspapers—some to fold them, and others to run with them all over Paris.
We walked out on to the boulevard: there was absolute stillness; now and
then one came upon a patrol of National Guards and police-sergeants,
strolling about and looking slyly at us.
‘How free from care the city sleeps,’ said my comrade, ‘with no
foreboding of the storm that will waken it to-morrow!’
‘Here are those who keep vigil for us all,’ I said to him, pointing
upwards—that is, to the lighted window of the _Maison d’Or_.
‘And very appropriately, too. Let us go in and have an absinthe; my
stomach is a bit upset.’
‘And I feel empty; it wouldn’t be amiss to have some supper too. How they
eat in the Capitole I don’t know, but in the Conciergerie the food is
abominable.’
From the bones left after our meal of cold turkey, no one could have
guessed either that cholera was raging in Paris, or that in two hours’
time we were going to change the destinies of Europe. We ate at the
Maison d’Or as Napoleon slept before Austerlitz.
Between eight and nine o’clock, when we reached the Boulevard Bonne
Nouvelle, many groups of people had already gathered there, evidently
impatient to know what they were to do; their faces showed perplexity,
but at the same time something in their aspect betrayed great
exasperation. Had those people found real leaders the day would not have
ended in a farce.
There was a minute when it seemed to me that something was really going
to happen. A gentleman rode on horseback down the boulevard rather
slowly. He was recognised as one of the ministers (Lacroix), who was
probably taking horse exercise so early not merely for the sake of fresh
air. He was surrounded by a shouting crowd, who pulled him off his horse,
tore his coat, and then let him go—that is, another group rescued him and
escorted him away. The crowd grew; by ten o’clock there may have been
twenty-five thousand people. No one we spoke to, no one we questioned,
knew anything. Chersosi, a _carbonaro_ of old days, assured us that the
_banlieu_ was coming through the Arc de Triomphe with a shout of ‘_Vive
la République!_’
‘Above all,’ the elders of the democracy repeated again, ‘be unarmed, or
you will spoil the character of the whole thing—the all-powerful people
ought to show the National Assembly its will peacefully and solemnly so
as to give the enemy no occasion to blaspheme.’
At last columns were formed; we foreigners made up a guard of honour
immediately behind the leaders, among whom were E. Arago[22] in the
uniform of a colonel, a former minister, Bastide,[23] and other
celebrities of 1848. We moved down the boulevard, shouting various things
and singing the Marseillaise. One who has not heard the Marseillaise sung
by thousands of voices in that state of nervous excitement and suspense
which is inevitable before a struggle can hardly realise the overwhelming
effect of the revolutionary hymn.
At that minute there was really something grand about the demonstration.
As we slowly moved down the boulevards all the windows were thrown open;
ladies and children crowded at them and came out on to the balconies; the
gloomy and agitated faces of their husbands, the fathers and proprietors,
peeped out from behind them, not observing that in the fourth storeys and
attics other heads, those of poor seamstresses and working girls, were
thrust out—they waved handkerchiefs, nodded, and greeted us. From time to
time as we passed by the houses of well-known people all sorts of shouts
were uttered.
In this way we reached the point where the Rue de la Paix joins the
boulevards; it was closed by a platoon of the Vincennes Chasseurs, and
when our column came up to it the chasseurs suddenly moved apart like
the scenery in a theatre, and Changarnier,[24] mounted upon a small
horse, galloped up at the head of a squadron of dragoons. With no summons
to the crowd to disperse, with no beating of the drums or other legal
formalities, he scattered the foremost ranks, cut them off from the
others, and, changing the dragoons into open formation, ordered them
to clear the street at full speed. The dragoons with positive zest fell
to riding down people, striking them with the flat of their swords and
using the edge at the slightest resistance. I hardly had time to take in
what was happening when I found myself nose to nose with a horse which
was snorting in my face, and a dragoon swearing also right in my face
and threatening me with a blow if I did not move away. I retreated to
the right, and in one instant was carried away by the crowd and squeezed
against the railings of the Rue Basse des Remparts. Of our rank the only
one left besides me was M. Strübing. Meanwhile the dragoons pressed upon
the foremost ranks with their horses, and the people, unable to get away,
were thrust back upon us. E. Arago leaped over into the Rue Basse des
Remparts, slipped, and dislocated his leg; Strübing and I jumped down
after him. We looked at each other in a sort of frenzied indignation;
Strübing turned round and shouted aloud: ‘_Aux armes! Aux armes!_’ A man
in a workman’s blouse caught him by the collar and, shoving him out of
the way, said; ‘Have you gone mad? Look there!’ A thick brush of bayonets
was moving down the street—the Chaussée d’Antin it must have been. ‘Get
away before they hear you and cut off all escape. All is lost, all!’
he added, clenching his fist; and, humming a tune as though there were
nothing the matter, rapidly walked away. We made our way to the Place de
la Concorde. In the Champs-Élysées there was not a single platoon from
the _banlieu_; why, Chersosi must have known that there was not. It had
been a diplomatic lie to save the situation, though it would perhaps have
been fatal if any had believed it.
The shamelessness of attacking an unarmed crowd aroused great resentment.
If anything really had been prepared, had there been leaders, nothing
would have been easier than for fighting to have begun in earnest.
Instead of showing itself in its full strength, the _Montagne_, on
hearing how absurdly the sovereign people had been dispersed by horses,
hid itself behind a cloud. Ledru-Rollin carried on negotiations with
Guinard.[25] Guinard, the artillery commander of the National Guard,
wanted to join the movement, wanted to give men, but would not on any
consideration give ammunition—he seems to have wished to act by the moral
influence of cannons; Forestier[26] was doing the same with his legion.
Whether it helped them much, we saw by the Versailles trial. Every one
wanted to do something, but no one ventured; the most foresight was shown
by some young men who built their hopes on the new regime—they ordered
themselves prefects’ uniforms, which they declined to take after the
movement failed, and the tailor had to put them up for sale.
When the hurriedly rigged-up government was installed at the _Arts et
Métiers_, the workmen, after walking about the streets with inquiring
faces and finding neither advice nor leadership, went home, convinced
once more of the ineffectiveness of the _Montagnard_ fathers of the
country; perhaps they gulped down their tears like the man who said
to us, ‘All is lost!’—or perhaps laughed in their sleeves at the
discomfiture of the _Montagne_.
But the dilatoriness of Ledru-Rollin, the pedantry of Guinard—these were
the external causes of the failure, and were as _appropriate to the
occasion_ as decisive characters and fortunate circumstances when they
are needed. The internal cause was the poverty of the republican idea in
which the movement originated. An idea that has outlived its day may
hobble about the world for years—may even, like Christ, appear after
death once or twice to its devotees; but it is hard for it ever again
to lead and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete possession of
a man, or gain possession only of incomplete people. If the _Montagne_
had been victorious on the 13th of June, what would it have done?
There was nothing new they could call their own. It would have been an
insipid reproduction of the gloomy Rembrandt or Salvator Rosa picture
of 1793 without the Jacobins, without the war, without even the naïve
guillotine....
After the 13th of June and the attempted rising at Lyons, arrests
followed. The mayor came with the police to us at the Ville d’Avray to
look for Karl Blind[27] and Arnold Ruge; some of our friends were seized.
The Conciergerie was full to overflowing. In one small room there were
as many as sixty men; in the middle stood a large slop-bucket, which was
emptied once in the twenty-four hours—and all this in civilised Paris,
with the cholera raging. Having no desire to spend some two months in
such pleasant surroundings, fed on rotten beans and putrid meat, I
borrowed a passport from a Moldav-Wallachian and went to Geneva.[28]
Transport in France was in the hands of Laffitte and Calliard in those
days. The diligences were put on the railway lines, then taken off—at
Châlons, I remember—then put on the rails again. A lean, sunburnt
gentleman with a clipped moustache and a rather unpleasant appearance
got into the carriage with me, and looked at me suspiciously; he had a
small travelling-bag, and a sword wrapped up in American leather. He was
obviously a police-sergeant in disguise. He scanned me carefully from
head to foot, then retreated into the corner and did not utter a single
word. At the first station he called up the conductor and told him that
he had left behind an excellent map, and would be grateful for a scrap
of paper and an envelope. The conductor said they only had three minutes
before the bell would ring; the sergeant jumped out, and returning
looked at me more suspiciously than ever. For four hours the silence
continued: my permission to smoke he even asked without speaking; I
answered in the same way with my head and my eyes, and took out a cigar.
When it began to get dusk he asked me, ‘Are you going to Geneva?’ ‘No,
to Lyons,’ I answered. ‘Ah!’ With that the conversation ended. A little
while later the door opened and the conductor with difficulty thrust
in a bald-headed, immensely corpulent individual, in a roomy pea-green
overcoat and a bright-coloured waistcoat, with a thick stick, a sack, and
an umbrella. When this typical figure of the virtuous uncle installed
himself between the sergeant and me, I asked him before he had time to
recover his breath: ‘_Monsieur, vous n’avez pas d’objection?_’ Coughing,
mopping his face, and tying a silk handkerchief round his head, he
answered: ‘Not in the least, by all means; my son who is in Algiers is
always smoking, _il fume toujours_’; and with this good opening he began
chatting and telling us stories. Half an hour later, he asked me where I
had come from and where I was going. Hearing that I came from Wallachia,
he added with characteristic French politeness, ‘_Ah, c’est un beau
pays_,’ though he did not know for certain whether it was in Turkey or in
Hungary.
My neighbour answered his questions very laconically. ‘_Monsieur est
militaire?_’ ‘_Oui, monsieur._’ ‘_Monsieur a été en Algérie?_’ ‘_Oui,
monsieur._’ ‘My eldest son, too, he is there now. In Oran,[29] I
suppose?’ ‘_Non, monsieur._’ ‘And in your country are there diligences?’
‘Between Jassy and Bucharest,’ I answered with inimitable assurance.
‘Only, with us, diligences are drawn by oxen.’
This greatly astonished my neighbour, and I am sure he would have taken
his oath that I was a Wallachian; after this happy detail, even the
sergeant was softened and became more conversational.
At Lyons I got out of the diligence and at once went to another
booking-office, climbed upon the roof of another diligence, and five
minutes later was dashing along the road to Geneva. At the last big town
before the frontier, a commissaire of police was sitting with a clerk in
the square before the police-station; gendarmes were standing about, and
a preliminary examination of passports was held. The description in my
passport did not quite fit me, and so, getting down from the knife-board,
I said to the gendarme: ‘_Mon brave_, where could we quickly get a drink
of wine together? Show me; the heat is insufferable.’
‘Why, there’s my sister’s café not two steps away.’
‘But what about my passport?’
‘Give it here, I’ll hand it over to my comrade; he will bring it back to
us.’
A minute later the gendarme and I were sitting over a bottle of Beaune
in his sister’s café, and five minutes later his comrade brought the
passport. I offered him a glass, he put his hand to his hat, and we
returned to the diligence friends. So far all was well. We reached the
frontier; there was a river, over the river a bridge, and on the other
side of the bridge the Piedmontese custom-house. French gendarmes were
sauntering in all directions on the bank, looking for Ledru-Rollin, who
had crossed the frontier long before, and for Félix Pyat,[30] who would
nevertheless cross it later, and like me with a Wallachian passport.
The conductor observed that here they would examine our passports
finally, that this would take rather a long time—half an hour—and so
he advised us to have something to eat at the posting inn. We went in,
and had no sooner sat down than another Lyons diligence drove up; the
passengers came in, and foremost among them was my sergeant. Ough! what
luck! And I had told him that I was going to Lyons. We bowed frigidly;
he, too, seemed surprised; however, he did not say a word.
A gendarme came in, distributed passports; the diligences were already
on the other side of the river. ‘Kindly cross the bridge on foot,
gentlemen.’ Now there will be a bobbery, I thought. We went out ...
and here we are on the bridge—no trouble; and now we were over the
bridge—still no trouble.
‘Ha—ha—ha!’ the sergeant laughed nervously. ‘So we’ve got across! Ough!
it’s like a load off one’s back.’
‘What?’ said I, ‘are you....’
‘Why, you too, it seems?’
‘Upon my word,’ I answered, laughing heartily, ‘I am straight from
Bucharest; came all the way with oxen.’
‘It’s your luck!’ the conductor said to me, holding up his finger. ‘You
must be more careful next time. Why did you give two francs to the boy
who brought you to the inn? It’s a good thing he is _one of us_ too; he
said to me at once, “He must be a red; he didn’t stop a minute at Lyons,
and he was so pleased to get a seat that he gave me two francs.” “You
hold your tongue, it’s not your business,” I said to him, “or some beast
of a gendarme will overhear you and maybe stop him.”’
Next day we reached Geneva, the old haven of refuge for the persecuted.
‘At the time of the king’s death, a hundred and fifty families,’ says
Michelet in his history of the 16th century, ‘escaped to Geneva; a
little later, another fourteen hundred. The refugees from France and the
refugees from Italy founded the real Geneva, that wonderful sanctuary
between three nations; with no support, afraid of the Swiss themselves,
it maintained itself by its moral force alone.’
Switzerland was at this time the meeting-place in which the survivors
left from European revolutions gathered together from all parts.
Representatives of all the unsuccessful risings were shifting about
between Geneva and Basle, crowds of the insurgents were crossing the
Rhine, others were descending the St. Gothard or coming from beyond the
Jura. The cowardly Federal Government did not dare yet to turn them out;
the cantons still clung to their ancient holy right of sanctuary.
All the people whose names were on everybody’s lips, whom I loved at a
distance and was now eager to meet, were passing through Geneva as though
on parade at a review, stopping there to rest and going on again....