On the day succeeding the battle of Sedan the mighty hosts of the two
German armies, without the delay of a moment, commenced their march on
Paris, the army of the Meuse coming in by the north through the valley
of the Marne, while the third army, passing the Seine at
Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, turned the city to the south and moved on
Versailles; and when, on that bright, warm September morning, General
Ducrot, to whom had been assigned the command of the as yet incomplete
14th corps, determined to attack the latter force while it was marching
by the flank, Maurice’s new regiment, the 115th, encamped in the woods
to the left of Meudon, did not receive its orders to advance until the
day was lost. A few shells from the enemy sufficed to do the work; the
panic started with a regiment of zouaves made up of raw recruits, and
quickly spreading to the other troops, all were swept away in a
headlong rout that never ceased until they were safe behind the walls
of Paris, where the utmost consternation prevailed. Every position in
advance of the southern line of fortifications was lost, and that
evening the wires of the Western Railway telegraph, the city’s sole
remaining means of communicating with the rest of France, were cut.
Paris was cut off from the world.
The condition of their affairs caused Maurice a terrible dejection. Had
the Germans been more enterprising they might have pitched their tents
that night in the Place du Carrousel, but with the prudence of their
race they had determined that the siege should be conducted according
to rule and precept, and had already fixed upon the exact lines of
investment, the position of the army of the Meuse being at the north,
stretching from Croissy to the Marne, through Epinay, the cordon of the
third army at the south, from Chennevieres to Chatillon and Bougival,
while general headquarters, with King William, Bismarck, and General
von Moltke, were established at Versailles. The gigantic blockade, that
no one believed could be successfully completed, was an accomplished
fact; the city, with its girdle of fortifications eight leagues and a
half in length, embracing fifteen forts and six detached redoubts, was
henceforth to be transformed into a huge prison-pen. And the army of
the defenders comprised only the 13th corps, commanded by General
Vinoy, and the 14th, then in process of reconstruction under General
Ducrot, the two aggregating an effective strength of eighty thousand
men; to which were to be added fourteen thousand sailors, fifteen
thousand of the francs corps, and a hundred and fifteen thousand
mobiles, not to mention the three hundred thousand National Guards
distributed among the sectional divisions of the ramparts. If this
seems like a large force it must be remembered that there were few
seasoned and trained soldiers among its numbers. Men were constantly
being drilled and equipped; Paris was a great intrenched camp. The
preparations for the defense went on from hour to hour with feverish
haste; roads were built, houses demolished within the military zone;
the two hundred siege guns and the twenty-five hundred pieces of lesser
caliber were mounted in position, other guns were cast; an arsenal,
complete in every detail, seemed to spring from the earth under the
tireless efforts of Dorian, the patriotic war minister. When, after the
rupture of the negotiations at Ferrieres, Jules Favre acquainted the
country with M. von Bismarck’s demands—the cession of Alsace, the
garrison of Strasbourg to be surrendered, three milliards of
indemnity—a cry of rage went up and the continuation of the war was
demanded by acclaim as a condition indispensable to the country’s
existence. Even with no hope of victory Paris must defend herself in
order that France might live.
On a Sunday toward the end of September Maurice was detailed to carry a
message to the further end of the city, and what he witnessed along the
streets he passed through filled him with new hope. Ever since the
defeat of Chatillon it had seemed to him that the courage of the people
was rising to a level with the great task that lay before them. Ah!
that Paris that he had known so thoughtless, so wayward, so keen in the
pursuit of pleasure; he found it now quite changed, simple, earnest,
cheerfully brave, ready for every sacrifice. Everyone was in uniform;
there was scarce a head that was not decorated with the _kepi_ of the
National Guard. Business of every sort had come to a sudden standstill,
as the hands of a watch cease to move when the mainspring snaps, and at
the public meetings, among the soldiers in the guard-room, or where the
crowds collected in the streets, there was but one subject of
conversation, inflaming the hearts and minds of all—the determination
to conquer. The contagious influence of illusion, scattered broadcast,
unbalanced weaker minds; the people were tempted to acts of generous
folly by the tension to which they were subjected. Already there was a
taint of morbid, nervous excitability in the air, a feverish condition
in which men’s hopes and fears alike became distorted and exaggerated,
arousing the worst passions of humanity at the slightest breath of
suspicion. And Maurice was witness to a scene in the Rue des Martyrs
that produced a profound impression on him, the assault made by a band
of infuriated men on a house from which, at one of the upper windows, a
bright light had been displayed all through the night, a signal,
evidently, intended to reach the Prussians at Bellevue over the roofs
of Paris. There were jealous citizens who spent all their nights on
their house-tops, watching what was going on around them. The day
before a poor wretch had had a narrow escape from drowning at the hands
of the mob, merely because he had opened a map of the city on a bench
in the Tuileries gardens and consulted it.
And that epidemic of suspicion Maurice, who had always hitherto been so
liberal and fair-minded, now began to feel the influence of in the
altered views he was commencing to entertain concerning men and things.
He had ceased to give way to despair, as he had done after the rout at
Chatillon, when he doubted whether the French army would ever muster up
sufficient manhood to fight again: the sortie of the 30th of September
on l’Hay and Chevilly, that of the 13th of October, in which the
mobiles gained possession of Bagneux, and finally that of October 21,
when his regiment captured and held for some time the park of la
Malmaison, had restored to him all his confidence, that flame of hope
that a spark sufficed to light and was extinguished as quickly. It was
true the Prussians had repulsed them in every direction, but for all
that the troops had fought bravely; they might yet be victorious in the
end. It was Paris now that was responsible for the young man’s gloomy
forebodings, that great fickle city that at one moment was cheered by
bright illusions and the next was sunk in deepest despair, ever haunted
by the fear of treason in its thirst for victory. Did it not seem as if
Trochu and Ducrot were treading in the footsteps of the Emperor and
Marshal MacMahon and about to prove themselves incompetent leaders, the
unconscious instruments of their country’s ruin? The same movement that
had swept away the Empire was now threatening the Government of
National Defense, a fierce longing of the extremists to place
themselves in control in order that they might save France by the
methods of ’92; even now Jules Favre and his co-members were more
unpopular than the old ministers of Napoleon III. had ever been. Since
they would not fight the Prussians, they would do well to make way for
others, for those revolutionists who saw an assurance of victory in
decreeing the _levée en masse_, in lending an ear to those visionaries
who proposed to mine the earth beneath the Prussians’ feet, or
annihilate them all by means of a new fashioned Greek fire.
Just previous to the 31st of October Maurice was more than usually a
victim to this malady of distrust and barren speculation. He listened
now approvingly to crude fancies that would formerly have brought a
smile of contempt to his lips. Why should he not? Were not imbecility
and crime abroad in the land? Was it unreasonable to look for the
miraculous when his world was falling in ruins about him? Ever since
the time he first heard the tidings of Froeschwiller, down there in
front of Mülhausen, he had harbored a deep-seated feeling of rancor in
his breast; he suffered from Sedan as from a raw sore, that bled afresh
with every new reverse; the memory of their defeats, with all the
anguish they entailed, was ever present to his mind; body and mind
enfeebled by long marches, sleepless nights, and lack of food, inducing
a mental torpor that left them doubtful even if they were alive; and
the thought that so much suffering was to end in another and an
irremediable disaster maddened him, made of that cultured man an
unreflecting being, scarce higher in the scale than a very little
child, swayed by each passing impulse of the moment. Anything,
everything, destruction, extermination, rather than pay a penny of
French money or yield an inch of French soil! The revolution that since
the first reverse had been at work within him, sweeping away the legend
of Napoleonic glory, the sentimental Bonapartism that he owed to the
epic narratives of his grandfather, was now complete. He had ceased to
be a believer in Republicanism, pure and simple, considering the remedy
not drastic enough; he had begun to dabble in the theories of the
extremists, he was a believer in the necessity of the Terror as the
only means of ridding them of the traitors and imbeciles who were about
to slay the country. And so it was that he was heart and soul with the
insurgents when, on the 31st of October, tidings of disaster came
pouring in on them in quick succession: the loss of Bourget, that had
been captured from the enemy only a few days before by a dashing
surprise; M. Thiers’ return to Versailles from his visit to the
European capitals, prepared to treat for peace, so it was said, in the
name of Napoleon III.; and finally the capitulation of Metz, rumors of
which had previously been current and which was now confirmed, the last
blow of the bludgeon, another Sedan, only attended by circumstances of
blacker infamy. And when he learned next day the occurrences at the
Hôtel de Ville—how the insurgents had been for a brief time successful,
how the members of the Government of National Defense had been made
prisoners and held until four o’clock in the morning, how finally the
fickle populace, swayed at one moment by detestation for the ministers
and at the next terrified by the prospect of a successful revolution,
had released them—he was filled with regret at the miscarriage of the
attempt, at the non-success of the Commune, which might have been their
salvation, calling the people to arms, warning them of the country’s
danger, arousing the cherished memories of a nation that wills it will
not perish. Thiers did not dare even to set his foot in Paris, where
there was some attempt at illumination to celebrate the failure of the
negotiations.
The month of November was to Maurice a period of feverish expectancy.
There were some conflicts of no great importance, in which he had no
share. His regiment was in cantonments at the time in the vicinity of
Saint-Ouen, whence he made his escape as often as he could to satisfy
his craving for news. Paris, like him, was awaiting the issue of events
in eager suspense. The election of municipal officers seemed to have
appeased political passion for the time being, but a circumstance that
boded no good for the future was that those elected were rabid
adherents of one or another party. And what Paris was watching and
praying for in that interval of repose was the grand sortie that was to
bring them victory and deliverance. As it had always been, so it was
now; confidence reigned everywhere: they would drive the Prussians from
their position, would pulverize them, annihilate them. Great
preparations were being made in the peninsula of Gennevilliers, the
point where there was most likelihood of the operation being attended
with success. Then one morning came the joyful tidings of the victory
at Coulmiers; Orleans was recaptured, the army of the Loire was
marching to the relief of Paris, was even then, so it was reported, in
camp at Étampes. The aspect of affairs was entirely changed: all they
had to do now was to go and effect a junction with it beyond the Marne.
There had been a general reorganization of the forces; three armies had
been created, one composed of the battalions of National Guards and
commanded by General Clement Thomas, another, comprising the 13th and
14th corps, to which were added a few reliable regiments, selected
indiscriminately wherever they could be found, was to form the main
column of attack under the lead of General Ducrot, while the third,
intended to act as a reserve, was made up entirely of mobiles and
turned over to General Vinoy. And when Maurice laid him down to sleep
in the wood of Vincennes on the night of the 28th of November, with his
comrades of the 115th, he was without a doubt of their success. The
three corps of the second army were all there, and it was common talk
that their junction with the army of the Loire had been fixed for the
following day at Fontainebleau. Then ensued a series of mischances, the
usual blunders arising from want of foresight; a sudden rising of the
river, which prevented the engineers from laying the pontoon bridge;
conflicting orders, which delayed the movement of the troops. The 115th
was among the first regiments to pass the river on the following night,
and in the neighborhood of ten o’clock, with Maurice in its ranks, it
entered Champigny under a destructive fire. The young man was wild with
excitement; he fired so rapidly that his chassepot burned his fingers,
notwithstanding the intense cold. His sole thought was to push onward,
ever onward, surmounting every obstacle until they should join their
brothers from the provinces over there across the river. But in front
of Champigny and Bry the army fell up against the park walls of
Coeuilly and Villiers, that the Prussians had converted into
impregnable fortresses, more than a quarter of a mile in length. The
men’s courage faltered, and after that the action went on in a
half-hearted way; the 3d corps was slow in getting up, the 1st and 2d,
unable to advance, continued for two days longer to hold Champigny,
which they finally abandoned on the night of December 2, after their
barren victory. The whole army retired to the wood of Vincennes, where
the men’s only shelter was the snow-laden branches of the trees, and
Maurice, whose feet were frost-bitten, laid his head upon the cold
ground and cried.
The gloom and dejection that reigned in the city, after the failure of
that supreme effort, beggars the powers of description. The great
sortie that had been so long in preparation, the irresistible eruption
that was to be the deliverance of Paris, had ended in disappointment,
and three days later came a communication from General von Moltke under
a flag of truce, announcing that the army of the Loire had been
defeated and that the German flag again waved over Orleans. The girdle
was being drawn tighter and tighter about the doomed city all whose
struggles were henceforth powerless to burst its iron fetters. But
Paris seemed to accumulate fresh powers of resistance in the delirium
of its despair. It was certain that ere long they would have to count
famine among the number of their foes. As early as October the people
had been restricted in their consumption of butcher’s meat, and in
December, of all the immense herds of beeves and flocks of sheep that
had been turned loose in the Bois de Boulogne, there was not a single
creature left alive, and horses were being slaughtered for food. The
stock of flour and wheat, with what was subsequently taken for the
public use by forced sale, it was estimated would keep the city
supplied with bread for four months. When the flour was all consumed
mills were erected in the railway stations to grind the grain. The
supply of coal, too, was giving out; it was reserved to bake the bread
and for use in the mills and arms factories. And Paris, her streets
without gas and lighted by petroleum lamps at infrequent intervals;
Paris, shivering under her icy mantle; Paris, to whom the authorities
doled out her scanty daily ration of black bread and horse flesh,
continued to hope—in spite of all, talking of Faidherbe in the north,
of Chanzy on the Loire, of Bourbaki in the east, as if their victorious
armies were already beneath the walls. The men and women who stood
waiting, their feet in snow and slush, in interminable lines before the
bakers’ and butchers’ shops, brightened up a bit at times at the news
of some imaginary success of the army. After the discouragement of each
defeat the unquenchable flame of their illusion would burst out and
blaze more brightly than ever among those wretched people, whom
starvation and every kind of suffering had rendered almost delirious. A
soldier on the Place du Château d’Eau having spoken of surrender, the
by-standers mobbed and were near killing him. While the army, its
endurance exhausted, feeling the end was near, called for peace, the
populace clamored still for the sortie _en masse_, the torrential
sortie, in which the entire population of the capital, men, women, and
children, even, should take part, rushing upon the Prussians like water
from a broken dyke and overwhelming them by sheer force of numbers.
And Maurice kept himself apart from his comrades, with an
ever-increasing disgust for the life and duties of a soldier, that
condemned him to inactivity and uselessness behind the ramparts of
Mont-Valerien. He grasped every occasion to get away and hasten to
Paris, where his heart was. It was in the midst of the great city’s
thronging masses alone that he found rest and peace of mind; he tried
to force himself to hope as they hoped. He often went to witness the
departure of the balloons, which were sent up every other day from the
station of the Northern Railway with a freight of despatches and
carrier pigeons. They rose when the ropes were cast loose and soon were
lost to sight in the cheerless wintry sky, and all hearts were filled
with anguish when the wind wafted them in the direction of the German
frontier. Many of them were never heard of more. He had himself twice
written to his sister Henriette, without ever learning if she had
received his letters. The memory of his sister and of Jean, living as
they did in that outer, shadowy world from which no tidings ever
reached him now, was become so blurred and faint that he thought of
them but seldom, as of affections that he had left behind him in some
previous existence. The incessant conflict of despair and hope in which
he lived occupied all the faculties of his being too fully to leave
room for mere human feelings. Then, too, in the early days of January
he was goaded to the verge of frenzy by the action of the enemy in
shelling the district on the left bank of the river. He had come to
credit the Prussians with reasons of humanity for their abstention,
which was in fact due simply to the difficulties they experienced in
bringing up their guns and getting them in position. Now that a shell
had killed two little girls at the Val-de-Grâce, his scorn and hatred
knew no bounds for those barbarous ruffians who murdered little
children and threatened to burn the libraries and museums. After the
first days of terror, however, Paris had resumed its life of dogged,
unfaltering heroism.
Since the reverse of Champigny there had been but one other attempt,
ending in disaster like the rest, in the direction of Bourget; and the
evening when the plateau of Avron was evacuated, under the fire of the
heavy siege artillery battering away at the forts, Maurice was a sharer
in the rage and exasperation that possessed the entire city. The
growing unpopularity that threatened to hurl from power General Trochu
and the Government of National Defense was so augmented by this
additional repulse that they were compelled to attempt a supreme and
hopeless effort. What, did they refuse the services of the three
hundred thousand National Guards, who from the beginning had been
demanding their share in the peril and in the victory! This time it was
to be the torrential sortie that had all along been the object of the
popular clamor; Paris was to throw open its dikes and drown the
Prussians beneath the on-pouring waves of its children. Notwithstanding
the certainty of a fresh defeat, there was no way of avoiding a demand
that had its origin in such patriotic motives; but in order to limit
the slaughter as far as possible, the chiefs determined to employ, in
connection with the regular army, only the fifty-nine mobilized
battalions of the National Guard. The day preceding the 19th of January
resembled some great public holiday; an immense crowd gathered on the
boulevards and in the Champs-Élysées to witness the departing
regiments, which marched proudly by, preceded by their bands, the men
thundering out patriotic airs. Women and children followed them along
the sidewalk, men climbed on the benches to wish them Godspeed. The
next morning the entire population of the city hurried out to the Arc
de Triomphe, and it was almost frantic with delight when at an early
hour news came of the capture of Montretout; the tales that were told
of the gallant behavior of the National Guard sounded like epics; the
Prussians had been beaten all along the line, the French would occupy
Versailles before night. As a natural result the consternation was
proportionately great when, at nightfall, the inevitable defeat became
known. While the left wing was seizing Montretout the center, which had
succeeded in carrying the outer wall of Buzanval Park, had encountered
a second inner wall, before which it broke. A thaw had set in, the
roads were heavy from the effects of a fine, drizzling rain, and the
guns, those guns that had been cast by popular subscription and were to
the Parisians as the apple of their eye, could not get up. On the right
General Ducrot’s column was tardy in getting into action and saw
nothing of the fight. Further effort was useless, and General Trochu
was compelled to order a retreat. Montretout was abandoned, and
Saint-Cloud as well, which the Prussians burned, and when it became
fully dark the horizon of Paris was illuminated by the conflagration.
Maurice himself this time felt that the end was come. For four hours he
had remained in the park of Buzanval with the National Guards under the
galling fire from the Prussian intrenchments, and later, when he got
back to the city, he spoke of their courage in the highest terms. It
was undisputed that the Guards fought bravely on that occasion; after
that was it not self-evident that all the disasters of the army were to
be attributed solely to the imbecility and treason of its leaders? In
the Rue de Rivoli he encountered bands of men shouting: “Hurrah for the
Commune! down with Trochu!” It was the leaven of revolution beginning
to work again in the popular mind, a fresh outbreak of public opinion,
and so formidable this time that the Government of National Defense, in
order to preserve its own existence, thought it necessary to compel
General Trochu’s resignation and put General Vinoy in his place. On
that same day Maurice, chancing to enter a hall in Belleville where a
public meeting was going on, again heard the _levée en masse_ demanded
with clamorous shouts. He knew the thing to be chimerical, and yet it
set his heart a-beating more rapidly to see such a determined will to
conquer. When all is ended, is it not left us to attempt the
impossible? All that night he dreamed of miracles.
Then a long week went by, during which Paris lay agonizing without a
murmur. The shops had ceased to open their doors; in the lonely streets
the infrequent wayfarer never met a carriage. Forty thousand horses had
been eaten; dogs, cats and rats were now luxuries, commanding a high
price. Ever since the supply of wheat had given out the bread was made
from rice and oats, and was black, damp, and slimy, and hard to digest;
to obtain the ten ounces that constituted a day’s ration involved a
wait, often of many hours, in line before the bake-house. Ah, the
sorrowful spectacle it was, to see those poor women shivering in the
pouring rain, their feet in the ice-cold mud and water! the misery and
heroism of the great city that would not surrender! The death rate had
increased threefold; the theaters were converted into hospitals. As
soon as it became dark the quarters where luxury and vice had formerly
held carnival were shrouded in funereal blackness, like the faubourgs
of some accursed city, smitten by pestilence. And in that silence, in
that obscurity, naught was to be heard save the unceasing roar of the
cannonade and the crash of bursting shells, naught to be seen save the
red flash of the guns illuminating the wintry sky.
On the 28th of January the news burst on Paris like a thunderclap that
for the past two days negotiations had been going on, between Jules
Favre and M. von Bismarck, looking to an armistice, and at the same
time it learned that there was bread for only ten days longer, a space
of time that would hardly suffice to revictual the city. Capitulation
was become a matter of material necessity. Paris, stupefied by the hard
truths that were imparted to it at that late day, remained sullenly
silent and made no sign. Midnight of that day heard the last shot from
the German guns, and on the 29th, when the Prussians had taken
possession of the forts, Maurice went with his regiment into the camp
that was assigned them over by Montrouge, within the fortifications.
The life that he led there was an aimless one, made up of idleness and
feverish unrest. Discipline was relaxed; the soldiers did pretty much
as they pleased, waiting in inactivity to be dismissed to their homes.
He, however, continued to hang around the camp in a semi-dazed
condition, moody, nervous, irritable, prompt to take offense on the
most trivial provocation. He read with avidity all the revolutionary
newspapers he could lay hands on; that three weeks’ armistice,
concluded solely for the purpose of allowing France to elect an
assembly that should ratify the conditions of peace, appeared to him a
delusion and a snare, another and a final instance of treason. Even if
Paris were forced to capitulate, he was with Gambetta for the
prosecution of the war in the north and on the line of the Loire. He
overflowed with indignation at the disaster of Bourbaki’s army in the
east, which had been compelled to throw itself into Switzerland, and
the result of the elections made him furious: it would be just as he
had always predicted; the base, cowardly provinces, irritated by Paris’
protracted resistance, would insist on peace at any price and restore
the monarchy while the Prussian guns were still directed on the city.
After the first sessions, at Bordeaux, Thiers, elected in twenty-six
departments and constituted by unanimous acclaim the chief executive,
appeared to his eyes a monster of iniquity, the father of lies, a man
capable of every crime. The terms of the peace concluded by that
assemblage of monarchists seemed to him to put the finishing touch to
their infamy, his blood boiled merely at the thought of those hard
conditions: an indemnity of five milliards, Metz to be given up, Alsace
to be ceded, France’s blood and treasure pouring from the gaping wound,
thenceforth incurable, that was thus opened in her flank.
Late in February Maurice, unable to endure his situation longer, made
up his mind he would desert. A stipulation of the treaty provided that
the troops encamped about Paris should be disarmed and returned to
their abodes, but he did not wait to see it enforced; it seemed to him
that it would break his heart to leave brave, glorious Paris, which
only famine had been able to subdue, and so he bade farewell to army
life and hired for himself a small furnished room next the roof of a
tall apartment house in the Rue des Orties, at the top of the butte des
Moulins, whence he had an outlook over the immense sea of roofs from
the Tuileries to the Bastille. An old friend, whom he had known while
pursuing his law studies, had loaned him a hundred francs. In addition
to that he had caused his name to be inscribed on the roster of a
battalion of National Guards as soon as he was settled in his new
quarters, and his pay, thirty sous a day, would be enough to keep him
alive. The idea of going to the country and there leading a tranquil
life, unmindful of what was happening to the country, filled him with
horror; the letters even that he received from his sister Henriette, to
whom he had written immediately after the armistice, annoyed him by
their tone of entreaty, their ardent solicitations that he would come
home to Remilly and rest. He refused point-blank; he would go later on
when the Prussians should be no longer there.
And so Maurice went on leading an idle, vagabondish sort of life, in a
state of constant feverish agitation. He had ceased to be tormented by
hunger; he devoured the first white bread he got with infinite gusto;
but the city was a prison still: German guards were posted at the
gates, and no one was allowed to pass them until he had been made to
give an account of himself. There had been no resumption of social life
as yet; industry and trade were at a standstill; the people lived from
day to day, watching to see what would happen next, doing nothing,
simply vegetating in the bright sunshine of the spring that was now
coming on apace. During the siege there had been the military service
to occupy men’s minds and tire their limbs, while now the entire
population, isolated from all the world, had suddenly been reduced to a
state of utter stagnation, mental as well as physical. He did as others
did, loitering his time away from morning till night, living in an
atmosphere that for months had been vitiated by the germs arising from
the half-crazed mob. He read the newspapers and was an assiduous
frequenter of public meetings, where he would often smile and shrug his
shoulders at the rant and fustian of the speakers, but nevertheless
would go away with the most ultra notions teeming in his brain, ready
to engage in any desperate undertaking in the defense of what he
considered truth and justice. And sitting by the window in his little
bedroom, and looking out over the city, he would still beguile himself
with dreams of victory; would tell himself that France and the Republic
might yet be saved, so long as the treaty of peace remained unsigned.
The 1st of March was the day fixed for the entrance of the Prussians
into Paris, and a long-drawn howl of wrath and execration went up from
every heart. Maurice never attended a meeting now that he did not hear
Thiers, the Assembly, even the men of September 4th themselves, cursed
and reviled because they had not spared the great heroic city that
crowning degradation. He was himself one night aroused to such a pitch
of frenzy that he took the floor and shouted that it was the duty of
all Paris to go and die on the ramparts rather than suffer the entrance
of a single Prussian. It was quite natural that the spirit of
insurrection should show itself thus, should bud and blossom in the
full light of day, among that populace that had first been maddened by
months of distress and famine and then had found itself reduced to a
condition of idleness that afforded it abundant leisure to brood on the
suspicions and fancied wrongs that were largely the product of its own
disordered imagination. It was one of those moral crises that have been
noticed as occurring after every great siege, in which excessive
patriotism, thwarted in its aims and aspirations, after having fired
men’s minds, degenerates into a blind rage for vengeance and
destruction. The Central Committee, elected by delegates from the
National Guard battalions, had protested against any attempt to disarm
their constituents. Then came an immense popular demonstration on the
Place de la Bastille, where there were red flags, incendiary speeches
and a crowd that overflowed the square, the affair ending with the
murder of a poor inoffensive agent of police, who was bound to a plank,
thrown into the canal, and then stoned to death. And forty-eight hours
later, during the night of the 26th of February, Maurice, awakened by
the beating of the long roll and the sound of the tocsin, beheld bands
of men and women streaming along the Boulevard des Batignolles and
dragging cannon after them. He descended to the street, and laying hold
of the rope of a gun along with some twenty others, was told how the
people had gone to the Place Wagram and taken the pieces in order that
the Assembly might not deliver them to the Prussians. There were
seventy of them; teams were wanting, but the strong arms of the mob,
tugging at the ropes and pushing at the limbers and axles, finally
brought them to the summit of Montmartre with the mad impetuosity of a
barbarian horde assuring the safety of its idols. When on March 1 the
Prussians took possession of the quarter of the Champs Élysées, which
they were to occupy only for one day, keeping themselves strictly
within the limits of the barriers, Paris looked on in sullen silence,
its streets deserted, its houses closed, the entire city lifeless and
shrouded in its dense veil of mourning.
Two weeks more went by, during which Maurice could hardly have told how
he spent his time while awaiting the approach of the momentous events
of which he had a distinct presentiment. Peace was concluded definitely
at last, the Assembly was to commence its regular sessions at
Versailles on the 20th of the month; and yet for him nothing was
concluded: he felt that they were ere long to witness the beginning of
a dreadful drama of atonement. On the 18th of March, as he was about to
leave his room, he received a letter from Henriette urging him to come
and join her at Remilly, coupled with a playful threat that she would
come and carry him off with her if he delayed too long to afford her
that great pleasure. Then she went on to speak of Jean, concerning
whose affairs she was extremely anxious; she told how, after leaving
her late in December to join the Army of the North, he had been seized
with a low fever that had kept him long a prisoner in a Belgian
hospital, and only the preceding week he had written her that he was
about to start for Paris, notwithstanding his enfeebled condition,
where he was determined to seek active service once again. Henriette
closed her letter by begging her brother to give her a faithful account
of how matters were with Jean as soon as he should have seen him.
Maurice laid the open letter before him on the table and sank into a
confused revery. Henriette, Jean; his sister whom he loved so fondly,
his brother in suffering and privation; how absent from his daily
thoughts had those dear ones been since the tempest had been raging in
his bosom! He aroused himself, however, and as his sister advised him
that she had been unable to give Jean the number of the house in the
Rue des Orties, promised himself to go that very day to the office
where the regimental records were kept and hunt up his friend. But he
had barely got beyond his door and was crossing the Rue Saint-Honoré
when he encountered two fellow-soldiers of his battalion, who gave him
an account of what had happened that morning and during the night
before at Montmartre, and the three men started off on a run toward the
scene of the disturbance.
Ah, that day of the 18th of March, the elation and enthusiasm that it
aroused in Maurice! In after days he could never remember clearly what
he said and did. First he beheld himself dimly, as through a veil of
mist, convulsed with rage at the recital of how the troops had
attempted, in the darkness and quiet that precedes the dawn, to disarm
Paris by seizing the guns on Montmartre heights. It was evident that
Thiers, who had arrived from Bordeaux, had been meditating the blow for
the last two days, in order that the Assembly at Versailles might
proceed without fear to proclaim the monarchy. Then the scene shifted,
and he was on the ground at Montmartre itself—about nine o’clock it
was—fired by the narrative of the people’s victory: how the soldiery
had come sneaking up in the darkness, how the delay in bringing up the
teams had given the National Guards an opportunity to fly to arms, the
troops, having no heart to fire on women and children, reversing their
muskets and fraternizing with the people. Then he had wandered
desultorily about the city, wherever chance directed his footsteps, and
by midday had satisfied himself that the Commune was master of Paris,
without even the necessity of striking a blow, for Thiers and the
ministers had decamped from their quarters in the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, the entire government was flying in disorder to Versailles,
the thirty thousand troops had been hastily conducted from the city,
leaving more than five thousand deserters from their numbers along the
line of their retreat. And later, about half-past five in the
afternoon, he could recall being at a corner of the exterior boulevard
in the midst of a mob of howling lunatics, listening without the
slightest evidence of disapproval to the abominable story of the murder
of Generals Lecomte and Clement Thomas. Generals, they called
themselves; fine generals, they! The leaders they had had at Sedan rose
before his memory, voluptuaries and imbeciles; one more, one less, what
odds did it make! And the remainder of the day passed in the same state
of half-crazed excitement, which served to distort everything to his
vision; it was an insurrection that the very stones of the streets
seemed to have favored, spreading, swelling, finally becoming master of
all at a stroke in the unforeseen fatality of its triumph, and at ten
o’clock in the evening delivering the Hôtel de Ville over to the
members of the Central Committee, who were greatly surprised to find
themselves there.
There was one memory, however, that remained very distinct to Maurice’s
mind: his unexpected meeting with Jean. It was three days now since the
latter had reached Paris, without a sou in his pocket, emaciated and
enfeebled by the illness that had consigned him to a hospital in
Brussels and kept him there two months, and having had the luck to fall
in with Captain Ravaud, who had commanded a company in the 106th, he
had enlisted at once in his former acquaintance’s new company in the
124th. His old rank as corporal had been restored to him, and that
evening he had just left the Prince Eugene barracks with his squad on
his way to the left bank, where the entire army was to concentrate,
when a mob collected about his men and stopped them as they were
passing along the boulevard Saint-Martin. The insurgents yelled and
shouted, and evidently were preparing to disarm his little band. With
perfect coolness he told them to let him alone, that he had no business
with them or their affairs; all he wanted was to obey his orders
without harming anybody. Then a cry of glad surprise was heard, and
Maurice, who had chanced to pass that way, threw himself on the other’s
neck and gave him a brotherly hug.
“What, is it you! My sister wrote me about you. And just think, no
later than this very morning I was going to look you up at the war
office!”
Jean’s eyes were dim with big tears of pleasure.
“Ah, my dear lad how glad I am to see you once more! I have been
looking for you, too, but where could a fellow expect to find you in
this confounded great big place?”
To the crowd, continuing their angry muttering, Maurice turned and
said:
“Let me talk to them, citizens! They’re good fellows; I’ll answer for
them.” He took his friend’s hands in his, and lowering his voice:
“You’ll join us, won’t you?”
Jean’s face was the picture of surprise. “How, join you? I don’t
understand.” Then for a moment he listened while Maurice railed against
the government, against the army, raking up old sores and recalling all
their sufferings, telling how at last they were going to be masters,
punish dolts and cowards and preserve the Republic. And as he struggled
to get the problems the other laid before him through his brain, the
tranquil face of the unlettered peasant was clouded with an increasing
sorrow. “Ah, no! ah, no! my boy. I can’t join you if it’s for that fine
work you want me. My captain told me to go with my men to Vaugirard,
and there I’m going. In spite of the devil and his angels I will go
there. That’s natural enough; you ought to know how it is yourself.” He
laughed with frank simplicity and added:
“It’s you who’ll come along with us.”
But Maurice released his hands with an angry gesture of dissent, and
thus they stood for some seconds, face to face, one under the influence
of that madness that was sweeping all Paris off its feet, the malady
that had been bequeathed to them by the crimes and follies of the late
reign, the other strong in his ignorance and practical common sense,
untainted as yet because he had grown up apart from the contaminating
principle, in the land where industry and thrift were honored. They
were brothers, however, none the less; the tie that united them was
strong, and it was a pang to them both when the crowd suddenly surged
forward and parted them.
“_Au revoir_, Maurice!”
“_Au revoir_, Jean!”
It was a regiment, the 79th, debouching from a side street, that had
caused the movement among the crowd, forcing the rioters back to the
sidewalks by the weight of its compact column, closed in mass. There
was some hooting, but no one ventured to bar the way against the
soldier boys, who went by at double time, well under control of their
officers. An opportunity was afforded the little squad of the 124th to
make their escape, and they followed in the wake of the larger body.
“_Au revoir_, Jean!”
“_Au revoir_, Maurice!”
They waved their hands once more in a parting salute, yielding to the
fatality that decreed their separation in that manner, but each none
the less securely seated in the other’s heart.
The extraordinary occurrences of the next and the succeeding days
crowded on the heels of one another in such swift sequence that Maurice
had scarcely time to think. On the morning of the 19th Paris awoke
without a government, more surprised than frightened to learn that a
panic during the night had sent army, ministers, and all the public
service scurrying away to Versailles, and as the weather happened to be
fine on that magnificent March Sunday, Paris stepped unconcernedly down
into the streets to have a look at the barricades. A great white
poster, bearing the signature of the Central Committee and convoking
the people for the communal elections, attracted attention by the
moderation of its language, although much surprise was expressed at
seeing it signed by names so utterly unknown. There can be no doubt
that at this incipient stage of the Commune Paris, in the bitter memory
of what it had endured, in the suspicions by which it was haunted, and
in its unslaked thirst for further fighting, was against Versailles. It
was a condition of absolute anarchy, moreover, the conflict for the
moment being between the mayors and the Central Committee, the former
fruitlessly attempting to introduce measures of conciliation, while the
latter, uncertain as yet to what extent it could rely on the federated
National Guard, continued modestly to lay claim to no higher title than
that of defender of the municipal liberties. The shots fired against
the pacific demonstration in the Place Vendôme, the few corpses whose
blood reddened the pavements, first sent a thrill of terror circulating
through the city. And while these things were going on, while the
insurgents were taking definite possession of the ministries and all
the public buildings, the agitation, rage and alarm prevailing at
Versailles were extreme, the government there hastening to get together
sufficient troops to repel the attack which they felt sure they should
not have to wait for long. The steadiest and most reliable divisions of
the armies of the North and of the Loire were hurried forward. Ten days
sufficed to collect a force of nearly eighty thousand men, and the tide
of returning confidence set in so strongly that on the 2d of April two
divisions opened hostilities by taking from the federates Puteaux and
Courbevoie.
It was not until the day following the events just mentioned that
Maurice, starting out with his battalion to effect the conquest of
Versailles, beheld, amid the throng of misty, feverish memories that
rose to his poor wearied brain, Jean’s melancholy face as he had seen
it last, and seemed to hear the tones of his last mournful _au revoir_.
The military operations of the Versaillese had filled the National
Guard with alarm and indignation; three columns, embracing a total
strength of fifty thousand men, had gone storming that morning through
Bougival and Meudon on their way to seize the monarchical Assembly and
Thiers, the murderer. It was the torrential sortie that had been
demanded with such insistence during the siege, and Maurice asked
himself where he should ever see Jean again unless among the dead lying
on the field of battle down yonder. But it was not long before he knew
the result; his battalion had barely reached the Plateau des Bergères,
on the road to Reuil, when the shells from Mont-Valerien came tumbling
among the ranks. Universal consternation reigned; some had supposed
that the fort was held by their comrades of the Guard, while others
averred that the commander had promised solemnly to withhold his fire.
A wild panic seized upon the men; the battalions broke and rushed back
to Paris fast as their legs would let them, while the head of the
column, diverted by a flanking movement of General Vinoy, was driven
back on Reuil and cut to pieces there.
Then Maurice, who had escaped unharmed from the slaughter, his nerves
still quivering with the fury that had inspired him on the battlefield,
was filled with fresh detestation for that so-called government of law
and order which always allowed itself to be beaten by the Prussians,
and could only muster up a little courage when it came to oppressing
Paris. And the German armies were still there, from Saint-Denis to
Charenton, watching the shameful spectacle of internecine conflict!
Thus, in the fierce longing for vengeance and destruction that animated
him, he could not do otherwise than sanction the first measures of
communistic violence, the building of barricades in the streets and
public squares, the arrest of the archbishop, some priests, and former
officeholders, who were to be held as hostages. The atrocities that
distinguished either side in that horrible conflict were already
beginning to manifest themselves, Versailles shooting the prisoners it
made, Paris retaliating with a decree that for each one of its soldiers
murdered three hostages should forfeit their life. The horror of it,
that fratricidal conflict, that wretched nation completing the work of
destruction by devouring its own children! And the little reason that
remained to Maurice, in the ruin of all the things he had hitherto held
sacred, was quickly dissipated in the whirlwind of blind fury that
swept all before it. In his eyes the Commune was to be the avenger of
all the wrongs they had suffered, the liberator, coming with fire and
sword to purify and punish. He was not quite clear in mind about it
all, but remembered having read how great and flourishing the old free
cities had become, how wealthy provinces had federated and imposed
their law upon the world. If Paris should be victorious he beheld her,
crowned with an aureole of glory, building up a new France, where
liberty and justice should be the watchwords, organizing a new society,
having first swept away the rotten debris of the old. It was true that
when the result of the elections became known he was somewhat surprised
by the strange mixture of moderates, revolutionists, and socialists of
every sect and shade to whom the accomplishment of the great work was
intrusted; he was acquainted with several of the men and knew them to
be of extremely mediocre abilities. Would not the strongest among them
come in collision and neutralize one another amid the clashing ideas
which they represented? But on the day when the ceremony of the
inauguration of the Commune took place before the Hôtel de Ville, amid
the thunder of artillery and trophies and red banners floating in the
air, his boundless hopes again got the better of his fears and he
ceased to doubt. Among the lies of some and the unquestioning faith of
others, the illusion started into life again with renewed vigor, in the
acute crisis of the malady raised to paroxysmal pitch.
During the entire month of April Maurice was on duty in the
neighborhood of Neuilly. The gentle warmth of the early spring had
brought out the blossoms on the lilacs, and the fighting was conducted
among the bright verdure of the gardens; the National Guards came into
the city at night with bouquets of flowers stuck in their muskets. The
troops collected at Versailles were now so numerous as to warrant their
formation in two armies, a first line under the orders of Marshal
MacMahon and a reserve commanded by General Vinoy. The Commune had
nearly a hundred thousand National Guards mobilized and as many more on
the rosters who could be called out at short notice, but fifty thousand
were as many as they ever brought into the field at one time. Day by
day the plan of attack adopted by the Versaillese became more manifest:
after occupying Neuilly they had taken possession of the Château of
Bécon and soon after of Asnières, but these movements were simply to
make the investment more complete, for their intention was to enter the
city by the Point-du-Jour soon as the converging fire from
Mont-Valerien and Fort d’Issy should enable them to carry the rampart
there. Mont-Valerien was theirs already, and they were straining every
nerve to capture Issy, utilizing the works abandoned by the Germans for
the purpose. Since the middle of April the fire of musketry and
artillery had been incessant; at Levallois and Neuilly the fighting
never ceased, the skirmishers blazing away uninterruptedly, by night as
well as by day. Heavy guns, mounted on armored cars, moved to and fro
on the Belt Railway, shelling Asnières over the roofs of Levallois. It
was at Vanves and Issy, however, that the cannonade was fiercest; it
shook the windows of Paris as the siege had done when it was at its
height. And when finally, on the 9th of May, Fort d’Issy was obliged to
succumb and fell into the hands of the Versailles army the defeat of
the Commune was assured, and in their frenzy of panic the leaders
resorted to most detestable measures.
Maurice favored the creation of a Committee of Public Safety. The
warnings of history came to his mind; had not the hour struck for
adopting energetic methods if they wished to save the country? There
was but one of their barbarities that really pained him, and that was
the destruction of the Vendôme column; he reproached himself for the
feeling as being a childish weakness, but his grandfather’s voice still
sounded in his ears repeating the old familiar tales of Marengo,
Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Wagram, the Moskowa—those epic
narratives that thrilled his pulses yet as often as he thought of them.
But that they should demolish the house of the murderer Thiers, that
they should retain the hostages as a guarantee and a menace, was not
that right and just when the Versaillese were unchaining their fury on
Paris, bombarding it, destroying its edifices, slaughtering women and
children with their shells? As he saw the end of his dream approaching
dark thoughts of ruin and destruction filled his mind. If their ideas
of justice and retribution were not to prevail, if they were to be
crushed out of them with their life-blood, then perish the world, swept
away in one of those cosmic upheavals that are the beginning of a new
life. Let Paris sink beneath the waves, let it go up in smoke and
flame, like a gigantic funeral pyre, sooner than let it be again
delivered over to its former state of vice and misery, to that old
vicious social system of abominable injustice. And he dreamed another
dark, terrible dream, the great city reduced to ashes, naught to be
seen on either side the Seine but piles of smoldering ruins, the
festering wound purified and healed with fire, a catastrophe without a
name, such as had never been before, whence should arise a new race.
Wild stories were everywhere circulated, which interested him
intensely, of the mines that were driven under all the quarters of the
city, the barrels of powder with which the catacombs were stuffed, the
monuments and public buildings ready to be blown into the air at a
moment’s notice; and all were connected by electric wires in such a way
that a single spark would suffice to set them off; there were great
stores of inflammable substances, too, especially petroleum, with which
the streets and avenues were to be converted into seething lakes of
flame. The Commune had sworn that should the Versaillese enter the city
not one of them would ever get beyond the barricades that closed the
ends of the streets; the pavements would yawn, the houses would sink in
ruins, Paris would go up in flames, and bury assailants and assailed
under its ashes.
And if Maurice solaced himself with these crazy dreams, it was because
of his secret discontent with the Commune itself. He had lost all
confidence in its members, he felt it was inefficient, drawn this way
and that by so many conflicting elements, losing its head and becoming
purposeless and driveling as it saw the near approach of the peril with
which it was menaced. Of the social reforms it had pledged itself to it
had not been able to accomplish a single one, and it was now quite
certain that it would leave behind it no great work to perpetuate its
name. But what more than all beside was gnawing at its vitals was the
rivalries by which it was distracted, the corroding suspicion and
distrust in which each of its members lived. For some time past many of
them, the more moderate and the timid, had ceased to attend its
sessions. The others shaped their course day by day in accordance with
events, trembling at the idea of a possible dictatorship; they had
reached that point where the factions of revolutionary assemblages
exterminate one another by way of saving the country. Cluzeret had
become suspected, then Dombrowski, and Rossel was about to share their
fate. Delescluze, appointed Civil Delegate at War, could do nothing of
his own volition, notwithstanding his great authority. And thus the
grand social effort that they had had in view wasted itself in the
ever-widening isolation about those men, whose power had become a
nullity, whose actions were the result of their despair.
In Paris there was an increasing feeling of terror. Paris, irritated at
first against Versailles, shivering at the recollection of what it had
suffered during the siege, was now breaking away from the Commune. The
compulsory enrollment, the decree incorporating every man under forty
in the National Guard, had angered the more sedate citizens and been
the means of bringing about a general exodus: men in disguise and
provided with forged papers of Alsatian citizenship made their escape
by way of Saint-Denis; others let themselves down into the moat in the
darkness of the night with ropes and ladders. The wealthy had long
since taken their departure. None of the factories and workshops had
opened their doors; trade and commerce there was none; there was no
employment for labor; the life of enforced idleness went on amid the
alarmed expectancy of the frightful denouement that everyone felt could
not be far away. And the people depended for their daily bread on the
pay of the National Guards, that dole of thirty sous that was paid from
the millions extorted from the Bank of France, the thirty sous for the
sake of which alone many men were wearing the uniform, which had been
one of the primary causes and the _raison d’être_ of the insurrection.
Whole districts were deserted, the shops closed, the house-fronts
lifeless. In the bright May sunshine that flooded the empty streets the
few pedestrians beheld nothing moving save the barbaric display of the
burial of some federates killed in action, the funeral train where no
priest walked, the hearse draped with red flags, followed by a crowd of
men and women bearing bouquets of immortelles. The churches were closed
and did duty each evening as political club-rooms. The revolutionary
journals alone were hawked about the streets; the others had been
suppressed. Great Paris was indeed an unhappy city in those days, what
with its republican sympathies that made it detest the monarchical
Assembly at Versailles and its ever-increasing terror of the Commune,
from which it prayed most fervently to be delivered among all the
grisly stories that were current, the daily arrests of citizens as
hostages, the casks of gunpowder that filled the sewers, where men
patrolled by day and night awaiting the signal to apply the torch.
Maurice, who had never been a drinking man, allowed himself to be
seduced by the too prevalent habit of over-indulgence. It had become a
thing of frequent occurrence with him now, when he was out on picket
duty or had to spend the night in barracks, to take a “pony” of brandy,
and if he took a second it was apt to go to his head in the
alcohol-laden atmosphere that he was forced to breathe. It had become
epidemic, that chronic drunkenness, among those men with whom bread was
scarce and who could have all the brandy they wanted by asking for it.
Toward evening on Sunday, the 21st of May, Maurice came home drunk, for
the first time in his life, to his room in the Rue des Orties, where he
was in the habit of sleeping occasionally. He had been at Neuilly again
that day, blazing away at the enemy and taking a nip now and then with
the comrades, to see if it would not relieve the terrible fatigue from
which he was suffering. Then, with a light head and heavy legs, he came
and threw himself on the bed in his little chamber; it must have been
through force of instinct, for he could never remember how he got
there. And it was not until the following morning, when the sun was
high in the heavens, that he awoke, aroused by the ringing of the alarm
bells, the blare of trumpets and beating of drums. During the night the
Versaillese, finding a gate undefended, had effected an unresisted
entrance at the Point-du-Jour.
When he had thrown on his clothes and hastened down into the street,
his musket slung across his shoulder by the strap, a band of frightened
soldiers whom he fell in with at the _mairie_ of the arrondissement
related to him the occurrences of the night, in the midst of a
confusion such that at first he had hard work to understand. Fort
d’Issy and the great battery at Montretout, seconded by Mont Valerien,
for the last ten days had been battering the rampart at the
Point-du-Jour, as a consequence of which the Saint-Cloud gate was no
longer tenable and an assault had been ordered for the following
morning, the 22d; but someone who chanced to pass that way at about
five o’clock perceived that the gate was unprotected and immediately
notified the guards in the trenches, who were not more than fifty yards
away. Two companies of the 37th regiment of regulars were the first to
enter the city, and were quickly followed by the entire 4th corps under
General Douay. All night long the troops were pouring in in an
uninterrupted stream. At seven o’clock Verge’s division marched down to
the bridge at Grenelle, crossed, and pushed on to the Trocadero. At
nine General Clinchamp was master of Passy and la Muette. At three
o’clock in the morning the 1st corps had pitched its tents in the Bois
de Boulogne, while at about the same hour Bruat’s division was passing
the Seine to seize the Sèvres gate and facilitate the movement of the
2d Corps, General de Cissey’s, which occupied the district of Grenelle
an hour later. The Versailles army, therefore, on the morning of the
22d, was master of the Trocadero and the Château of la Muette on the
right bank, and of Grenelle on the left; and great was the rage and
consternation that prevailed among the Communists, who were already
accusing one another of treason, frantic at the thought of their
inevitable defeat.
When Maurice at last understood the condition of affairs his first
thought was that the end had come, that all left him was to go forth
and meet his death. But the tocsin was pealing, drums were beating,
women and children, even, were working on the barricades, the streets
were alive with the stir and bustle of the battalions hurrying to
assume the positions assigned them in the coming conflict. By midday it
was seen that the Versaillese were remaining quiet in their new
positions, and then fresh courage returned to the hearts of the
soldiers of the Commune, who were resolved to conquer or die. The
enemy’s army, which they had feared to see in possession of the
Tuileries by that time, profiting by the stern lessons of experience
and imitating the prudent tactics of the Prussians, conducted its
operations with the utmost caution. The Committee of Public Safety and
Delescluze, Delegate at War, directed the defense from their quarters
in the Hôtel de Ville. It was reported that a last proposal for a
peaceable arrangement had been rejected by them with disdain. That
served to inspire the men with still more courage, the triumph of Paris
was assured, the resistance would be as unyielding as the attack was
vindictive, in the implacable hate, swollen by lies and cruelties, that
inflamed the heart of either army. And that day was spent by Maurice in
the quarters of the Champ de Mars and the Invalides, firing and falling
back slowly from street to street. He had not been able to find his
battalion; he fought in the ranks with comrades who were strangers to
him, accompanying them in their march to the left bank without taking
heed whither they were going. About four o’clock they had a furious
conflict behind a barricade that had been thrown across the Rue de
l’Université, where it comes out on the Esplanade, and it was not until
twilight that they abandoned it on learning that Bruat’s division,
stealing up along the _quai_, had seized the Corps Législatif. They had
a narrow escape from capture, and it was with great difficulty that
they managed to reach the Rue de Lille after a long circuit through the
Rue Saint-Dominique and the Rue Bellechasse. At the close of that day
the army of Versailles occupied a line which, beginning at the Vanves
gate, led past the Corps Législatif, the Palace of the Élysée, St.
Augustine’s Church, the Lazare station, and ended at the Asnières gate.
The next day, Tuesday, the 23d, was warm and bright, and a terrible day
it was for Maurice. The few hundred federates with whom he was, and in
whose ranks were men of many different battalions, were charged with
the defense of the entire quartier, from the _quai_ to the Rue
Saint-Dominique. Most of them had bivouacked in the gardens of the
great mansions that line the Rue de Lille; he had had an unbroken
night’s rest on a grass-plot at one side of the Palace of the Legion of
Honor. It was his belief that soon as it was light enough the troops
would move out from their shelter behind the Corps Législatif and force
them back upon the strong barricades in the Rue du Bac, but hour after
hour passed and there was no sign of an attack. There was only some
desultory firing at long range between parties posted at either end of
the streets. The Versaillese, who were not desirous of attempting a
direct attack on the front of the formidable fortress into which the
insurgents had converted the terrace of the Tuileries, developed their
plan of action with great circumspection; two strong columns were sent
out to right and left that, skirting the ramparts, should first seize
Montmartre and the Observatory and then, wheeling inward, swoop down on
the central quarters, surrounding them and capturing all they
contained, as a shoal of fish is captured in the meshes of a gigantic
net. About two o’clock Maurice heard that the tricolor was floating
over Montmartre: the great battery of the Moulin de la Galette had
succumbed to the combined attack of three army corps, which hurled
their battalions simultaneously on the northern and western faces of
the butte through the Rues Lepic, des Saules and du Mont-Cenis; then
the waves of the victorious troops had poured back on Paris, carrying
the Place Saint-Georges, Notre-Dame de Lorette, the _mairie_ in the Rue
Drouot and the new Opera House, while on the left bank the turning
movement, starting from the cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, had reached the
Place d’Enfer and the Horse Market. These tidings of the rapid progress
of the hostile army were received by the communards with mingled
feelings of rage and terror amounting almost to stupefaction. What,
Montmartre carried in two hours; Montmartre, the glorious, the
impregnable citadel of the insurrection! Maurice saw that the ranks
were thinning about him; trembling soldiers, fearing the fate that was
in store for them should they be caught, were slinking furtively away
to look for a place where they might wash the powder grime from hands
and face and exchange their uniform for a blouse. There was a rumor
that the enemy were making ready to attack the Croix-Rouge and take
their position in flank. By this time the barricades in the Rues
Martignac and Bellechasse had been carried, the red-legs were beginning
to make their appearance at the end of the Rue de Lille, and soon all
that remained was a little band of fanatics and men with the courage of
their opinions, Maurice and some fifty more, who were resolved to sell
their lives dearly, killing as many as they could of those Versaillese,
who treated the federates like thieves and murderers, dragging away the
prisoners they made and shooting them in the rear of the line of
battle. Their bitter animosity had broadened and deepened since the
days before; it was war to the knife between those rebels dying for an
idea and that army, inflamed with reactionary passions and irritated
that it was kept so long in the field.
About five o’clock, as Maurice and his companions were finally falling
back to seek the shelter of the barricades in the Rue du Bac,
descending the Rue de Lille and pausing at every moment to fire another
shot, he suddenly beheld volumes of dense black smoke pouring from an
open window in the Palace of the Legion of Honor. It was the first fire
kindled in Paris, and in the furious insanity that possessed him it
gave him a fierce delight. The hour had struck; let the whole city go
up in flame, let its people be cleansed by the fiery purification! But
a sight that he saw presently filled him with surprise: a band of five
or six men came hurrying out of the building, headed by a tall varlet
in whom he recognized Chouteau, his former comrade in the squad of the
106th. He had seen him once before, after the 18th of March, wearing a
gold-laced _kepi_; he seemed by his bedizened uniform to have risen in
rank, was probably on the staff of some one of the many generals who
were never seen where there was fighting going on. He remembered the
account somebody had given him of that fellow Chouteau, of his
quartering himself in the Palace of the Legion of Honor and living
there, guzzling and swilling, in company with a mistress, wallowing
with his boots on in the great luxurious beds, smashing the plate-glass
mirrors with shots from his revolver, merely for the amusement there
was in it. It was even asserted that the woman left the building every
morning in one of the state carriages, under pretense of going to the
Halles for her day’s marketing, carrying off with her great bundles of
linen, clocks, and even articles of furniture, the fruit of their
thieveries. And Maurice, as he watched him running away with his men,
carrying a bucket of petroleum on his arm, experienced a sickening
sensation of doubt and felt his faith beginning to waver. How could the
terrible work they were engaged in be good, when men like that were the
workmen?
Hours passed, and still he fought on, but with a bitter feeling of
distress, with no other wish than that he might die. If he had erred,
let him at least atone for his error with his blood! The barricade
across the Rue de Lille, near its intersection with the Rue du Bac, was
a formidable one, composed of bags and casks filled with earth and
faced by a deep ditch. He and a scant dozen of other federates were its
only defenders, resting in a semi-recumbent position on the ground,
infallibly causing every soldier who exposed himself to bite the dust.
He lay there, without even changing his position, until nightfall,
using up his cartridges in silence, in the dogged sullenness of his
despair. The dense clouds of smoke from the Palace of the Legion of
Honor were billowing upward in denser masses, the flames
undistinguishable as yet in the dying daylight, and he watched the
fantastic, changing forms they took as the wind whirled them downward
to the street. Another fire had broken out in an hotel not far away.
And all at once a comrade came running up to tell him that the enemy,
not daring to advance along the street, were making a way for
themselves through the houses and gardens, breaking down the walls with
picks. The end was close at hand; they might come out in the rear of
the barricade at any moment. A shot having been fired from an upper
window of a house on the corner, he saw Chouteau and his gang, with
their petroleum and their lighted torch, rush with frantic speed to the
buildings on either side and climb the stairs, and half an hour later,
in the increasing darkness, the entire square was in flames, while he,
still prone on the ground behind his shelter, availed himself of the
vivid light to pick off any venturesome soldier who stepped from his
protecting doorway into the narrow street.
How long did Maurice keep on firing? He could not tell; he had lost all
consciousness of time and place. It might be nine o’clock, or ten,
perhaps. He continued to load and fire; his condition of hopelessness
and gloom was pitiable; death seemed to him long in coming. The
detestable work he was engaged in gave him now a sensation of nausea,
as the fumes of the wine he has drunk rise and nauseate the drunkard.
An intense heat began to beat on him from the houses that were burning
on every side—an air that scorched and asphyxiated. The carrefour, with
the barricades that closed it in, was become an intrenched camp,
guarded by the roaring flames that rose on every side and sent down
showers of sparks. Those were the orders, were they not? to fire the
adjacent houses before they abandoned the barricades, arrest the
progress of the troops by an impassable sea of flame, burn Paris in the
face of the enemy advancing to take possession of it. And presently he
became aware that the houses in the Rue du Bac were not the only ones
that were devoted to destruction; looking behind him he beheld the
whole sky suffused with a bright, ruddy glow; he heard an ominous roar
in the distance, as if all Paris were bursting into conflagration.
Chouteau was no longer to be seen; he had long since fled to save his
skin from the bullets. His comrades, too, even those most zealous in
the cause, had one by one stolen away, affrighted at the approaching
prospect of being outflanked. At last he was left alone, stretched at
length between two sand bags, his every faculty bent on defending the
front of the barricade, when the soldiers, who had made their way
through the gardens in the middle of the block, emerged from a house in
the Rue du Bac and pounced on him from the rear.
For two whole days, in the fevered excitement of the supreme conflict,
Maurice had not once thought of Jean, nor had Jean, since he entered
Paris with his regiment, which had been assigned to Bruat’s division,
for a single moment remembered Maurice. The day before his duties had
kept him in the neighborhood of the Champ de Mars and the Esplanade of
the Invalides, and on this day he had remained in the Place du
Palais-Bourbon until nearly noon, when the troops were sent forward to
clean out the barricades of the quartier, as far as the Rue des
Saints-Pères. A feeling of deep exasperation against the rioters had
gradually taken possession of him, usually so calm and self-contained,
as it had of all his comrades, whose ardent wish it was to be allowed
to go home and rest after so many months of fatigue. But of all the
atrocities of the Commune that stirred his placid nature and made him
forgetful even of his tenderest affections, there were none that
angered him as did those conflagrations. What, burn houses, set fire to
palaces, and simply because they had lost the battle! Only robbers and
murderers were capable of such work as that. And he who but the day
before had sorrowed over the summary executions of the insurgents was
now like a madman, ready to rend and tear, yelling, shouting, his eyes
starting from their sockets.
Jean burst like a hurricane into the Rue du Bac with the few men of his
squad. At first he could distinguish no one; he thought the barricade
had been abandoned. Then, looking more closely, he perceived a
communard extended on the ground between two sand bags; he stirred, he
brought his piece to the shoulder, was about to discharge it down the
Rue du Bac. And impelled by blind fate, Jean rushed upon the man and
thrust his bayonet through him, nailing him to the barricade.
Maurice had not had time to turn. He gave a cry and raised his head.
The blinding light of the burning buildings fell full on their faces.
“O Jean, dear old boy, is it you?”
To die, that was what he wished, what he had been longing for. But to
die by his brother’s hand, ah! the cup was too bitter; the thought of
death no longer smiled on him.
“Is it you, Jean, old friend?”
Jean, sobered by the terrible shock, looked at him with wild eyes. They
were alone; the other soldiers had gone in pursuit of the fugitives.
About them the conflagrations roared and crackled and blazed up higher
than before; great sheets of white flame poured from the windows, while
from within came the crash of falling ceilings. And Jean cast himself
on the ground at Maurice’s side, sobbing, feeling him, trying to raise
him to see if he might not yet be saved.
“My boy, oh! my poor, poor boy!”