When at about nine o’clock the train from Sedan, after innumerable
delays along the way, rolled into the Saint-Denis station, the sky to
the south was lit up by a fiery glow as if all Paris was burning. The
light had increased with the growing darkness, and now it filled the
horizon, climbing constantly higher up the heavens and tingeing with
blood-red hues some clouds, that lay off to the eastward in the gloom
which the contrast rendered more opaque than ever.
The travelers alighted, Henriette among the first, alarmed by the glare
they had beheld from the windows of the cars as they rushed onward
across the darkling fields. The soldiers of a Prussian detachment,
moreover, that had been sent to occupy the station, went through the
train and compelled the passengers to leave it, while two of their
number, stationed on the platform, shouted in guttural French:
“Paris is burning. All out here! this train goes no further. Paris is
burning, Paris is burning!”
Henriette experienced a terrible shock. _Mon Dieu!_ was she too late,
then? Receiving no reply from Maurice to her two last letters, the
alarming news from Paris had filled her with such mortal terror that
she determined to leave Remilly and come and try to find her brother in
the great city. For months past her life at Uncle Fouchard’s had been a
melancholy one; the troops occupying the village and the surrounding
country had become harsher and more exacting as the resistance of Paris
was protracted, and now that peace was declared and the regiments were
stringing along the roads, one by one, on their way home to Germany,
the country and the cities through which they passed were taxed to
their utmost to feed the hungry soldiers. The morning when she arose at
daybreak to go and take the train at Sedan, looking out into the
courtyard of the farmhouse she had seen a body of cavalry who had slept
there all night, scattered promiscuously on the bare ground, wrapped in
their long cloaks. They were so numerous that the earth was hidden by
them. Then, at the shrill summons of a trumpet call, all had risen to
their feet, silent, draped in the folds of those long mantles, and in
such serried, close array that she involuntarily thought of the graves
of a battlefield opening and giving up their dead at the call of the
last trump. And here again at Saint-Denis she encountered the
Prussians, and it was from Prussian lips that came that cry which
caused her such distress:
“All out here! this train goes no further. Paris is burning!”
Henriette, her little satchel in her hand, rushed distractedly up to
the men in quest of information. There had been heavy fighting in Paris
for the last two days, they told her, the railway had been destroyed,
the Germans were watching the course of events. But she insisted on
pursuing her journey at every risk, and catching sight upon the
platform of the officer in command of the detachment detailed to guard
the station, she hurried up to him.
“Sir, I am terribly distressed about my brother, and am trying to get
to him. I entreat you, furnish me with the means to reach Paris.” The
light from a gas jet fell full on the captain’s face she stopped in
surprise. “What, Otto, is it you! Oh, _mon Dieu_, be good to me, since
chance has once more brought us together!”
It was Otto Gunther, the cousin, as stiff and ceremonious as ever,
tight-buttoned in his Guard’s uniform, the picture of a narrow-minded
martinet. At first he failed to recognize the little, thin,
insignificant-looking woman, with the handsome light hair and the pale,
gentle face; it was only by the brave, honest look that filled her eyes
that he finally remembered her. His only answer was a slight shrug of
the shoulders.
“You know I have a brother in the army,” Henriette eagerly went on. “He
is in Paris; I fear he has allowed himself to become mixed up with this
horrible conflict. O Otto, I beseech you, assist me to continue my
journey.”
At last he condescended to speak. “But I can do nothing to help you;
really I cannot. There have been no trains running since yesterday; I
believe the rails have been torn up over by the ramparts somewhere. And
I have neither a horse and carriage nor a man to guide you at my
disposal.”
She looked him in the face with a low, stifled murmur of pain and
sorrow to behold him thus obdurate. “Oh, you will do nothing to aid me.
My God, to whom then can I turn!”
It was an unlikely story for one of those Prussians to tell, whose
hosts were everywhere all-powerful, who had the city at their beck and
call, could have requisitioned a hundred carriages and brought a
thousand horses from their stables. And he denied her prayer with the
haughty air of a victor who has made it a law to himself not to
interfere with the concerns of the vanquished, lest thereby he might
defile himself and tarnish the luster of his new-won laurels.
“At all events,” continued Henriette, “you know what is going on in the
city; you won’t refuse to tell me that much.”
He gave a smile, so faint as scarce to be perceptible. “Paris is
burning. Look! come this way, you can see more clearly.”
Leaving the station, he preceded her along the track for a hundred
steps or so until they came to an iron foot-bridge that spanned the
road. When they had climbed the narrow stairs and reached the floor of
the structure, resting their elbows on the railing, they beheld the
broad level plain outstretched before them, at the foot of the slope of
the embankment.
“You see, Paris is burning.”
It was in the neighborhood of ten o’clock. The fierce red glare that
lit the southern sky was ever mounting higher. The blood-red clouds had
disappeared from where they had floated in the east; the zenith was
like a great inverted bowl of inky blackness, across which ran the
reflections of the distant flames. The horizon was one unbroken line of
fire, but to the right they could distinguish spots where the
conflagration was raging with greater fury, sending up great spires and
pinnacles of flame, of the most vivid scarlet, to pierce the dense
opacity above, amid billowing clouds of smoke. It was like the burning
of some great forest, where the fire bridges intervening space, and
leaps from tree to tree; one would have said the very earth must be
calcined and reduced to ashes beneath the heat of Paris’ gigantic
funeral pyre.
“Look,” said Otto, “that eminence that you see profiled in black
against the red background is Montmartre. There on the left, at
Belleville and la Villette, there has not been a house burned yet; it
must be they are selecting the districts of the wealthy for their work;
and it spreads, it spreads. Look! there is another conflagration
breaking out; watch the flames there to the right, how they seethe and
rise and fall; observe the shifting tints of the vapors that rise from
the blazing furnace. And others, and others still; the heavens are on
fire!”
He did not raise his voice or manifest any sign of feeling, and it
froze Henriette’s blood that a human being could stand by and witness
such a spectacle unmoved. Ah, that those Prussians should be there to
see that sight! She saw an insult in his studied calmness, in the faint
smile that played upon his lips, as if he had long foreseen and been
watching for that unparalleled disaster. So, Paris was burning then at
last, Paris, upon whose monuments the German shells had scarce been
able to inflict more than a scratch! and he was there to see it burn,
and in the spectacle found compensation for all his grievances, the
inordinate length to which the siege had been protracted, the bitter,
freezing weather, the difficulties they had surmounted only to see them
present themselves anew under some other shape, the toil and trouble
they had had in mounting their heavy guns, while all the time Germany
from behind was reproaching them with their dilatoriness. Nothing in
all the glory of their victory, neither the ceded provinces nor the
indemnity of five milliards, appealed to him so strongly as did that
sight of Paris, in a fit of furious madness, immolating herself and
going up in smoke and flame on that beautiful spring night.
“Ah, it was sure to come,” he added in a lower voice. “Fine work, my
masters!”
It seemed to Henriette as if her heart would break in presence of that
dire catastrophe. Her personal grief was lost to sight for some
minutes, swallowed up in the great drama of a people’s atonement that
was being enacted before her eyes. The thought of the lives that would
be sacrificed to the devouring flames, the sight of the great capital
blazing on the horizon, emitting the infernal light of the cities that
were accursed and smitten for their iniquity, elicited from her an
involuntary cry of anguish. She clasped her hands, asking:
“Oh, merciful Father, of what have we been guilty that we should be
punished thus?”
Otto raised his arm in an oratorical attitude. He was on the point of
speaking, with the stern, cold-blooded vehemence of the military bigot
who has ever a quotation from Holy Writ at his tongue’s end, but
glancing at the young woman, the look he encountered from her candid,
gentle eyes checked him. Besides, his gesture had spoken for him; it
told his hatred for the nation, his conviction that he was in France to
mete out justice, delegated by the God of Armies, to chastise a
perverse and stiff-necked generation. Paris was burning off there on
the horizon in expiation of its centuries of dissolute life, of its
heaped-up measure of crime and lust. Once again the German race were to
be the saviors of the world, were to purge Europe of the remnant of
Latin corruption. He let his arm fall to his side and simply said:
“It is the end of all. There is another quartier doomed, for see, a
fresh fire has broken out there to the right. In that direction, that
line of flame that creeps onward like a stream of lava—”
Neither spoke for a long time; an awed silence rested on them. The
great waves of flame continued to ascend, sending up streamers and
ribbons of vivid light high into the heavens. Beneath the sea of fire
was every moment extending its boundaries, a tossing, stormy, burning
ocean, whence now arose dense clouds of smoke that collected over the
city in a huge pall of a somber coppery hue, which was wafted slowly
athwart the blackness of the night, streaking the vault of heaven with
its accursed rain of ashes and of soot.
Henriette started as if awaking from an evil dream, and, the thought of
her brother flowing in again upon her mind, once more became a
supplicant.
“Can you do nothing for me? won’t you assist me to get to Paris?”
With his former air of unconcern Otto again raised his eyes to the
horizon, smiling vaguely.
“What would be the use? since to-morrow morning the city will be a pile
of ruins!”
And that was all; she left the bridge, without even bidding him
good-by, flying, she knew not whither, with her little satchel, while
he remained yet a long time at his post of observation, a motionless
figure, rigid and erect, lost in the darkness of the night, feasting
his eyes on the spectacle of that Babylon in flames.
Almost the first person that Henriette encountered on emerging from the
station was a stout lady who was chaffering with a hackman over his
charge for driving her to the Rue Richelieu in Paris, and the young
woman pleaded so touchingly, with tears in her eyes, that finally the
lady consented to let her occupy a seat in the carriage. The driver, a
little swarthy man, whipped up his horse and did not open his lips once
during the ride, but the stout lady was extremely loquacious, telling
how she had left the city the day but one before after tightly locking
and bolting her shop, but had been so imprudent as to leave some
valuable papers behind, hidden in a hole in the wall; hence her mind
had been occupied by one engrossing thought for the two hours that the
city had been burning, how she might return and snatch her property
from the flames. The sleepy guards at the barrier allowed the carriage
to pass without much difficulty, the worthy lady allaying their
scruples with a fib, telling them she was bringing back her niece with
her to Paris to assist in nursing her husband, who had been wounded by
the Versaillese. It was not until they commenced to make their way
along the paved streets that they encountered serious obstacles; they
were obliged at every moment to turn out in order to avoid the
barricades that were erected across the roadway, and when at last they
reached the boulevard Poissonière the driver declared he would go no
further. The two women were therefore forced to continue their way on
foot, through the Rue du Sentier, the Rue des Jeûneurs, and all the
circumscribing region of the Bourse. As they approached the
fortifications the blazing sky had made their way as bright before them
as if it had been broad day; now they were surprised by the deserted
and tranquil condition of the streets, where the only sound that
disturbed the stillness was a dull, distant roar. In the vicinity of
the Bourse, however, they were alarmed by the sound of musketry; they
slipped along with great caution, hugging the walls. On reaching the
Rue Richelieu and finding her shop had not been disturbed, the stout
lady was so overjoyed that she insisted on seeing her traveling
companion safely housed; they struck through the Rue du Hazard, the Rue
Saint-Anne, and finally reached the Rue des Orties. Some federates,
whose battalion was still holding the Rue Saint-Anne, attempted to
prevent them from passing. It was four o’clock and already quite light
when Henriette, exhausted by the fatigue of her long day and the stress
of her emotions, reached the old house in the Rue des Orties and found
the door standing open. Climbing the dark, narrow staircase, she turned
to the left and discovered behind a door a ladder that led upward
toward the roof.
Maurice, meantime, behind the barricade in the Rue du Bac, had
succeeded in raising himself to his knees, and Jean’s heart throbbed
with a wild, tumultuous hope, for he believed he had pinned his friend
to the earth.
“Oh, my little one, are you alive still? is that great happiness in
store for me, brute that I am? Wait a moment, let me see.”
He examined the wound with great tenderness by the light of the burning
buildings. The bayonet had gone through the right arm near the
shoulder, but a more serious part of the business was that it had
afterward entered the body between two of the ribs and probably touched
the lung. Still, the wounded man breathed without much apparent
difficulty, but the right arm hung useless at his side.
“Poor old boy, don’t grieve! We shall have time to say good-by to each
other, and it is better thus, you see; I am glad to have done with it
all. You have done enough for me to make up for this, for I should have
died long ago in some ditch, even as I am dying now, had it not been
for you.”
But Jean, hearing him speak thus, again gave way to an outburst of
violent grief.
“Hush, hush! Twice you saved me from the clutches of the Prussians. We
were quits; it was my turn to devote my life, and instead of that I
have slain you. Ah, _tonnerre de Dieu!_ I must have been drunk not to
recognize you; yes, drunk as a hog from glutting myself with blood.”
Tears streamed from his eyes at the recollection of their last parting,
down there, at Remilly, when they embraced, asking themselves if they
should ever meet again, and how, under what circumstances of sorrow or
of gladness. It was nothing, then, that they had passed toilsome days
and sleepless nights together, with death staring them in the face? It
was to bring them to this abominable thing, to this senseless,
atrocious fratricide, that their hearts had been fused in the crucible
of those weeks of suffering endured in common? No, no, it could not be;
he turned in horror from the thought.
“Let’s see what I can do, little one; I must save you.”
The first thing to be done was to remove him to a place of safety, for
the troops dispatched the wounded Communists wherever they found them.
They were alone, fortunately; there was not a minute to lose. He first
ripped the sleeve from wrist to shoulder with his knife, then took off
the uniform coat. Some blood flowed; he made haste to bandage the arm
securely with strips that he tore from the lining of the garment for
the purpose. After that he staunched as well as he could the wound in
the side and fastened the injured arm over it, He luckily had a bit of
cord in his pocket, which he knotted tightly around the primitive
dressing, thus assuring the immobility of the injured parts and
preventing hemorrhage.
“Can you walk?”
“Yes, I think so.”
But he did not dare to take him through the streets thus, in his shirt
sleeves. Remembering to have seen a dead soldier lying in an adjacent
street, he hurried off and presently came back with a capote and a
_kepi_. He threw the greatcoat over his friend’s shoulders and assisted
him to slip his uninjured arm into the left sleeve. Then, when he had
put the _kepi_ on his head:
“There, now you are one of us—where are we to go?”
That was the question. His reviving hope and courage were suddenly
damped by a horrible uncertainty. Where were they to look for a shelter
that gave promise of security? the troops were searching the houses,
were shooting every Communist they took with arms in his hands. And in
addition to that, neither of them knew a soul in that portion of the
city to whom they might apply for succor and refuge; not a place where
they might hide their heads.
“The best thing to do would be to go home where I live,” said Maurice.
“The house is out of the way; no one will ever think of visiting it.
But it is in the Rue des Orties, on the other side of the river.”
Jean gave vent to a muttered oath in his irresolution and despair.
“_Nom de Dieu!_ What are we to do?”
It was useless to think of attempting to pass the Pont Royal, which
could not have been more brilliantly illuminated if the noonday sun had
been shining on it. At every moment shots were heard coming from either
bank of the river. Besides that, the blazing Tuileries lay directly in
their path, and the Louvre, guarded and barricaded, would be an
insurmountable obstacle.
“That ends it, then; there’s no way open,” said Jean, who had spent six
months in Paris on his return from the Italian campaign.
An idea suddenly flashed across his brain. There had formerly been a
place a little below the Pont Royal where small boats were kept for
hire; if the boats were there still they would make the venture. The
route was a long and dangerous one, but they had no choice, and,
further, they must act with decision.
“See here, little one, we’re going to clear out from here; the locality
isn’t healthy. I’ll manufacture an excuse for my lieutenant; I’ll tell
him the communards took me prisoner and I got away.”
Taking his unhurt arm he sustained him for the short distance they had
to traverse along the Rue du Bac, where the tall houses on either hand
were now ablaze from cellar to garret, like huge torches. The burning
cinders fell on them in showers, the heat was so intense that the hair
on their head and face was singed, and when they came out on the _quai_
they stood for a moment dazed and blinded by the terrific light of the
conflagrations, rearing their tall crests heavenward, on either side
the Seine.
“One wouldn’t need a candle to go to bed by here,” grumbled Jean, with
whose plans the illumination promised to interfere. And it was only
when he had helped Maurice down the steps to the left and a little way
down stream from the bridge that he felt somewhat easy in mind. There
was a clump of tall trees standing on the bank of the stream, whose
shadow gave them a measure of security. For near a quarter of an hour
the dark forms moving to and fro on the opposite _quai_ kept them in a
fever of apprehension. There was firing, a scream was heard, succeeded
by a loud splash, and the bosom of the river was disturbed. The bridge
was evidently guarded.
“Suppose we pass the night in that shed?” suggested Maurice, pointing
to the wooden structure that served the boatman as an office.
“Yes, and get pinched to-morrow morning!”
Jean was still harboring his idea. He had found quite a flotilla of
small boats there, but they were all securely fastened with chains; how
was he to get one loose and secure a pair of oars? At last he
discovered two oars that had been thrown aside as useless; he succeeded
in forcing a padlock, and when he had stowed Maurice away in the bow,
shoved off and allowed the boat to drift with the current, cautiously
hugging the shore and keeping in the shadow of the bathing-houses.
Neither of them spoke a word, horror-stricken as they were by the
baleful spectacle that presented itself to their vision. As they
floated down the stream and their horizon widened the enormity of the
terrible sight increased, and when they reached the bridge of Solferino
a single glance sufficed to embrace both the blazing _quais_.
On their left the palace of the Tuileries was burning. It was not yet
dark when the Communists had fired the two extremities of the
structure, the Pavilion de Flore and the Pavilion de Marsan, and with
rapid strides the flames had gained the Pavilion de l’Horloge in the
central portion, beneath which, in the Salle des Marechaux, a mine had
been prepared by stacking up casks of powder. At that moment the
intervening buildings were belching from their shattered windows dense
volumes of reddish smoke, streaked with long ribbons of blue flame. The
roofs, yawning as does the earth in regions where volcanic agencies
prevail, were seamed with great cracks through which the raging sea of
fire beneath was visible. But the grandest, saddest spectacle of all
was that afforded by the Pavilion de Flore, to which the torch had been
earliest applied and which was ablaze from its foundation to its lofty
summit, burning with a deep, fierce roar that could be heard far away.
The petroleum with which the floors and hangings had been soaked gave
the flames an intensity such that the ironwork of the balconies was
seen to twist and writhe in the convolutions of a serpent, and the tall
monumental chimneys, with their elaborate carvings, glowed with the
fervor of live coals.
Then, still on their left, were, first, the Chancellerie of the Legion
of Honor, which was fired at five o’clock in the afternoon and had been
burning nearly seven hours, and next, the Palace of the Council of
State, a huge rectangular structure of stone, which was spouting
torrents of fire from every orifice in each of its two colonnaded
stories. The four structures surrounding the great central court had
all caught at the same moment, and the petroleum, which here also had
been distributed by the barrelful, had poured down the four grand
staircases at the four corners of the building in rivers of hellfire.
On the facade that faced the river the black line of the mansard was
profiled distinctly against the ruddy sky, amid the red tongues that
rose to lick its base, while colonnades, entablatures, friezes,
carvings, all stood out with startling vividness in the blinding,
shimmering glow. So great was the energy of the fire, so terrible its
propulsive force, that the colossal structure was in some sort raised
bodily from the earth, trembling and rumbling on its foundations,
preserving intact only its four massive walls, in the fierce eruption
that hurled its heavy zinc roof high in air. Then, close at one side
were the d’Orsay barracks, which burned with a flame that seemed to
pierce the heavens, so purely white and so unwavering that it was like
a tower of light. And finally, back from the river, were still other
fires, the seven houses in the Rue du Bac, the twenty-two houses in the
Rue de Lille, helping to tinge the sky a deeper crimson, profiling
their flames on other flames, in a blood-red ocean that seemed to have
no end.
Jean murmured in awed tone:
“Did ever mortal man look on the like of this! the very river is on
fire.”
Their boat seemed to be sailing on the bosom of an incandescent stream.
As the dancing lights of the mighty conflagrations were caught by the
ripples of the current the Seine seemed to be pouring down torrents of
living coals; flashes of intensest crimson played fitfully across its
surface, the blazing brands fell in showers into the water and were
extinguished with a hiss. And ever they floated downward with the tide
on the bosom of that blood-red stream, between the blazing palaces on
either hand, like wayfarers in some accursed city, doomed to
destruction and burning on the banks of a river of molten lava.
“Ah!” exclaimed Maurice, with a fresh access of madness at the sight of
the havoc he had longed for, “let it burn, let it all go up in smoke!”
But Jean silenced him with a terrified gesture, as if he feared such
blasphemy might bring them evil. Where could a young man whom he loved
so fondly, so delicately nurtured, so well informed, have picked up
such ideas? And he applied himself more vigorously to the oars, for
they had now passed the bridge of Solferino and were come out into a
wide open space of water. The light was so intense that the river was
illuminated as by the noonday sun when it stands vertically above men’s
heads and casts no shadow. The most minute objects, such as the eddies
in the stream, the stones piled on the banks, the small trees along the
_quais_, stood out before their vision with wonderful distinctness. The
bridges, too, were particularly noticeable in their dazzling whiteness,
and so clearly defined that they could have counted every stone; they
had the appearance of narrow gangways thrown across the fiery stream to
connect one conflagration with the other. Amid the roar of the flames
and the general clamor a loud crash occasionally announced the fall of
some stately edifice. Dense clouds of soot hung in the air and settled
everywhere, the wind brought odors of pestilence on its wings. And
another horror was that Paris, those more distant quarters of the city
that lay back from the banks of the Seine, had ceased to exist for
them. To right and left of the conflagration that raged with such
fierce resplendency was an unfathomable gulf of blackness; all that
presented itself to their strained gaze was a vast waste of shadow, an
empty void, as if the devouring element had reached the utmost limits
of the city and all Paris were swallowed up in everlasting night. And
the heavens, too, were dead and lifeless; the flames rose so high that
they extinguished the stars.
Maurice, who was becoming delirious, laughed wildly.
“High carnival at the Consoil d’Etat and at the Tuileries to-night!
They have illuminated the facades, women are dancing beneath the
sparkling chandeliers. Ah, dance, dance and be merry, in your smoking
petticoats, with your chignons ablaze—”
And he drew a picture of the feasts of Sodom and Gomorrah, the music,
the lights, the flowers, the unmentionable orgies of lust and
drunkenness, until the candles on the walls blushed at the
shamelessness of the display and fired the palaces that sheltered such
depravity. Suddenly there was a terrific explosion. The fire,
approaching from either extremity of the Tuileries, had reached the
Salle des Marechaux, the casks of powder caught, the Pavilion de
l’Horloge was blown into the air with the violence of a powder mill. A
column of flame mounted high in the heavens, and spreading, expanded in
a great fiery plume on the inky blackness of the sky, the crowning
display of the horrid _fete_.
“Bravo!” exclaimed Maurice, as at the end of the play, when the lights
are extinguished and darkness settles on the stage.
Again Jean, in stammering, disconnected sentences, besought him to be
quiet. No, no, it was not right to wish evils to anyone! And if they
invoked destruction, would not they themselves perish in the general
ruin? His sole desire was to find a landing place so that he might no
longer have that horrid spectacle before his eyes. He considered it
best not to attempt to land at the Pont de la Concorde, but, rounding
the elbow of the Seine, pulled on until they reached the Quai de la
Conférence, and even at that critical moment, instead of shoving the
skiff out into the stream to take its chances, he wasted some precious
moments in securing it, in his instinctive respect for the property of
others. While doing this he had seated Maurice comfortably on the bank;
his plan was to reach the Rue des Orties through the Place de la
Concorde and the Rue Saint-Honoré. Before proceeding further he climbed
alone to the top of the steps that ascended from the _quai_ to explore
the ground, and on witnessing the obstacles they would have to surmount
his courage was almost daunted. There lay the impregnable fortress of
the Commune, the terrace of the Tuileries bristling with cannon, the
Rues Royale, Florentin, and Rivoli obstructed by lofty and massive
barricades; and this state of affairs explained the tactics of the army
of Versailles, whose line that night described an immense arc, the
center and apex resting on the Place de la Concorde, one of the two
extremities being at the freight depot of the Northern Railway on the
right bank, the other on the left bank, at one of the bastions of the
ramparts, near the gate of Arcueil. But as the night advanced the
Communards had evacuated the Tuileries and the barricades and the
regular troops had taken possession of the quartier in the midst of
further conflagrations; twelve houses at the junction of the Rue
Saint-Honoré and the Rue Royale had been burning since nine o’clock in
the evening.
When Jean descended the steps and reached the river-bank again he found
Maurice in a semi-comatose condition, the effects of the reaction after
his hysterical outbreak.
“It will be no easy job. I hope you are going to be able to walk,
youngster?”
“Yes, yes; don’t be alarmed. I’ll get there somehow, alive or dead.”
It was not without great difficulty that he climbed the stone steps,
and when he reached the level ground of the _quai_ at the summit he
walked very slowly, supported by his companion’s arm, with the
shuffling gait of a somnambulist. The day had not dawned yet, but the
reflected light from the burning buildings cast a lurid illumination on
the wide Place. They made their way in silence across its deep
solitude, sick at heart to behold the mournful scene of devastation it
presented. At either extremity, beyond the bridge and at the further
end of the Rue Royale, they could faintly discern the shadowy outlines
of the Palais Bourbon and the Church of the Madeleine, torn by shot and
shell. The terrace of the Tuileries had been breached by the fire of
the siege guns and was partially in ruins. On the Place itself the
bronze railings and ornaments of the fountains had been chipped and
defaced by the balls; the colossal statue of Lille lay on the ground
shattered by a projectile, while near at hand the statue of Strasbourg,
shrouded in heavy veils of crape, seemed to be mourning the ruin that
surrounded it on every side. And near the Obelisk, which had escaped
unscathed, a gas-pipe in its trench had been broken by the pick of a
careless workman, and the escaping gas, fired by some accident, was
flaring up in a great undulating jet, with a roaring, hissing sound.
Jean gave a wide berth to the barricade erected across the Rue Royale
between the Ministry of Marine and the Garde-Meuble, both of which the
fire had spared; he could hear the voices of the soldiers behind the
sand bags and casks of earth with which it was constructed. Its front
was protected by a ditch, filled with stagnant, greenish water, in
which was floating the dead body of a federate, and through one of its
embrasures they caught a glimpse of the houses in the carrefour
Saint-Honoré, which were burning still in spite of the engines that had
come in from the suburbs, of which they heard the roar and clatter. To
right and left the trees and the kiosks of the newspaper venders were
riddled by the storm of bullets to which they had been subjected. Loud
cries of horror arose; the firemen, in exploring the cellar of one of
the burning houses, had come across the charred bodies of seven of its
inmates.
Although the barricade that closed the entrance to the Rue
Saint-Florentin and the Rue de Rivoli by its skilled construction and
great height appeared even more formidable than the other, Jean’s
instinct told him they would have less difficulty in getting by it. It
was completely evacuated, indeed, and the Versailles troops had not yet
entered it. The abandoned guns were resting in the embrasures in
peaceful slumber, the only living thing behind that invincible rampart
was a stray dog, that scuttled away in haste. But as Jean was making
what speed he could along the Rue Saint-Florentin, sustaining Maurice,
whose strength was giving out, that which he had been in fear of came
to pass; they fell directly into the arms of an entire company of the
88th of the line, which had turned the barricade.
“Captain,” he explained, “this is a comrade of mine, who has just been
wounded by those bandits. I am taking him to the hospital.”
It was then that the capote which he had thrown over Maurice’s
shoulders stood them in good stead, and Jean’s heart was beating like a
trip-hammer as at last they turned into the Rue Saint-Honoré. Day was
just breaking, and the sound of shots reached their ears from the
cross-streets, for fighting was going on still throughout the quartier.
It was little short of a miracle that they finally reached the Rue des
Frondeurs without sustaining any more disagreeable adventure. Their
progress was extremely slow; the last four or five hundred yards
appeared interminable. In the Rue des Frondeurs they struck up against
a communist picket, but the federates, thinking a whole regiment was at
hand, took to their heels. And now they had but a short bit of the Rue
d’Argenteuil to traverse and they would be safe in the Rue des Orties.
For four long hours that seemed like an eternity Jean’s longing desire
had been bent on that Rue des Orties with feverish impatience, and now
they were there it appeared like a haven of safety. It was dark,
silent, and deserted, as if there were no battle raging within a
hundred leagues of it. The house, an old, narrow house without a
concierge, was still as the grave.
“I have the keys in my pocket,” murmured Maurice. “The big one opens
the street door, the little one is the key of my room, way at the top
of the house.”
He succumbed and fainted dead away in Jean’s arms, whose alarm and
distress were extreme. They made him forget to close the outer door,
and he had to grope his way up that strange, dark staircase, bearing
his lifeless burden and observing the greatest caution not to stumble
or make any noise that might arouse the sleeping inmates of the rooms.
When he had gained the top he had to deposit the wounded man on the
floor while he searched for the chamber door by striking matches, of
which he fortunately had a supply in his pocket, and only when he had
found and opened it did he return and raise him in his arms again.
Entering, he laid him on the little iron bed that faced the window,
which he threw open to its full extent in his great need of air and
light. It was broad day; he dropped on his knees beside the bed,
sobbing as if his heart would break, suddenly abandoned by all his
strength as the fearful thought again smote him that he had slain his
friend.
Minutes passed; he was hardly surprised when, raising his eyes, he saw
Henriette standing by the bed. It was perfectly natural: her brother
was dying, she had come. He had not even seen her enter the room; for
all he knew she might have been standing there for hours. He sank into
a chair and watched her with stupid eyes as she hovered about the bed,
her heart wrung with mortal anguish at sight of her brother lying there
senseless, in his blood-stained garments. Then his memory began to act
again; he asked:
“Tell me, did you close the street door?”
She answered with an affirmative motion of the head, and as she came
toward him, extending her two hands in her great need of sympathy and
support, he added:
“You know it was I who killed him.”
She did not understand; she did not believe him. He felt no flutter in
the two little hands that rested confidingly in his own.
“It was I who killed him—yes, ’twas over yonder, behind a barricade, I
did it. He was fighting on one side, I on the other—”
There began to be a fluttering of the little hands.
“We were like drunken men, none of us knew what he as about—it was I
who killed him.”
Then Henriette, shivering, pale as death, withdrew her hands, fixing on
him a gaze that was full of horror. Father of Mercy, was the end of all
things come! was her crushed and bleeding heart to know no peace for
ever more! Ah, that Jean, of whom she had been thinking that very day,
happy in the unshaped hope that perhaps she might see him once again!
And it was he who had done that abominable thing; and yet he had saved
Maurice, for was it not he who had brought him home through so many
perils? She could not yield her hands to him now without a revolt of
all her being, but she uttered a cry into which she threw the last hope
of her tortured and distracted heart.
“Oh! I will save him; I _must_ save him, now!”
She had acquired considerable experience in surgery during the long
time she had been in attendance on the hospital at Remilly, and now she
proceeded without delay to examine her brother’s hurt, who remained
unconscious while she was undressing him. But when she undid the rude
bandage of Jean’s invention, he stirred feebly and uttered a faint cry
of pain, opening wide his eyes that were bright with fever. He
recognized her at once and smiled.
“You here! Ah, how glad I am to see you once more before I die!”
She silenced him, speaking in a tone of cheerful confidence.
“Hush, don’t talk of dying; I won’t allow it! I mean that you shall
live! There, be quiet, and let me see what is to be done.”
However, when Henriette had examined the injured arm and the wound in
the side, her face became clouded and a troubled look rose to her eyes.
She installed herself as mistress in the room, searching until she
found a little oil, tearing up old shirts for bandages, while Jean
descended to the lower regions for a pitcher of water. He did not open
his mouth, but looked on in silence as she washed and deftly dressed
the wounds, incapable of aiding her, seemingly deprived of all power of
action by her presence there. When she had concluded her task, however,
noticing her alarmed expression, he proposed to her that he should go
and secure a doctor, but she was in possession of all her clear
intelligence. No, no; she would not have a chance-met doctor, of whom
they knew nothing, who, perhaps, would betray her brother to the
authorities. They must have a man they could depend on; they could
afford to wait a few hours. Finally, when Jean said he must go and
report for duty with his company, it was agreed that he should return
as soon as he could get away, and try to bring a surgeon with him.
He delayed his departure, seemingly unable to make up his mind to leave
that room, whose atmosphere was pervaded by the evil he had
unintentionally done. The window, which had been closed for a moment,
had been opened again, and from it the wounded man, lying on his bed,
his head propped up by pillows, was looking out over the city, while
the others, also, in the oppressive silence that had settled on the
chamber, were gazing out into vacancy.
From that elevated point of the Butte des Moulins a good half of Paris
lay stretched beneath their eyes in a vast panorama: first the central
districts, from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré to the Bastille, then the
Seine in its entire course through the city, with the thickly-built,
densely-populated regions of the left bank, an ocean of roofs,
treetops, steeples, domes, and towers. The light was growing stronger,
the abominable night, than which there have been few more terrible in
history, was ended; but beneath the rosy sky, in the pure, clear light
of the rising sun, the fires were blazing still. Before them lay the
burning Tuileries, the d’Orsay barracks, the Palaces of the Council of
State and the Legion of Honor, the flames from which were paled by the
superior refulgence of the day-star. Even beyond the houses in the Rue
de Lille and the Rue du Bac there must have been other structures
burning, for clouds of smoke were visible rising from the carrefour of
la Croix-Rouge, and, more distant still, from the Rue Vavin and the Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Nearer at hand and to their right the fires in
the Rue Saint-Honoré were dying out, while to the left, at the
Palais-Royal and the new Louvre, to which the torch had not been
applied until near morning, the work of the incendiaries was apparently
a failure. But what they were unable to account for at first was the
dense volume of black smoke which, impelled by the west wind, came
driving past their window. Fire had been set to the Ministry of Finance
at three o’clock in the morning and ever since that time it had been
smoldering, emitting no blaze, among the stacks and piles of documents
that were contained in the low-ceiled, fire-proof vaults and chambers.
And if the terrific impressions of the night were not there to preside
at the awakening of the great city—the fear of total destruction, the
Seine pouring its fiery waves past their doors, Paris kindling into
flame from end to end—a feeling of gloom and despair, hung heavy over
the quartiers that had been spared, with that dense, on-pouring smoke,
whose dusky cloud was ever spreading. Presently the sun, which had
risen bright and clear, was hid by it, and the golden sky was filled
with the great funeral pall.
Maurice, who appeared to be delirious again, made a slow, sweeping
gesture that embraced the entire horizon, murmuring:
“Is it all burning? Ah, how long it takes!”
Tears rose to Henriette’s eyes, as if her burden of misery was made
heavier for her by the share her brother had had in those deeds of
horror. And Jean, who dared neither take her hand nor embrace his
friend, left the room with the air of one crazed by grief.
“I will return soon. _Au revoir_!”
It was dark, however, nearly eight o’clock, before he was able to
redeem his promise. Notwithstanding his great distress he was happy;
his regiment had been transferred from the first to the second line and
assigned the task of protecting the quartier, so that, bivouacking with
his company in the Place du Carrousel, he hoped to get a chance to run
in each evening to see how the wounded man was getting on. And he did
not return alone; as luck would have it he had fallen in with the
former surgeon of the 106th and had brought him along with him, having
been unable to find another doctor, consoling himself with the
reflection that the terrible, big man with the lion’s mane was not such
a bad sort of fellow after all.
When Bouroche, who knew nothing of the patient he was summoned with
such insistence to attend and grumbled at having to climb so many
stairs, learned that it was a Communist he had on his hands he
commenced to storm.
“God’s thunder, what do you take me for? Do you suppose I’m going to
waste my time on those thieving, murdering, house-burning scoundrels?
As for this particular bandit, his case is clear, and I’ll take it upon
me to see he is cured; yes, with a bullet in his head!”
But his anger subsided suddenly at sight of Henriette’s pale face and
her golden hair streaming in disorder over her black dress.
“He is my brother, doctor, and he was with you at Sedan.”
He made no reply, but uncovered the injuries and examined them in
silence; then, taking some phials from his pocket, he made a fresh
dressing, explaining to the young woman how it was done. When he had
finished he turned suddenly to the patient and asked in his loud, rough
voice:
“Why did you take sides with those ruffians? What could cause you to be
guilty of such an abomination?”
Maurice, with a feverish luster in his eyes, had been watching him
since he entered the room, but no word had escaped his lips. He
answered in a voice that was almost fierce, so eager was it:
“Because there is too much suffering in the world, too much wickedness,
too much infamy!”
Bouroche’s shrug of the shoulders seemed to indicate that he thought a
young man was likely to make his mark who carried such ideas about in
his head. He appeared to be about to say something further, but changed
his mind and bowed himself out, simply adding:
“I will come in again.”
To Henriette, on the landing, he said he would not venture to make any
promises. The injury to the lung was serious; hemorrhage might set in
and carry off the patient without a moment’s warning. And when she
re-entered the room she forced a smile to her lips, notwithstanding the
sharp stab with which the doctor’s words had pierced her heart, for had
she not promised herself to save him? and could she permit him to be
snatched from them now that they three were again united, with a
prospect of a lifetime of affection and happiness before them? She had
not left the room since morning, an old woman who lived on the landing
having kindly offered to act as her messenger for the purchase of such
things as she required. And she returned and resumed her place upon a
chair at her brother’s bedside.
But Maurice, in his febrile excitation, questioned Jean, insisting on
knowing what had happened since the morning. The latter did not tell
him everything, maintaining a discreet silence upon the furious rage
which Paris, now it was delivered from its tyrants, was manifesting
toward the dying Commune. It was now Wednesday. For two interminable
days succeeding the Sunday evening when the conflict first broke out
the citizens had lived in their cellars, quaking with fear, and when
they ventured out at last on Wednesday morning, the spectacle of
bloodshed and devastation that met their eyes on every side, and more
particularly the frightful ruin entailed by the conflagrations, aroused
in their breasts feelings the bitterest and most vindictive. It was
felt in every quarter that the punishment must be worthy of the crime.
The houses in the suspected quarters were subjected to a rigorous
search and men and women who were at all tainted with suspicion were
led away in droves and shot without formality. At six o’clock of the
evening of that day the army of the Versaillese was master of the half
of Paris, following the line of the principal avenues from the park of
Montsouris to the station of the Northern Railway, and the remainder of
the braver members of the Commune, a mere handful, some twenty or so,
had taken refuge in the _mairie_ of the eleventh arrondissement, in the
Boulevard Voltaire.
They were silent when he concluded his narration, and Maurice, his
glance vaguely wandering over the city through the open window that let
in the soft, warm air of evening, murmured:
“Well, the work goes on; Paris continues to burn!”
It was true: the flames were becoming visible again in the increasing
darkness and the heavens were reddened once more with the ill-omened
light. That afternoon the powder magazine at the Luxembourg had
exploded with a frightful detonation, which gave rise to a report that
the Pantheon had collapsed and sunk into the catacombs. All that day,
moreover, the conflagrations of the night pursued their course
unchecked; the Palace of the Council of State and the Tuileries were
burning still, the Ministry of Finance continued to belch forth its
billowing clouds of smoke. A dozen times Henriette was obliged to close
the window against the shower of blackened, burning paper that the hot
breath of the fire whirled upward into the sky, whence it descended to
earth again in a fine rain of fragments; the streets of Paris were
covered with them, and some were found in the fields of Normandy,
thirty leagues away. And now it was not the western and southern
districts alone which seemed devoted to destruction, the houses in the
Rue Royale and those of the Croix-Rouge and the Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs: the entire eastern portion of the city appeared
to be in flames, the Hôtel de Ville glowed on the horizon like a mighty
furnace. And in that direction also, blazing like gigantic beacon-fires
upon the mountain tops, were the Théâtre-Lyrique, the _mairie_ of the
fourth arrondissement, and more than thirty houses in the adjacent
streets, to say nothing of the theater of the Porte-Saint-Martin,
further to the north, which illuminated the darkness of its locality as
a stack of grain lights up the deserted, dusky fields at night. There
is no doubt that in many cases the incendiaries were actuated by
motives of personal revenge; perhaps, too, there were criminal records
which the parties implicated had an object in destroying. It was no
longer a question of self-defense with the Commune, of checking the
advance of the victorious troops by fire; a delirium of destruction
raged among its adherents: the Palace of Justice, the Hôtel-Dieu and
the cathedral of Notre-Dame escaped by the merest chance. They would
destroy solely for the sake of destroying, would bury the effete,
rotten humanity beneath the ruins of a world, in the hope that from the
ashes might spring a new and innocent race that should realize the
primitive legends of an earthly paradise. And all that night again did
the sea of flame roll its waves over Paris.
“Ah; war, war, what a hateful thing it is!” said Henriette to herself,
looking out on the sore-smitten city.
Was it not indeed the last act, the inevitable conclusion of the
tragedy, the blood-madness for which the lost fields of Sedan and Metz
were responsible, the epidemic of destruction born from the siege of
Paris, the supreme struggle of a nation in peril of dissolution, in the
midst of slaughter and universal ruin?
But Maurice, without taking his eyes from the fires that were raging in
the distance, feebly, and with an effort, murmured:
“No, no; do not be unjust toward war. It is good; it has its appointed
work to do—”
There were mingled hatred and remorse in the cry with which Jean
interrupted him.
“Good God! When I see you lying there, and know it is through my
fault—Do not say a word in defense of it; it is an accursed thing, is
war!”
The wounded man smiled faintly.
“Oh, as for me, what matters it? There is many another in my condition.
It may be that this blood-letting was necessary for us. War is life,
which cannot exist without its sister, death.”
And Maurice closed his eyes, exhausted by the effort it had cost him to
utter those few words. Henriette signaled Jean not to continue the
discussion. It angered her; all her being rose in protest against such
suffering and waste of human life, notwithstanding the calm bravery of
her frail woman’s nature, with her clear, limpid eyes, in which lived
again all the heroic spirit of the grandfather, the veteran of the
Napoleonic wars.
Two days more, Thursday and Friday, passed, like their predecessors,
amid scenes of slaughter and conflagration. The thunder of the
artillery was incessant; the batteries of the army of Versailles on the
heights of Montmartre roared against those that the federates had
established at Belleville and Père-Lachaise without a moment’s respite,
while the latter maintained a desultory fire on Paris. Shells had
fallen in the Rue Richelieu and the Place Vendôme. At evening on the
25th the entire left bank was in possession of the regular troops, but
on the right bank the barricades in the Place Château d’Eau and the
Place de la Bastille continued to hold out; they were veritable
fortresses, from which proceeded an uninterrupted and most destructive
fire. At twilight, while the last remaining members of the Commune were
stealing off to make provision for their safety, Delescluze took his
cane and walked leisurely away to the barricade that was thrown across
the Boulevard Voltaire, where he died a hero’s death. At daybreak on
the following morning, the 26th, the Château d’Eau and Bastille
positions were carried, and the Communists, now reduced to a handful of
brave men who were resolved to sell their lives dearly, had only la
Villette, Belleville, and Charonne left to them, And for two more days
they remained and fought there with the fury of despair.
On Friday evening, as Jean was on his way from the Place du Carrousel
to the Rue des Orties, he witnessed a summary execution in the Rue
Richelieu that filled him with horror. For the last forty-eight hours
two courts-martial had been sitting, one at the Luxembourg, the other
at the Théâtre du Chatelet; the prisoners convicted by the former were
taken into the garden and shot, while those found guilty by the latter
were dragged away to the Lobau barracks, where a platoon of soldiers
that was kept there in constant attendance for the purpose mowed them
down, almost at point-blank range. The scenes of slaughter there were
most horrible: there were men and women who had been condemned to death
on the flimsiest evidence: because they had a stain of powder on their
hands, because their feet were shod with army shoes; there were
innocent persons, the victims of private malice, who had been
wrongfully denounced, shrieking forth their entreaties and explanations
and finding no one to lend an ear to them; and all were driven
pell-mell against a wall, facing the muzzles of the muskets, often so
many poor wretches in the band at once that the bullets did not suffice
for all and it became necessary to finish the wounded with the bayonet.
From morning until night the place was streaming with blood; the
tumbrils were kept busy bearing away the bodies of the dead. And
throughout the length and breadth of the city, keeping pace with the
revengeful clamors of the people, other executions were continually
taking place, in front of barricades, against the walls in the deserted
streets, on the steps of the public buildings. It was under such
circumstances that Jean saw a woman and two men dragged by the
residents of the quartier before the officer commanding the detachment
that was guarding the Théâtre Français. The citizens showed themselves
more bloodthirsty than the soldiery, and those among the newspapers
that had resumed publication were howling for measures of
extermination. A threatening crowd surrounded the prisoners and was
particularly violent against the woman, in whom the excited bourgeois
beheld one of those _petroleuses_ who were the constant bugbear of
terror-haunted imaginations, whom they accused of prowling by night,
slinking along the darkened streets past the dwellings of the wealthy,
to throw cans of lighted petroleum into unprotected cellars. This
woman, was the cry, had been found bending over a coal-hole in the Rue
Sainte-Anne. And notwithstanding her denials, accompanied by tears and
supplications, she was hurled, together with the two men, to the bottom
of the ditch in front of an abandoned barricade, and there, lying in
the mud and slime, they were shot with as little pity as wolves caught
in a trap. Some by-passers stopped and looked indifferently on the
scene, among them a lady hanging on her husband’s arm, while a baker’s
boy, who was carrying home a tart to someone in the neighborhood,
whistled the refrain of a popular air.
As Jean, sick at heart, was hurrying along the street toward the house
in the Rue des Orties, a sudden recollection flashed across his mind.
Was not that Chouteau, the former member of his squad, whom he had
seen, in the blouse of a respectable workman, watching the execution
and testifying his approval of it in a loud-mouthed way? He was a
proficient in his role of bandit, traitor, robber, and assassin! For a
moment the corporal thought he would retrace his steps, denounce him,
and send him to keep company with the other three. Ah, the sadness of
the thought; the guilty ever escaping punishment, parading their
unwhipped infamy in the bright light of day, while the innocent molder
in the earth!
Henriette had come out upon the landing at the sound of footsteps
coming up the stairs, where she welcomed Jean with a manner that
indicated great alarm.
“’Sh! he has been extremely violent all day long. The major was here, I
am in despair—”
Bouroche, in fact, had shaken his head ominously, saying he could
promise nothing as yet. Nevertheless the patient might pull through, in
spite of all the evil consequences he feared; he had youth on his side.
“Ah, here you are at last,” Maurice said impatiently to Jean, as soon
as he set eyes on him. “I have been waiting for you. What is going
on—how do matters stand?” And supported by the pillows at his back, his
face to the window which he had forced his sister to open for him, he
pointed with his finger to the city, where, on the gathering darkness,
the lambent flames were beginning to rise anew. “You see, it is
breaking out again; Paris is burning. All Paris will burn this time!”
As soon as daylight began to fade, the distant quarters beyond the
Seine had been lighted up by the burning of the Grenier d’Abondance.
From time to time there was an outburst of flame, accompanied by a
shower of sparks, from the smoking ruins of the Tuileries, as some wall
or ceiling fell and set the smoldering timbers blazing afresh. Many
houses, where the fire was supposed to be extinguished, flamed up anew;
for the last three days, as soon as darkness descended on the city it
seemed as if it were the signal for the conflagrations to break out
again; as if the shades of night had breathed upon the still glowing
embers, reanimating them, and scattering them to the four corners of
the horizon. Ah, that city of the damned, that had harbored for a week
within its bosom the demon of destruction, incarnadining the sky each
evening as soon as twilight fell, illuminating with its infernal
torches the nights of that week of slaughter! And when, that night, the
docks at la Villette burned, the light they shed upon the huge city was
so intense that it seemed to be on fire in every part at once,
overwhelmed and drowned beneath the sea of flame.
“Ah, it is the end!” Maurice repeated. “Paris is doomed!”
He reiterated the words again and again with apparent relish, actuated
by a feverish desire to hear the sound of his voice once more, after
the dull lethargy that had kept him tongue-tied for three days. But the
sound of stifled sobs causes him to turn his head.
“What, sister, you, brave little woman that you are! You weep because I
am about to die—”
She interrupted him, protesting:
“But you are not going to die!”
“Yes, yes; it is better it should be so; it must be so. Ah, I shall be
no great loss to anyone. Up to the time the war broke out I was a
source of anxiety to you, I cost you dearly in heart and purse. All the
folly and the madness I was guilty of, and which would have landed me,
who knows where? in prison, in the gutter—”
Again she took the words from his mouth, exclaiming hotly:
“Hush! be silent!—you have atoned for all.”
He reflected a moment. “Yes, perhaps I shall have atoned, when I am
dead. Ah, Jean, old fellow, you didn’t know what a service you were
rendering us all when you gave me that bayonet thrust.”
But the other protested, his eyes swimming with tears:
“Don’t, I entreat you, say such things! do you wish to make me go and
dash out my brains against a wall?”
Maurice pursued his train of thought, speaking in hurried, eager tones.
“Remember what you said to me the day after Sedan, that it was not such
a bad thing, now and then, to receive a good drubbing. And you added
that if a man had gangrene in his system, if he saw one of his limbs
wasting from mortification, it would be better to take an ax and chop
off that limb than to die from the contamination of the poison. I have
many a time thought of those words since I have been here, without a
friend, immured in this city of distress and madness. And I am the
diseased limb, and it is you who have lopped it off—” He went on with
increasing vehemence, regardless of the supplications of his terrified
auditors, in a fervid tirade that abounded with symbols and striking
images. It was the untainted, the reasoning, the substantial portion of
France, the peasantry, the tillers of the soil, those who had always
kept close contact with their mother Earth, that was suppressing the
outbreak of the crazed, exasperated part, the part that had been
vitiated by the Empire and led astray by vain illusions and empty
dreams; and in the performance of its duty it had had to cut deep into
the living flesh, without being fully aware of what it was doing. But
the baptism of blood, French blood, was necessary; the abominable
holocaust, the living sacrifice, in the midst of the purifying flames.
Now they had mounted the steps of the Calvary and known their bitterest
agony; the crucified nation had expiated its faults and would be born
again. “Jean, old friend, you and those like you are strong in your
simplicity and honesty. Go, take up the spade and the trowel, turn the
sod in the abandoned field, rebuild the house! As for me, you did well
to lop me off, since I was the ulcer that was eating away your
strength!”
After that his language became more and more incoherent; he insisted on
rising and going to sit by the window. “Paris burns, Paris burns; not a
stone of it will be left standing. Ah! the fire that I invoked, it
destroys, but it heals; yes, the work it does is good. Let me go down
there; let me help to finish the work of humanity and liberty—”
Jean had the utmost difficulty in getting him back to bed, while
Henriette tearfully recalled memories of their childhood, and entreated
him, for the sake of the love they bore each other, to be calm. Over
the immensity of Paris the fiery glow deepened and widened; the sea of
flame seemed to be invading the remotest quarters of the horizon; the
heavens were like the vaults of a colossal oven, heated to red heat.
And athwart the red light of the conflagrations the dense black
smoke-clouds from the Ministry of Finance, which had been burning three
days and given forth no blaze, continued to pour in unbroken, slow
procession.
The following, Saturday, morning brought with it a decided improvement
in Maurice’s condition: he was much calmer, the fever had subsided, and
it afforded Jean inexpressible delight to behold a smile on Henriette’s
face once more, as the young woman fondly reverted to her cherished
dream, a pact of reciprocal affection between the three of them, that
should unite them in a future that might yet be one of happiness, under
conditions that she did not care to formulate even to herself. Would
destiny be merciful? Would it save them all from an eternal farewell by
saving her brother? Her nights were spent in watching him; she never
stirred outside that chamber, where her noiseless activity and gentle
ministrations were like a never-ceasing caress. And Jean, that evening,
while sitting with his friends, forgot his great sorrow in a delight
that astonished him and made him tremble. The troops had carried
Belleville and the Buttes-Chaumont that day; the only remaining point
where there was any resistance now was the cemetery of Père-Lachaise,
which had been converted into a fortified camp. It seemed to him that
the insurrection was ended; he even declared that the troops had ceased
to shoot their prisoners, who were being collected in droves and sent
on to Versailles. He told of one of those bands that he had seen that
morning on the _quai_, made up of men of every class, from the most
respectable to the lowest, and of women of all ages and conditions,
wrinkled old bags and young girls, mere children, not yet out of their
teens; pitiful aggregation of misery and revolt, driven like cattle by
the soldiers along the street in the bright sunshine, and that the
people of Versailles, so it was said, received with revilings and
blows.
But Sunday was to Jean a day of terror. It rounded out and fitly ended
that accursed week. With the triumphant rising of the sun on that
bright, warm Sabbath morning he shudderingly heard the news that was
the culmination of all preceding horrors. It was only at that late day
that the public was informed of the murder of the hostages; the
archbishop, the curé of the Madeleine and others, shot at la Roquette
on Wednesday, the Dominicans of Arcueil coursed like hares on Thursday,
more priests and gendarmes, to the number of forty-seven in all,
massacred in cold blood in the Rue Haxo on Friday; and a furious cry
went up for vengeance, the soldiers bunched the last prisoners they
made and shot them in mass. All day long on that magnificent Sunday the
volleys of musketry rang out in the courtyard of the Lobau barracks,
that were filled with blood and smoke and the groans of the dying. At
la Roquette two hundred and twenty-seven miserable wretches, gathered
in here and there by the drag-net of the police, were collected in a
huddle, and the soldiers fired volley after volley into the mass of
human beings until there was no further sign of life. At Père-Lachaise,
which had been shelled continuously for four days and was finally
carried by a hand-to-hand conflict among the graves, a hundred and
forty-eight of the insurgents were drawn up in line before a wall, and
when the firing ceased the stones were weeping great tears of blood;
and three of them, despite their wounds, having succeeded in making
their escape, they were retaken and despatched. Among the twelve
thousand victims of the Commune, who shall say how many innocent people
suffered for every malefactor who met his deserts! An order to stop the
executions had been issued from Versailles, so it was said, but none
the less the slaughter still went on; Thiers, while hailed as the
savior of his country, was to bear the stigma of having been the Jack
Ketch of Paris, and Marshal MacMahon, the vanquished of Froeschwiller,
whose proclamation announcing the triumph of law and order was to be
seen on every wall, was to receive the credit of the victory of
Père-Lachaise. And in the pleasant sunshine Paris, attired in holiday
garb, appeared to be _en fête_; the reconquered streets were filled
with an enormous crowd; men and women, glad to breathe the air of
heaven once more, strolled leisurely from spot to spot to view the
smoking ruins; mothers, holding their little children by the hand,
stopped for a moment and listened with an air of interest to the
deadened crash of musketry from the Lobau barracks.
When Jean ascended the dark staircase of the house in the Rue des
Orties, in the gathering obscurity of that Sunday evening, his heart
was oppressed by a chill sense of impending evil. He entered the room,
and saw at once that the inevitable end was come; Maurice lay dead on
the little bed; the hemorrhage predicted by Bouroche had done its work.
The red light of the setting sun streamed through the open window and
rested on the wall as if in a last farewell; two tapers were burning on
a table beside the bed. And Henriette, alone with her dead, in her
widow’s weeds that she had not laid aside, was weeping silently.
At the noise of footsteps she raised her head, and shuddered on
beholding Jean. He, in his wild despair, was about to hurry toward her
and seize her hands, mingle his grief with hers in a sympathetic clasp,
but he saw the little hands were trembling, he felt as by instinct the
repulsion that pervaded all her being and was to part them for
evermore. Was not all ended between them now? Maurice’s grave would be
there, a yawning chasm, to part them as long as they should live. And
he could only fall to his knees by the bedside of his dead friend,
sobbing softly. After the silence had lasted some moments, however,
Henriette spoke:
“I had turned my back and was preparing a cup of bouillon, when he gave
a cry. I hastened to his side, but had barely time to reach the bed
before he expired, with my name upon his lips, and yours as well, amid
an outgush of blood—”
Her Maurice, her twin brother, whom she might almost be said to have
loved in the prenatal state, her other self, whom she had watched over
and saved! sole object of her affection since at Bazeilles she had seen
her poor Weiss set against a wall and shot to death! And now cruel war
had done its worst by her, had crushed her bleeding heart; henceforth
her way through life was to be a solitary one, widowed and forsaken as
she was, with no one upon whom to bestow her love.
“Ah, _bon sang_!” cried Jean, amid his sobs, “behold my work! My poor
little one, for whom I would have laid down my life, and whom I
murdered, brute that I am! What is to become of us? Can you ever
forgive me?”
At that moment their glances met, and they were stricken with
consternation at what they read in each other’s eyes. The past rose
before them, the secluded chamber at Remilly, where they had spent so
many melancholy yet happy days. His dream returned to him, that dream
of which at first he had been barely conscious and which even at a
later period could not be said to have assumed definite shape: life
down there in the pleasant country by the Meuse, marriage, a little
house, a little field to till whose produce should suffice for the
needs of two people whose ideas were not extravagant. Now the dream was
become an eager longing, a penetrating conviction that, with a wife as
loving and industrious as she, existence would be a veritable earthly
paradise. And she, the tranquillity of whose mind had never in those
days been ruffled by thoughts of that nature, in the chaste and
unconscious bestowal of her heart, now saw clearly and understood the
true condition of her feelings. That marriage, of which she had not
admitted to herself the possibility, had been, unknown to her, the
object of her desire. The seed that had germinated had pushed its way
in silence and in darkness; it was love, not sisterly affection, that
she bore toward that young man whose company had at first been to her
nothing more than a source of comfort and consolation. And that was
what their eyes told each other, and the love thus openly expressed
could have no other fruition than an eternal farewell. It needed but
that frightful sacrifice, the rending of their heart-strings by that
supreme parting, the prospect of their life’s happiness wrecked amid
all the other ruins, swept away by the crimson tide that ended their
brother’s life.
With a slow and painful effort Jean rose from his knees.
“Farewell!”
Henriette stood motionless in her place.
“Farewell!”
But Jean could not tear himself away thus. Advancing to the bedside he
sorrowfully scanned the dead man’s face, with its lofty forehead that
seemed loftier still in death, its wasted features, its dull eyes,
whence the wild look that had occasionally been seen there in life had
vanished. He longed to give a parting kiss to his little one, as he had
called him so many times, but dared not. It seemed to him that his
hands were stained with his friend’s blood; he shrank from the horror
of the ordeal. Ah, what a death to die, amid the crashing ruins of a
sinking world! On the last day, among the shattered fragments of the
dying Commune, might not this last victim have been spared? He had gone
from life, hungering for justice, possessed by the dream that haunted
him, the sublime and unattainable conception of the destruction of the
old society, of Paris chastened by fire, of the field dug up anew, that
from the soil thus renewed and purified might spring the idyl of
another golden age.
His heart overflowing with bitter anguish, Jean turned and looked out
on Paris. The setting sun lay on the edge of the horizon, and its level
rays bathed the city in a flood of vividly red light. The windows in
thousands of houses flamed as if lighted by fierce fires within; the
roofs glowed like beds of live coals; bits of gray wall and tall,
sober-hued monuments flashed in the evening air with the sparkle of a
brisk fire of brushwood. It was like the show-piece that is reserved
for the conclusion of a _fete_, the huge bouquet of gold and crimson,
as if Paris were burning like a forest of old oaks and soaring
heavenward in a rutilant cloud of sparks and flame. The fires were
burning still; volumes of reddish smoke continued to rise into the air;
a confused murmur in the distance sounded on the ear, perhaps the last
groans of the dying Communists at the Lobau barracks, or it may have
been the happy laughter of women and children, ending their pleasant
afternoon by dining in the open air at the doors of the wine-shops. And
in the midst of all the splendor of that royal sunset, while a large
part of Paris was crumbling away in ashes, from plundered houses and
gutted palaces, from the torn-up streets, from the depths of all that
ruin and suffering, came sounds of life.
Then Jean had a strange experience. It seemed to him that in the slowly
fading daylight, above the roofs of that flaming city, he beheld the
dawning of another day. And yet the situation might well be considered
irretrievable. Destiny appeared to have pursued them with her utmost
fury; the successive disasters they had sustained were such as no
nation in history had ever known before; defeat treading on the heels
of defeat, their provinces torn from them, an indemnity of milliards to
be raised, a most horrible civil war that had been quenched in blood,
their streets cumbered with ruins and unburied corpses, without money,
their honor gone, and order to be re-established out of chaos! His
share of the universal ruin was a heart lacerated by the loss of
Maurice and Henriette, the prospect of a happy future swept away in the
furious storm! And still, beyond the flames of that furnace whose fiery
glow had not subsided yet, Hope, the eternal, sat enthroned in the
limpid serenity of the tranquil heavens. It was the certain assurance
of the resurrection of perennial nature, of imperishable humanity; the
harvest that is promised to him who sows and waits; the tree throwing
out a new and vigorous shoot to replace the rotten limb that has been
lopped away, which was blighting the young leaves with its vitiated
sap.
“Farewell!” Jean repeated with a sob.
“Farewell!” murmured Henriette, her bowed face hidden in her hands.
The neglected field was overgrown with brambles, the roof-tree of the
ruined house lay on the ground; and Jean, bearing his heavy burden of
affliction with humble resignation, went his way, his face set
resolutely toward the future, toward the glorious and arduous task that
lay before him and his countrymen, to create a new France.