Mes cahiers rouges. I
My Red Notebooks. I
Maxime Vuillaume
I. — A Day at the Court Martial of the Luxembourg
WITH A FOREWORD BY LUCIEN DESCAVES
Lucien Descaves
FOREWORD
If we consulted only Maxime Vuillaume’s taste, it is likely that the best introduction to his Memoirs would be one whose conciseness Vapereau and Larousse would envy.
Yes, since his presentation to the reader is required, or at least since we are imposing it upon him, I believe he would be perfectly content with brief indications such as these:
“Born in Saclas, in the Beauce region, twenty-five years before the war, of a father from the Franche-Comté. Was the pupil, at Sainte-Barbe, of Eugène Despois, author of Revolutionary Vandalism. Bachelor of arts. Brief stay at the École des Mines, then, in 1869, first ventures in the small opposition press against the Empire…”
But this expeditious manner, suitable for dictionaries and encyclopedias, is less fitting for a foreword, and I have the pleasant duty, being somewhat responsible for this publication, of better introducing its author.
Ah! how beautiful it was, at the end of the Empire, the youthful ardor of that journalism where, behind Jules Vallès, Maroteau, Vermersch, Francis Enne, Charles Frémine, Gustave Puissant, Cavalier, André Gill, Henri Bellenger, Albert Fermé were making their first sallies, fighting cocks perched on their spurs, crests erect and wings beating!
How beautiful it was, that pension Laveur, where Gambetta came, where Courbet sang, where old Toussenel grumbled, annoyed by Vallès…, where the others drank! And the brasserie on the Rue Saint-Séverin, do you remember it? The whole Commune was germinating there in Rigault, Ferré, Eudes, Longuet, Chardon, Lucipia, Lullier, Pilotell, Régère, Maître, Breuillé, Treilhard, Tony Moilin, Paget-Lupicin. Who else? A beard, Benjamin Flotte, who would strive in vain to exchange the hostages for his old friend Blanqui; a figure of rhetoric, Rogeard, the author of the Sayings of Labienus; a future deputy, Ordinaire, who would be saved from oblivion ten years later by his apostrophe to the clemency commission: “Commission of assassins!”…
And the cabaret on the Rue Dauphine, where Vermersch and Verlaine tuned their viols…; for the terrible author of The Incendiaries was, at heart, only a Rossel of Parnassus, impatient for literary glory, as the other was for promotion. And the brasserie Müller, neighbor of that boarding house on the Rue Vavin, where Vermersch conducted his love affairs, broadcast by the most charming strophe of his Grand Testament in imitation of Villon:
If gold loafs about in my vest, Let it be taken to Rachel, a girl Who lives alone, without family, And lodges near the Châtelet.
She is pretty and disreputable; She has blue eyes, large and mocking, And of the queens of my heart She is the one I loved best!
Nor do I forget, rest assured, Vuillaume — the brasserie de l’Union, the brasserie on the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, kept by Théodore, where one met, with Vallès still, with Courbet always, with Vermersch of course, the poets Glatigny, Lemoyne, Mérat, and d’Hervilly, the draftsman Félix Régamey, the engraver Cattelain, chief of security under the Commune, Castagnary the art critic, and Pierre Dupont, from whose mouth songs no longer issued except like gold coins from a crumbling coffer.
And let us even conclude the tour, if you like, with a mention of the cafes, all the cafes of the Quarter: Huber, Kreber, Hoffmann, d’Harcourt, Soufflet, Rhin, Jeune-France, Salamandre — also known as the Café des politiques, where Vermorel would sometimes come.
Another memorable meeting place was the printing house on the Rue du Jardinet, whence the fireships set sail, whence came La Rue by Vallès and Le Père Duchêne (the first) by Maroteau (December 1869), in which Vuillaume published his first article.
Ah! beautiful youth! Time of cherries, mistletoe, and the lilacs of the Closerie! Time when fines and a few months in Sainte-Pélagie, inflicted by the sixth chamber for an article, a drawing, a remark, an allusion, spared ephemeral papers the shame of dying obscure!
And these revolutionaries were poets, and these poets were revolutionaries. The last avatar of a bohemia that will never be seen again in any form. For it is quite useless today to sing to the youth: “Here come the leaders passing, hide your red banners!” At the age when the student of yesterday was sowing his wild oats, the student of today aspires only to jostle for position… It is the youth of Schools of apprenticeship for power.
Two or three other fireships by Maroteau having met the same fate as the Père Duchêne, Vuillaume founded with Passedouet, in February 1870, La Misère, a daily as was fitting, as is always fitting, and which lived one week. There we find again Sornet, Bellenger, and the good Édouard Roullier, a cobbler like Gaillard and like Dereure.
Meanwhile, the horizon was darkening. The air was heavy with storm. A few drops of blood were already falling.
On January 10, Pierre Bonaparte assassinated Victor Noir. On the 12th, a hundred thousand people attended his funeral. On the 21st, Félix Pyat had his toast read at the Saint-Mandé banquet: “To a little bullet.” On February 7, Flourens seized by the collar, at a public meeting, the police commissioner Barlet, whom he paraded on a leash through Belleville, in upheaval the next day. On the 11th, Mégy killed with a pistol shot the police inspector who came to his home to arrest him.
They struck the newspapers, they struck the journalists, they struck the International…; but only the Empire was hit. Indeed, it was hit hard. It had only one alternative left: to bleed Paris, which at the plebiscite had voted no by a majority — or to bleed France. It bled France. But it was the Empire that died of it.
Maxime Vuillaume donned the uniform like everyone else and, like everyone else, was instantly made lieutenant of the 248th, Longuet’s battalion. Notable actions: October 31 and January 22. The Parisians attended to the most pressing matter, which was to defend Paris against a Government of National Defense that proved its incompetence every day.
It was between the capitulation and March 18 that Vuillaume founded the Père Duchêne, with Vermersch and Alphonse Humbert.
I need not tell the story of this famous firebrand: Vuillaume will do it better than I. And besides, my friendship for him does not blind me. As much as the Père Duchêne’s incitements to civil war seem to me conceivable, the pastiche of Hébert is, in form, unbearable to me. And I shall say why.
Vuillaume, Vermersch, and Humbert, having come from the bourgeoisie, from the schools where it has its sons educated, had perfectly the right and duty to embrace the cause of the people; but they had neither the right nor the duty to scrape their mouths speaking a language that Blanqui, Delescluze, Pyat, Vallès, Varlin, Vermorel, Flourens, and so many others would not need to call upon to make themselves heard in the faubourgs.
The expression “descending to the people” annoys me. It evokes in my eyes amateurs putting on a smock and heavy boots to enter the sewers. I prefer Blanqui gloved in black, Flourens well dressed, and old Delescluze taking a bath before going to die in a frock coat, silk hat, and patent leather boots.
His debased language lends to the so-called stove dealer’s vituperations something factitious, complacent, degraded — a puerile disguise. Speaking in a gruff voice or acting the boor impresses only children. If the men to whom the Père Duchêne of 1871 was addressed had enough insight to notice that its hands were black with ink and not soot, what was the use of maintaining the fable and tone of the stove dealer?
What irritated Barbey d’Aurevilly when he heard La Bordas sing La Canaille was above all that it was sung by a woman in a black velvet gown with a train and a golden torsade. The discordance offended him much more than the refrain. I think the same of the revived Père Duchêne.
Hear me well, my dear Vuillaume: revived. For I see you coming with your references. You are going to give me the slip by citing the opinion that on two occasions the Goncourts expressed about your ancestor Hébert. With what pleasure I reproduce it!
It is, first, in their History of French Society During the Revolution, that the Goncourts write: “Do not let yourselves be deceived by those foutre’s, those bougre’s, which are so to speak merely a manner of punctuation; overcome the disgust, and you will find beyond this gutter speech a skillful tactic, a clever lure for the common people, a reduction to their level of governmental theses and abstract political propositions. You will find beyond that an idiom heightened in tone, rich, vigorous, Rabelaisian, aided at every turn by comic or vulgar terms that come off well, a true ring, a remarkable wit of sallies, a tight dialectic, a stout plebeian common sense. A day will come — when, in order to judge works, one will no longer remember which hands held the pens — when one will recognize wit, originality, eloquence even, perhaps the only true eloquence of the Revolution, in the Père Duchêne and above all in Hébert.”
And in their Journal, after a Magny dinner, the Goncourts redouble:
“A disgust, almost a contempt, comes over us for the Magny diners. To think that this is the gathering of the freest minds in France, and yet, despite the originality of their talent, what poverty of ideas truly their own, of opinions formed from their nerves, from their own sensations, and what absence of personality, of temperament! In all of them, what bourgeois fear of excess! This evening, we nearly got ourselves stoned for maintaining that Hébert, the author of the Père Duchêne — whom, incidentally, no one at the table has read — had talent. Sainte-Beuve pronounced that the proof he had none was that his contemporaries had not recognized any in him.”
I subscribe, it goes without saying, to the Goncourts’ judgment, but do not hasten to infer from my severity toward Hébert’s grandsons that it puts me in contradiction with myself.
The apologist of the Hébertists, Gustave Tridon, for his part, answered Hébert’s detractors very well:
“What do you expect? He had sold box office stubs on the boulevard!”
Which of you three, Vuillaume, could have invoked the same extenuating circumstances in his own favor? None. That is the grievance. It would have been preferable to leave the peacock his feather, which was neither yours, nor Vermersch’s, nor Humbert’s, sons of the Third Estate like you, and like you squandering their talent and elocution to give the Communard movement and the working element the most dubious of pledges of inclination.
Let us move on. Vuillaume, Vermersch, and Humbert were not eighty years old between the three of them. Errors of our twenty-five years — if only we could commit you again!
After the defeat, Vuillaume took refuge in Switzerland.
With Henri Bellenger and Massenet de Marancour, brother of the composer and the gendarmerie commandant, he first crumbled, in tiny installments and under the title Men and Things of the Commune, memories still warm; he then published, in the Liberté of Brussels, one of the rare newspapers welcoming to the exiles, Six Hours at the Court Martial of the Luxembourg; (1) then, under the pseudonym Maxime Hélène, he worked for Hachette and Masson on popular science books. Finally, he became general secretary to Louis Favre, the Swiss engineer charged with boring the Saint-Gothard tunnel. He remained there until the amnesty, went shortly afterward to Russia to explore the Donets coal basin for a dynamite company, and, returning definitively to Paris in 1887, became Clemenceau’s editorial secretary at La Justice.
He has not left the press since. He contributes to Le Radical, and it was in L’Aurore, last year, that he commemorated each anniversary of the Siege and the Commune with chronicles whose substance will be found in the pages that follow.
I had long insisted to Maxime Vuillaume that he gather and complete his memories of a militant witness of the Commune. I had insisted ever since I read the episode of the court martial, that moving deposition by a condemned man who saw death as closely as Dostoevsky, but commuted his own sentence, through escape, to ten years of exile. And I insisted still more when A Little Truth About the Death of the Hostages confirmed my esteem for a narrator who was sober, meticulous, and truthful to the degree a historian can be.
But Vuillaume was in no hurry. It was no use my telling him, persisting: “Hurry. Time passes. Those who were actors in the popular tragedy of 1871 disappear each day. I will have known the last ones. Once they are gone, whom do you want us to question about this social upheaval, this earthquake of the people? Workers have given me their confidences, written or verbal; I would now like to collect those of a young man of good family, fresh as you then were from the École des Mines and from demands chewed over at the brasserie and in the acrid newsrooms.”
I could not persuade him. He would object: “Do you truly believe that this Memorial would greatly interest the rising generation, passionate as it is about sports and automobiling? And then… and then, while it is true that the number of our comrades in struggle diminishes every year, there remain enough nonetheless to justify my hesitation. I have an aversion, as you know, to dressed-up, made-up history, to detours and reticence. Tell everything or tell nothing, that is my rule. Now, it is often nearly impossible for me to tell everything without implicating comrades who are still alive or whose family, heavier than a tombstone, seems to sit upon their grave to keep it from being opened. Every day, when people speak of the War or the Commune, you hear folk exclaim: ‘How distant!… a century!’ But let you touch upon that era — not at all cooled, burning still, on the contrary — the same people, sons and grandsons of the combatants of ‘71, disapprove of revelations likely, by resurrecting the dead, to disturb the peace of the living. Under these conditions, is it not better to abstain? Later, one will not have the same reasons for restraint. It is bread for the future. The Goncourts also used to say that antiquity belongs to its professors. The French Revolution being today the food of historians, let us leave the successors of MM. Aulard and company something to chew on.”
I triumphed happily over this resistance. There will still be found, no doubt, in some passages of Vuillaume’s narratives, the regrettable initial followed by dots, designating a personage to whom the author believes he must extend the charity of anonymity, but this scruple is insufficient to stamp a provisional character on documents sifted through.
For behind what Vuillaume saw at the time, there is what Vuillaume heard, noted, verified, afterward. I know his working method. He would not trade the direct testimony of the sincere man who tells him: “I was there, such a thing befell me…” for all the glosses in the world. Nor does he conceive of the superfluity that literature introduces into a genre that does not admit of it. His short, dry, nervous, rapid sentence excels at transcribing impressions and echoing confidences. He does not embellish. He does not phonograph either. The distant voices he lets us hear, the quieted sounds he reawakens, do not reach our ear as imitations, but as the very voice and sound, in the fullness of their tone.
You would also be wrong to seek in these Memoirs a broad-brush painting of the insurrection. See it rather expressed by that die-hard, crouched alone in a newspaper kiosk on the Rue de Rennes, and sniping from there at the Gare de Montparnasse held by the Versaillais. And consider, moreover, that astonishing Paget-Lupicin, peacefully fishing with a line in the “shelters” of the old Hôtel-Dieu, while the Prefecture of Police burns and the army of order, an excited pack, hunts in the vicinity.
Line-fishing seems to be, of all occupations, the one that best allows the enthusiast to isolate himself.
Among papers of hers that I possess, a woman of letters and action whom Vuillaume knew well and who willingly shared the fate of the exiles, André Léo, relates the following:
On September 4, carried with Louise Michel by human waves toward the Corps législatif, she glimpsed, on the Quai des Tuileries, a row of fishermen so indifferent to what was happening that they did not even turn their eyes away. The Republic — or rather, if you prefer, its proclamation — was not worth a gudgeon to them!
Thus Paget-Lupicin was reducing to the vague red dot of a bobber the fiery image of his flag!
Then again, there are more illustrious examples of such feats of abstraction.
There is Hegel, distracted from his metaphysics by the cannonade of Jena, and saying to his housekeeper: “Manage as you will, but let this racket cease…”
And there is the admirable César Franck, similarly disturbed in his home on the Boulevard Saint-Michel at the time of the Siege. He was bringing into the world that joy, that masterpiece: The Beatitudes… And in the pains of composition, under the Prussian shells that battered his quarter, the great dispenser of ecstasies also moaned: “My God, how disagreeable that noise is!”
To superficial observers, Maxime Vuillaume, of skeptical and bantering humor, appears to have come back from many things. But let one not trust appearances… Irony is yet another disguise of the reformed Père Duchêne, and I prefer that mask to the other. In every line of these Notebooks of the Commune, what shows through is not regret, but pride at having been part of it. It is certainly not to exhort those who will read him not to do as he did that Vuillaume writes. He does not say he was heroic, but he says where heroism, conviction, and disinterestedness were — all things that no longer haunt the barricades.
One must take care with these old powders and handle them with caution, even when giving them a nice dry shelter in our libraries.
Our navy knows, and we know too, that these old powders are still dangerous to the safety of old ships.
Lucien Descaves
MAXIME VUILLAUME
MY RED NOTEBOOKS
I. — A DAY AT THE COURT MARTIAL OF THE LUXEMBOURG
I
rout
Six o’clock in the evening, Wednesday, May 24, 1871. Across from the Pitié hospital. The Panthéon is occupied. The Fédéré battalions descend in indescribable disorder. Somber faces, dirty with dust and gunpowder, torn clothing.
— Betrayed! We are betrayed! Montmartre is taken.
Montmartre, alas! has been occupied since the previous morning. And it is its shells — the shells captured by the army — that riddle the neighborhood. The news had been denied. Impossible to be mistaken now. The hour of enthusiastic bulletins has finished striking.
— I’ve had enough, cries an artilleryman. I’ve been fighting for three days.
And, showing his punctured and soiled jacket:
— It’s not like I’m afraid, mind you… But we’re done for. No more leaders. The wife and little ones are crying at home. I’ve had enough, I tell you.
Sadly, the man lowers his head. He hastily tears off the broad red band from his trousers, which could give him away. Useless trouble. The court martial, however thin a stripe he has kept, the poor wretch, awaits him.
The mitrailleuses bump along the cobblestones of the Rue Lacépède, dragged by the combatants. The horses have been abandoned up there.
Finally, everything has filed past. Here are still more stretchers, before which the hospital gate opens. Two or three interns are there. One of them, at each arrival, lifts the white sheet.
I approach. The intern casts a somber glance at me. I believe he spoke to me of Saint-Sulpice, from which someone arrives, and where everyone has been shot: prisoners who had taken refuge in the seminary courtyard, wounded men nailed to their ambulance beds, pell-mell with the doctor. (1)
(1) That same day, Wednesday May 24, at half-past noon, Doctor Faneau, who with his colleague L. de Franco headed the ambulance set up at the Saint-Sulpice seminary, had been shot, along with eighty wounded Fédérés.
The firing has ceased. The quay is still ours. Shall we rest? For two days I have not had a minute of sleep. In the morning I tried to stretch out on the balcony of a friendly house on the Rue Gay-Lussac. Bullets drove me out. I sat inside on a sofa. And here again a projectile, piercing the windowpane, came whistling by my ear, burying itself in the binding of a book from the library. It seemed to me that it came from the bell tower of the church of Saint-Jacques. Beware, in these days of struggle, of bell towers.
red trousers
Shall we go into this little hotel, near the Cuvier fountain… There are five or six of us who have had the same idea. At ten o’clock, everything is still silent. Certainly the troops also need to bivouac after the battle. We have the night ahead of us.
And I snore like someone who has not slept for two days… I snore with such serenity that it is five o’clock on my copper watch — I shall speak of this watch again — when the sun, freely piercing the curtainless windows, opens my eyes.
Still nothing. Not a shot. An unusual commotion, however, rises from the street. Metallic sounds. Calls… I jump out of bed. At the same moment, one of my comrades, who has been snoring too, bursts in.
— The Versaillais are here. We’re surrounded.
I rush to the window.
Below, the little square onto which the Jardin des Plantes gate opens is full of troops. In the middle, a heap of weapons surrounded by a group of soldiers. A sturdy fellow, with square shoulders, his sleeve adorned with a tricolored armband, brandishes a rifle whose butt he smashes upon the pile.
— Another one! he proclaims in a furious voice, which reaches us.
All around, uniforms, képis, belts, tossed at random on the pavement.
Leaning against the gate, two officers of the National Guard of order. Blue képi with broad white band, revolver in its yellow leather holster, high boots. Saber at the side, over a long gray overcoat. Tricolored armband sewn to the sleeve.
This tricolored armband, which I was to see again a few hours later at the court martial, I could not tear my gaze from it… For a month already, we knew that they were in storage in Paris, these armbands, ready to be pinned to the arms of the victors. And not a single effort to stamp out the conspiracy! Today, there they were in broad daylight, triumphantly displayed! Beware those they are going to recognize, arrest, push before the firing squad!
We must go down, however — flee anywhere, but flee fast. Already, we see the squads forming, entering neighboring houses, coming out with seized weapons, parcels, prisoners.
But I have papers! I may be arrested in the street. And most compromising papers. A pass to the Place Vendôme, the day of the fall of the column. (1) That is already something… Another, even more incriminating. The green card issued by the Commune, a kind of pass that was given only advisedly. It indicates my name, my first names, my profession, alas! That is more than enough to have me stood against a wall without examination. It was given to me by my friend Tridon, (1) who signed it.
I rapidly tear up the two cards, slipping the pieces under the carpet nailed to the floor.
And my képi with its double silver braid! I need a different hat. Well then, let us ring for the bellboy. There is nothing else to be done.
Good man, that bellboy! He has already guessed, before I even questioned him. Quickly he goes to fetch his own round hat.
— Sir, they came down all night, he says to me rapidly, lowering his voice. The garden is full of them. I already threw away my jacket and all the rest.
On every step of the staircase there is one sleeping.
We go out, the friend who came to find me in my room and I. My heart surely beats when I set foot on the first step.
Well then! my word, forward. And as the hotel door is crowded with soldiers chatting and laughing, who block my way, I spot, while waiting for them to make room, a sweet little blonde girl of three or four whose wild curls I caress, as if I were a regular of the house. Go ahead and take me for an insurgent now.
accursed paving stones
— Let’s head back to the quarter, shall we? I say to the friend accompanying me.
At the turn of the Rue Lacépède, we cast a glance inside the Pitié, whose gate stands wide open. I would very much like to see the intern again, ask him what has become of our prisoners.
Bang! Bang! A firing squad, very close. It comes from the Jardin des Plantes.
I turn around. The officer with the tricolored armband is still there, motionless against the gate. But now he steps aside. A group passes. In the midst of soldiers, bayonets fixed, two civilians.
Bang! Bang! Another volley. Let us go up quickly. Everywhere line soldiers, chasseurs, those I saw the day before, before the attack on the Panthéon, behind the Luxembourg railings and before the barricade on the Rue Soufflot.
The bars are full of them. They clink noisily at the counter, making their rifles ring on the floor, tossing silver coins, their belts stuffed with revolvers.
We reach the Rue de la Vieille-Estrapade. There a barricade. Two officers with armbands and gray overcoats.
— Come on! Come on! they cry to the passersby. Tear this thing down for me. And quickly.
You have to take your paving stone, throw it into the ditch full of weapons and uniforms.
— Should I take mine too? says suddenly, close by me, with a big laugh, a man in civilian clothes, himself wearing the tricolored armband.
Before continuing on his way, the policeman — for I shall soon learn that these men in black frock coats and tricolored armbands are the purveyors of the courts martial — casts a glance around him.
— And to think that among these scoundrels, he howls, there are some who built it.
And after a pause:
— Yes, but the swine, they bloody well paid for it. You should have seen it last night at the Luxembourg!
day after victory
Now it is the dreadful spectacle of the day after the victory. Streets torn up, houses scarred by shells and bullets, cobblestones black or red — black with powder, red with blood — sidewalks strewn with a thousand different things thrown from windows during the night. One must hasten to rid oneself of everything that might recall to the eyes of the searchers that one had had anything to do, near or far, with the Commune.
A glance at the Place du Panthéon. Standing before a pillar of the town hall, two officers read Delescluze’s poster (1) calling the people to arms. I am close enough to the group to recognize it. I would like to move closer still, to hear what they are saying. But I recoil in horror. In the corner that opens before me, half a dozen corpses, one of which, folded upon itself, shows its head horribly split open, bloody and emptied.
Horrible and unforgettable vision!
On the steps of the Panthéon, soldiers. On the square, more soldiers. In the middle, a sailor who shouts and sings, brandishing I know not what in his raised arm. It seems to me it is a torn woman’s bodice…
From the little street that runs along the Sainte-Geneviève library emerges a detachment of line soldiers. Some fifty prisoners in their midst. Women follow.
On the Rue Saint-Jacques, leaning against the front of that liquor establishment known as the “Academy,” the corpse of an old white-bearded man, still wearing his Fédéré jacket.
He has been there since the day before — or since the night. His outstretched legs are red with blood.
I go back down toward the boulevard. It is all decked with flags. Already, at this early hour — seven o’clock — the cafes overflow with patrons, officers and civilians, talking loudly, faces flushed.
The roadway overflows with soldiers of all arms.
Rue des Écoles, a large crowd before the great empty lot where the new Sorbonne now stands. I learned later that they were shooting people there.
I cross paths with a cart moving at a walk. The rear door is open. It is full of corpses.
At the corner of the Rue Racine and the Rue de l’École-de-Médecine, the two barricades that defended the entrance to the Boulevard Saint-Michel are broken open. In the bottom of the ditch, a mitrailleuse has rolled down, crushing a wounded white horse whose bloody spine is visible. Beneath this wreckage, the corpse of a Fédéré of giant stature, his face flattened under the wheel of the gun carriage.
The Cafe Soufflet is devastated. The day before, during the attack on the Rue des Écoles, the assailants pushed a cannon inside. To aim it at the barricade that blocked the Rue Saint-Jacques, they had to smash through the front. The cannon is still there, amid the piled-up tables, the scarred walls.
The sidewalks are strewn with foliage and branches, cut clean by projectiles.
Everywhere blood in wide pools, abandoned uniforms, heaps of broken weapons.
Closing off the Place Saint-Michel at the height of the fountain, the barricade defended the day before by the 248th. In the bottom of the ditch, stretched out, faces bloody and muddy, some ten corpses. Between their lips frozen by death, bottle necks and seasoned pipes have been planted… Infamies!
Dispatch riders pass at every moment, at full gallop. A marine fusilier passes on horseback, his rifle across the saddle, carrying, hooked to his belt, a Fédéré commander’s képi with its quadruple silver braid.
searches
I feel my arm seized. It is a friend, Henri Bellenger, editor at the Cri du Peuple of Vallès. (1)
I recount to him quickly what I have done since our last meeting, the day before, at the Panthéon town hall: the night spent on the Rue Cuvier, the terrible awakening, the flight through corpses and barricades.
— I spent the night on the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, he tells me in turn, and I don’t know how I got here. All night, searches, arrests, shootings. That whole maze of little dark streets is paved with dead. A squad of chasseurs came up to our house. About twenty of us were taken downstairs. I sat down on a curbstone, waiting. An old man in his shirt was brought, all trembling. A soldier approaches him.
— So you surrender, old man.
The old man looks at the soldier with a pleading air.
— But yes, yes… I surrender.
The soldier has his revolver raised. He continues:
— So you surrender, is that right.
— Yes, yes.
— All right then, turn around.
The old man turns and falls, never to rise again.
The soldier has smashed his skull.
— All night, Bellenger continued, they shot people in the market of the Place Maubert, whose gates they closed. Against the big barricade on the square, there are heaps. There are also some at the bottom of the stone stairs that lead to the Rue Jean-de-Beauvais. After the capture of the Rue Saint-Séverin, the Fédérés who had taken refuge in the church were all shot. They are still at the crossroads. As I passed the Rue Saint-Jacques, I saw in a corner two women shot dead, one of whom still had a red cockade stuck in her brown hair.
And, lowering his voice:
— The court martial is set up at the Luxembourg.
— We must, however, I say, figure out how to take shelter. We can’t stay any longer in the street. Everyone knows us around here.
— Let’s go to my place. My house is safe.
At Bellenger’s, on the Place de l’École-de-Médecine, we find our mutual friend A…, a medical student, today a doctor in a department near Paris, who had been assistant surgeon of the 248th Fédéré, the former battalion of Longuet (1), during the Siege.
— It’s simple to move about without danger of arrest, A… tells me calmly. They don’t arrest doctors. Put on an ambulance armband like me.
And he slipped on my arm the armband with the red cross of the Geneva Convention.
We went out, A… and I, having decided to go first to the Rue de Madame to check on our old friend Rogeard, the author of the Sayings of Labienus. (2)
We walk along the Rue de Tournon and then the Rue de Vaugirard, moving fast and without looking around us too much.
We had barely passed the door of the Petit Luxembourg, today the hotel of the presidency of the Senate, when we heard double footsteps ring on the sidewalk. At the same time, a hand fell on each of us:
— Where are you going like that?
— But we’re going… we’re going for a walk.
— Very well, very well. But first come in here with us.
And two policemen, wearing the tricolored armband, pushed us into the courtyard already swarming with prisoners.
We were at the Court Martial.
II
Citizen!
The courtyard of the Senate — the small courtyard that opens onto the Rue de Vaugirard, not the great courtyard of honor that faces the Rue de Tournon — is full of soldiers, policemen, people of every age and every costume. Men are penned in the corners, motionless, their faces marked with an indefinable and heartrending sadness. Others pass running, surrounded by line soldiers, bayonets fixed. Officers in campaign dress, revolvers at their belts, lean against the walls or stroll about smoking. In a corner, a man with a tricolored armband converses animatedly. He is surrounded by three or four soldiers, including a sergeant-major, to whom he seems to be giving orders. With his finger he indicates the thickets that form, at the end of the courtyard, a great green curtain. I shall learn only shortly what dreadful spectacle this infamous curtain hides.
A firing squad rings out to the right. I have the rapid sensation that it has been fired very close to me, perhaps right in those thickets that just passed before my eyes. I turn around. But abruptly I feel pushed by the shoulder, by a solid and heavy hand, certainly the same hand that seized me two minutes ago.
— Come on! Come on! Let’s not dawdle…
We are both in a small dark room where, confusedly, I sense mysterious and cruel things stirring. I need not open my eyes long before there detaches itself, never again to leave me, a vision of horror and blood.
Ah! here it is indeed, that court martial whose name, since the defeat, is spoken only with terror. I am only in the anteroom. It is already the slaughterhouse, with large parcels wide open on the floor from which clothes, weapons, papers spill.
I am standing, waiting for I know not what. The man with the armband has left us. He asked me nothing. Nor my friend. Why the devil then did he collar us? Certainly we had not been denounced in advance. He knew neither one of us. It is an error, and surely, as soon as we give our names — false names of course — we shall be set free.
Before me, I see my man with the armband returning. He heads toward us. He is alone. Another, wearing the tricolored ribbon like him, joins him. They enter. But, I say to myself, looking at them, they don’t look so villainous after all!
One of them even has a good big cheerful face, with a mass of curly brown hair and big black poodle eyes. The other, blond, is harder of face, with a handlebar mustache that makes him look like a disguised gendarme.
To this gendarme I shall never speak. But the other? What if I tried? Precisely, he comes closer. He is the one who speaks:
— What have you got there, on your arm?
— It’s a Geneva Convention armband.
— What’s that? Don’t know that armband.
For him, surely, there is no other armband than the one he proudly wears on the sleeve of his black frock coat, an ample, brand-new frock coat that gives him the peaceful and well-to-do air of a journeyman craftsman. This word Geneva has moreover annoyed him. I saw it from his frown. Geneva? Geneva? He must not be very strong on geography.
— Come, come, what on earth is this? he says again.
— It is — and I put into my sentence my most insinuating accent of sincerity — it is — and I stress every word to overcome his doubt — it is the armband of the International Convention of Geneva.
Oh, how my man jumped!
— International! International! he howls with a rage that nearly makes him foam. So you’re from the International! Oh! God damn it!
And he turns around, triumphant, toward the gendarmes, whom I see seated on the benches, nodding approval.
And he bellows:
— The International!
I want to reply. I try to plead my case. In what fashion, alas!
— But, citizen, I say softly, the Intern—
— Citizen! Citizen! Oh! God damn it! That’s even better. Don’t call me citizen… or I’ll stick my boot up your ass.
And with a formidable shove of his broad paw, the good poodle of a moment ago, suddenly rabid, sits me down on the bench, where I am crushed, defeated, thunderstruck.
With a violent gesture the man with the armband adds:
— And take good care of this one. He must be a good one!
between the two gendarmes
At this outburst, two gendarmes detach themselves from the long bench where they make a large blue blotch, sprinkled with bright points that are the uniform buttons and the pommels of sabers. They come to bracket me, so tightly that I feel their thick bodies press me as in a vise.
And I think to myself:
— I’m done for this time. A while ago I could still have got out of it. Picked up by chance in the street, with no indication, with my smooth-faced look where a semblance of mustache shows, not looking like an insurgent at all — who the devil would have recognized me! But now it’s another matter. Here I am marked out. I called that man “citizen.” I can be nothing other than a dangerous scoundrel… Citizen! What a bad habit we really picked up during the Siege! Blast! Why did my tongue slip… And to think that my skin is compromised by a single word, three simple syllables.
How to get out of this?…
It is about ten o’clock. I have eaten nothing since the day before. Four long hours since I have been running through the streets. And with what emotions! I see again for a moment the corpse of the Fédéré at the barricade on the Rue Racine, and, lined up, the insulted corpses of the Place Saint-Michel.
A firing squad cuts short my reveries…
I examine the room, the anteroom where I wait. A bare room, with wainscoting of a dirty gray. All around, benches. And on these benches, other people, arrested like me, like me squeezed at the sides by gendarmes. Not a word, not a breath.
Two steps away, my friend A… I almost envy his fate. He did not mention “citizen.” What if they release him and keep me, all alone! I feel a shiver of envy, of jealousy, thinking that in an hour he could be free. Where shall I be?
I begin to think of everything that might save me. First, I shall shortly give a false name. What shall I call myself? A good bourgeois name, that arouses no suspicion. And I think of the name of a school friend — the school at Étampes, where I began my studies — which comes to mind. I recall: Langlois. I did indeed call myself Langlois. If the records of the provost of the Luxembourg have been preserved, which is very unlikely, one would find this name:
“Langlois, arrested Rue de Vaugirard, nine o’clock in the morning, Thursday May 25, questioned at one o’clock. Sent to the queue.”
I shall explain later this expression: “Sent to the queue.”
At the court martial of the Luxembourg, it was death.
my watch
I cannot yet foresee the sentence. All I can do is build in my brain a plan of escape. Do I have on me anything that might give me away? For they will search me. And I go over in my memory the contents of my pockets. My Commune cards, I tore them up this very morning before leaving the hotel on the Rue Cuvier, where I spent the night. I have no other papers. On that score I am easy.
Suddenly, I feel a white-hot iron burning my throat.
— My watch! My copper watch, in my vest pocket! It is you who will give me away, wretched watch…
Eight days earlier, I bought a watch, a poor gilded copper watch, which cost me the modest sum of nine francs.
On the case, I engraved with the point of a penknife my name, my address, and, beside it, this terrible notation: editor of the Père Duchêne. Below, a Vive la Commune, damn it! It is my certain death sentence.
Who will rid me of this watch?
How gladly I would snatch it from my fob! How I would crush it under my feet! How I would grind it to a thousand pieces!
But I am caught between my two gendarmes, a prisoner, reduced to immobility. Try putting your hand in your pocket, pulling out this watch! And where to throw it? They would pick it up. They would read the incriminating inscription.
And yet, I slowly stretch my arm, slide it down to my pocket, seize the watch, which I grip in my hand, pass my arm behind my back, extend it to the bench, and with a pounding heart, slowly, silently, I open my hand. The watch slips out. It has fallen… I alone heard a small dry sound… No one stirred around me…
Oh! the brave, the excellent watch that I was cursing just now! It bore me no grudge for perhaps having dented its gilded shell.
I am quite joyful at this deliverance. I have nothing more in my pockets. Ah! now let the provost come! I shall tell him I am M. Langlois, a good young student fellow, who put on a red-cross armband only to walk more quietly in the street, and who is not, not in the least, of the Commune…
I have often wondered, and I wonder still, as I tell this episode of my passage through the court martial, who could have found my watch. Let him bring it back to me, if he still has it. I promise him an honest reward.
“Socialism”
My victory was quickly to have its reverse.
I had barely recovered a moment of rest and confidence when I was recalled to the sense of reality by the entrance of a group — soldiers, policemen, prisoners — which noisily burst into the room.
I counted half a dozen unfortunates who had very probably just been rounded up in a search. I can still see them before me. One, a tall devil, was wearing National Guard trousers. He was in shirtsleeves. His face, hollowed with fatigue, said clearly enough that he had been fighting, that he had returned home, and there had been caught, probably denounced by a neighbor. Two young men, two women, one of them with a child in her arms.
They went and stood in a row across from us.
The two policemen threw to the ground an enormous parcel, which they set about opening. I saw books tumble out. I find in my notes, transcribed as soon as I set foot on hospitable soil, the title of one of these books that rolled near me:
SOCIALISM, by Th. Besnard, editor of the Siècle. (1)
One of the agents had picked it up, this book. And he cast furious looks at the two young men at whose home the book had been seized — SOCIALISM! — A perfectly harmless book, but whose accusing title perhaps led the two prisoners all the way to the firing squad.
a priest
A lieutenant had just entered. And with him, a priest, a chaplain.
I shall never forget this priest. A tall old man with a thin profile, a hooked nose, long curling graying hair. His eyes shone, deep-set beneath the prominent arch. A large cross of the Légion d’honneur pinned to his cassock.
The policeman went to him:
— Father, you might wish to see the provost. He is having lunch nearby, at the Foyot restaurant.
— Ah! said the priest.
And he was about to turn back, calm and hard, this chaplain of the Luxembourg, when the policeman, who had just rummaged in one of the parcels torn open in the middle of the room, drew from it a weapon, one of those baroque weapons that the patriotism fanatics manufactured during the Siege, a sort of gigantic hook, forged from a bayonet, whose sharp prongs made one shudder and laugh at the same time…
— Ah! Father, Father, cried the man, brandishing the hook, the bastards, that’s what they wanted to stick in our bellies!
The priest had a smile. Approval or disdain for the grotesque outburst of the imbecile informer. He went out, and I saw him cross the courtyard.
the Provost
The little room fell back into silence, broken here and there by the bursts of laughter and oaths of the policemen. From time to time a prisoner arrived and sat down, in line, on one of the benches. Detonations rang out. A double door opened a crack. I strained my ear. Calls, protestations, sobs… The door closed again.
One of the two women who for an hour had been crouching in a corner rose and tried to speak. What did she say? I could hear nothing. She was begging. The policeman pushed her back. I believe she was asking for water. She returned to the place she had left, sat down on the ground again, and, unbuttoning her bodice, offered her breast to her child. The child began to nurse in silence, without a cry, happy in that hell.
Noon. The twelve strokes of the Luxembourg clock ring out. I think of my watch. I feel like picking it up, to see if it is on time. This gives me a flash of gaiety. Truly, I did put one over on them, my two good gendarmes. They are dozing, moreover, and I sense around me the floating cloud, the vapor of brandy.
Two men pass. One of them, a leather briefcase under his arm, wears black lustrine cuffs, like a careful clerk. They open a door. I catch a glimpse of a table, chairs, barred windows looking onto the Rue de Vaugirard.
In the courtyard, a great commotion arises. Officers stir. Among them, a senior officer I have not yet seen. I recognize him from his photograph, on display in all the shop windows during the Siege. It is General de Cissey. (1) Stout, short, his gray hair in a brush cut, he buckles his belt…