Mes cahiers rouges. V
My Red Notebooks
Maxime Vuillaume
V. — Through the Revolted City
THE ENTRY OF THE PRUSSIANS
First of March, 1871
Boulevard Saint-Michel. Past midnight. The tocsin rings at Saint-Severin. Groups file past in silence, with hurried steps, heading toward the quays. At morning, at the first glimmers of day, tonight perhaps, they say, the Prussians are going to enter.
I meet some guards from my battalion, the 248th. Let us go where the others go. To the ramparts. All along the road, we cross companies under arms. Place de la Concorde, the statues of the Cities of France are veiled in black. A long crepe covers them entirely, like a lugubrious hood. At the Arc de Triomphe, the avenues are full of people, soldiers, National Guards, anxious onlookers. The silence of this crowd is terrifying. Only the rustling of rifles that are stacked, here and there, in sheaves, breaks this deathly monotony.
At the bastions. Two o’clock strikes somewhere. There are a few battalions there, mingled with one another. Some guards have taken shelter in the casemates to sleep. The question is everywhere the same. At what hour are they going to enter? And we listen. We strain our ears.
A distant bugle call… Could this already be the signal? Another call, nearer. No more doubt. It is them!
And we seem to hear the gallop of horses drawing closer. The gate is going to open. They are going to burst through. Let us flee. Let us flee quickly…
We go back down the long avenue.
The crowd at the Arc de l’Etoile has dispersed. Only about a hundred guards remain, surrounded by street urchins. We stop.
— They’re coming… They’re very close.
We were wrong. The victors were not to enter until eight o’clock. The hussars first, as scouts. At three o’clock, the main body of enemy troops passed through the walls, after the review at Longchamp.
Good morning, little soldier!
We return to the Latin Quarter. Lunch at noon, at our brasserie on the rue Saint-Severin. Everyone is there. Valles, Longuet, Rogeard, Gill. Pilotell, Fremine, in artilleryman’s costume. Our friend Maitre in the uniform of the Vincennes chasseurs. Humbert, Lullier, Rigault. Others and still others. I recount our nighttime dash. Old father Beslay, who is seventy-six, comes in. At the gate of his house on the rue du Cherche-Midi, he has had a black flag planted. He tells us that everywhere, in the streets he has just crossed, the shops are shut. Everywhere the sign of mourning for the profaned city. No newspapers.
GREAT DAYS
I go out with a friend from Pyat’s Vengeur, Henri Bellenger. Mechanically, we walk along the quays. We retrace the route I took during the night. From the Pont Solferino onward, a confused swarming, dotted with brilliant patches, appears to us along the riverbank, at the corner of the Pont de la Concorde.
As we draw nearer, the brilliant patches take shape and form. They are the Prussian helmets. The dark patches are the uniforms and the black caterpillars of the Bavarians. We are soon close enough to hear the horses neighing.
Shall we go farther? The blood rises to our foreheads.
Is not our visit to the victors something like a betrayal? Does our heart not clench at the memory of those comrades of ours who remained out there, beyond the ramparts, in the fields covered with bloody snow?
It is decided. We shall go.
Here we are on the right bank, facing the barricade erected at the corner of the Tuileries terrace and the quay.
A narrow lane forms a passage. On our side, the French side — on this accursed day, there is German territory in Paris — a little infantryman, sad, weary-looking.
— Good morning, little soldier!
The infantryman does not answer. With the tip of his rifle, he points out, jutting above the paving stones, the spike of the helmet of the foreigner who is also standing guard two paces away, on the other side — the Prussian side.
The soldier inspects us rapidly with his gaze. It is strictly forbidden to keep any vestige of a uniform.
— You must remove that!
I have kept, out of habit, my belt, a fine officer’s belt, whose plate with the Gallic rooster gleams at the bottom of my waistcoat.
I remove the belt and throw it on the paving stones.
We pass through.
The Prussian soldier, a stout fellow with a red beard, big, plump, chubby, does not flinch.
How healthy the rascal looks! What a contrast between this colossus who has certainly never lacked for anything during the campaign, as hard and perilous though it was for him as for our men, stuffed with sausages and beer, swollen with health and pride — and our poor little infantryman, gaunt, puny, disheveled, whose sunken belly attests to the nights without sleep and the days without food. These two soldiers alone tell the whole reason for our defeat.
Parisse! Parisse!
Place de la Concorde. The fine, gleaming Prussian soldiers! They are all like the sentry. Polished, brushed, waxed, fattened — on purpose, perhaps, for the entry. Red hussars, white cuirassiers, blue Bavarians, spiked helmets, ball-topped helmets, helmets surmounted by the eagle. Sabers dragging in a clatter of metal on the pavement. Here is a group of about fifty men marching in step, commanded by an officer. Their headgear is crowned with foliage torn from the trees of the Champs-Elysees groves. We follow them with our eyes. The garden gate opens. They are going to visit, we learned later, the galleries of the Louvre, the Tuileries, which would not keep for long — a well-deserved punishment — the traces of the victors’ footsteps.
Near the fountain, a flat-capped officer caracoles, pointing at the crepe-wrapped heads of the statues, the Marly Horses that have been enclosed, since the announcement of the bombardment, in crates. The officer leans over his saddle to chat with five or six young men in berets and long uniform tunics. With the tip of his riding crop, he points to the Madeleine and, turning about, to the Palais-Bourbon.
The group draws nearer to the quay. There, it is the magnificent spectacle of Paris in the distance, with the majestic line of the river, the bridges, the domes, the spires, the bell towers, the towers. Notre-Dame, the Sainte-Chapelle, the Palais de Justice, the Tour Saint-Jacques. All that is mystery. The barricade forbids going further.
— Ah! Parisse! Parisse! the soldiers exclaim with their Germanic accent. Parisse!
And they stretch their arms toward the horizon as if they wished to seize and carry away with them all these marvels and all these riches that they only glimpse, as in a dream…
It was well worth the trouble of taking Paris, of suffering, of risking death a hundred times, of crowning themselves with laurels, to be penned in here, like a herd of prisoners!
Pig of a Prussian!
Cours-la-Reine. Cavalry. Artillery. The cannons stretch their necks of steel. These are the cannons that vanquished us. The legend has circulated, since the first battles, that while our artillerymen were firing furiously, the Prussian soldiers were calmly eating their soup behind their batteries. Our projectiles did not reach them. And so, how one stares at those cannons! The horses are tied to the trees. A memory of the Cossacks and the Invasion. Near the guns, the soldiers chat, laugh, smoke their long pipes. Here is one, with a placid face and big blue eyes, who wears, hooked to a button of his jacket, his tobacco pouch. A street urchin approaches him. He touches the pouch, flicks it with a snap. The Prussian does not flinch. The little rascal grows bolder, sneering in the colossus’s face.
— You Prussian. Sausage eater.
The soldier says nothing.
— Pig of a Prussian!…
The soldier has understood. He smiles, unhooks his pouch, and threatens the boy, who backs away and runs off.
White Cuirassiers
On the avenue. Great commotion. The berets rise, the soldiers take a military posture. What is happening? Hurrahs burst forth.
Still far off, halfway to the Arc de Triomphe, a wide white band, fringed with gold at the top, stands out against the dark background of the troops. Little by little the group draws near. They are white cuirassiers. Beneath the half-open cloak, which entirely covers the haunches of the powerful horses, gleam the golden straps of the cuirass. The glittering helmet, surmounted by the proud eagle, curves backward, hiding the nape of the rider’s neck. The mustachioed face is as if sculpted in marble. One would say it was some vision from ancient times, a spiral detached from Trajan’s Column.
The white cuirassiers pass in silence, impassive, with a rustling of iron. In their midst, a carriage that they escort. Seated on the cushions, wrapped in their great gray cloaks, two officers. Who?
Vergiss mein nicht
We climb as far as the Palais de l’Industrie. A military band has assembled, tuning its brasses, its oboes, its drums. The fifes whistle. All around, the soldiers form a circle.
A soft waltz rises. And these men, their long porcelain pipes between their teeth, their tobacco pouches swaying with the dance, begin to turn as if they were at a kermesse.
— Let us go, said the friend who accompanied me. We have seen enough…
We cross back over the barricade on the quay. The Prussian soldier, polished, spruce, still stands guard. The little infantryman, weary and sad, has sat down on the paving stones.
My belt was still there. I did not dare take it back…
MARCH 18
To arms! To arms!
Evening of March 17. Half past eleven. Sornet and I leave the little brasserie on the rue Saint-Severin. A damp night, blurred with fog. The Boulevard Saint-Michel deserted. Barely, here and there, a few groups of National Guards in long gray overcoats left open. A few of them, chilly, still have wrapped around their necks the knitted woolen muffler that they wore all through the winter of the siege.
We go back up to the Luxembourg, where two regiments of the line are encamped, having arrived very recently in Paris.
Behind the railings, the soldiers press close, showing their anxious and emaciated faces. The officers walk about in silence. In the distance, reflected on the great trees, the bivouac fires. Here and there, the stacked rifles gleam.
— We have been here three days, a soldier tells us, whom we question through the railings. We come from the Army of the North. The night from Wednesday to Thursday (the night of the 15th to the 16th) we spent under canvas, in the mud, already exhausted by fatigue and hunger. It was only yesterday that they gave us straw.
But the officer has approached.
The soldier falls silent and continues his solitary walk.
He passes before us again soon. And, through his teeth, without stopping:
— It is for this morning… at Montmartre.
I do not let the soldier finish. So they are going to attack Montmartre… In a few hours! The troops are perhaps already scaling the Butte.
— Let us go home, I say to Sornet. And if you hear anything, come fetch me and we shall go together.
Rue du Sommerard, where I live, the National Guard post that occupies the ground-floor shop is at full strength. I enter. The rifles are in the rack, ready to be seized at the first signal.
— Do you have news? the post commander asks me.
— Yes, it is for this morning.
I spend reading and dreaming the few hours that separate me from daybreak.
Five o’clock strikes, then six. The fog has vanished. Day has risen, clear in a whitish sky. Nothing, not a sound, not a signal. On the sidewalk below, two guards are sitting, legs outstretched, dozing.
Suddenly, a muffled detonation.
— A cannon shot!
The two guards rise.
— That comes from the sector, says one of them. It is Duval firing.
Why from the sector? So it is not the Buttes that are being attacked?
But before I have had time for the least reflection, the drums beat the recall. And also the generale. The deserted streets fill with an agitated crowd, barely awake. Here a guard hurriedly pulls on his overcoat. There an officer buckles his belt.
— To arms! To arms! Montmartre is taken! To Montmartre! To Montmartre!
At the Buttes of Montmartre!
I race down my stairs. Quickly to the rue Cujas, where Sornet lives, who surely must have stayed up like me and be on his feet. Sornet is snoring like a drum. I have to pull him by the arm that hangs out of the bed.
— Can you not hear the generale!
The animal does not budge.
I glance around. On the chair, a checked red and black flannel shirt. Wait! I recognize that shirt. Is it not the one belonging to the beautiful Henriette, the pretty cantiniere of the 248th? Hmm! My fellow may well be a heavy sleeper.
I investigate the alcove. I have made a rash judgment.
The cantiniere’s shirt is indeed on the chair, but the pretty girl is not there. Sornet’s skull gleams alone, like an ivory ball, on the pillow.
— Come now! Come now, old Sornet, quick out of bed. A fine day is shaping up for the Pere Duchene! We are going to reappear this evening. This time, old fellow, this is it! Buckle your belt and let us run to victory!
In the blink of an eye, my friend has pulled on his trousers, buttoned his jacket, put on his kepi. We are in the street, both of us so busy that I completely forget to make him tell me the story, which must be tolerably amusing, of the beautiful cantiniere’s shirt.
We go rapidly back up the boulevard, whose shops are still shuttered. At the corner of the Pont Saint-Michel, a detachment of National Guards are encamped, standing at arms. At the entrance to the rue Montmartre, plastered on the wall of Saint-Eustache, a great white poster before which people stop, the government’s proclamation, announcing the recapture of the cannons.
As we advance, the crowd grows and becomes noisy. News begins to circulate. The Buttes are occupied. The Boulevard Clichy, the Boulevard Rochechouart, everything is full of troops. They are already bringing the cannons down the rue Lepic. There are about ten in the Place Moncey.
— At last, we can breathe easy, ventures a gentleman in a frock coat. And not a moment too soon…
The looks, menacing, fix upon the fellow, who slips away quickly.
To Berlin the Cannons
Halfway up the rue de Clichy, an enormous flood shows its first columns, shouting, howling, pouring down in incredible disorder. We press ourselves against the houses so as not to be swept away by the torrent.
— The gendarmes! The gendarmes! Down with the cops!
Behind this fleeing herd, we see the blue kepis with their white bands of the gendarmes surge up and the steel of naked sabers flash.
There are not only gendarmes; there are also mounted chasseurs, who push back the crowd at a walk.
We are at the outer boulevard.
In three ranks the gendarmerie occupies the roadway and the sidewalk. The Avenue de Clichy is blocked, as are the neighboring streets. We must maneuver with miracles of prudence so as not to be crushed by the horses that paw the ground, maddened by the clamor, motionless since the first hours of the day.
The Place Moncey is guarded by the military. The roadway is cleared. Not a sound, except the clinking of scabbards against the riders’ saddles.
But now a heavy rumbling begins to emerge; then a resonant thunder. The first heads of the train horses appear. Here are the cannons.
— To Berlin the cannons! cries a jeering voice.
— Montmartre is done for! someone whispers in my ear in a familiar voice.
I turn around. A silent handshake.
It is that excellent Gill, who has also gone up to the Buttes, and whose heart bleeds like mine.
And the cannons — our cannons — pass and vanish. They are eight-pounders and mitrailleuses, the ones we paid for out of our own pockets during the siege. Everyone paid for cannons in those days of ardent patriotism. The notaries gave their cannon to the fatherland, and I believe even the bailiffs subscribed. There they are today, those glorious pieces, going off sadly, each under the escort of a squad of gendarmes, to the impound or the depot. In truth, they are being led to the Parc Monceau. All along the procession, foot soldiers run, rifles cocked in hand.
At last, the final piece has passed. I counted twelve.
Only twelve pieces. But the Montmartre park holds a hundred and seventy-one! I saw them, I touched them yesterday. That is the figure the post captain gave me. Twelve out of a hundred and seventy-one! Come, there is still hope.
Butts in the Air
— There is fighting in the Place Pigalle! Vinoy is a prisoner!
A National Guard has just slipped this into our ear. Gill and Sornet have heard.
It takes no more for all three of us, lifted as by a spring, without even having consulted one another, to go down the rue de Clichy. We can reach the Place Blanche through the side streets. The march is not easy. The gendarmes occupy every street. Fortunately, Gill and I are in civilian clothes. As for our friend Sornet, we are forced to leave him behind on the way, his uniform being suspect.
It is approximately nine o’clock or half past nine when we arrive in the rue Duperre. Over the heads, we see, spread across the whole width of the square, the blue uniforms of the chasseurs. But are we not going to find an observation post?
— Why, of course! says Gill, a friend has his studio on the fourth floor. We shall have front-row seats.
We go up. The friend is not there. There is only a little artist’s model at his place, who does us the honors of the house, and who trembles, who trembles with all her little model’s heart.
The spectacle is well calculated to frighten the poor girl. The square is packed with troops. Still gendarmes. Still chasseurs. The rue Frochot is blocked by a detachment, and the rue Pigalle too.
— Half an hour ago, the little model tells us, a general on horseback arrived in the square. He drew his saber. People shouted, whistled, threw stones.
The streets climbing the Butte are all occupied.
— But there are also red trousers, observes Gill, who has trained a field glass in the direction of the rue Houdon… And red trousers with their butts in the air… Well, things are not so bad for us after all. There is the line fraternizing with us… What the devil can be happening up there!
The Finest Day of My Life!
Up there, as we shall learn shortly, the cannons seized at five o’clock had been quickly retaken. The Butte, at the very moment when, in the Place Clichy, we were watching the eight-pounders and mitrailleuses file past, had been reconquered long before. Those soldiers fraternizing at the entrance to the rue Houdon with our National Guards are the soldiers of the 88th and the 137th, soldiers of the Army of the North, comrades of the soldiers encamped at the Luxembourg. The cannons we saw pass are the only ones that were taken away. Those they tried to bring down afterward, they were stopped in the rue Lepic. The men cut the traces of the harnesses, the women hung on the arms of the artillerists.
— Leave us our cannons, sirs artillerists. They belong to us.
And the artillerists let it happen, just as the soldiers up there had let it happen.
Gill, Sornet, whom we had found again, and I entered a wine merchant’s on the rue Lepic who can boast of having had his apotheosis that day. Before his door, one of the cannons from the Buttes had been stopped that morning. And this cannon, they were garlanding it like a god. They were bedecking it with ribbons. They were clinking glasses on its bronze back. By itself, it was the altar of the Fatherland.
Before the counter, a dozen or so National Guards were emptying their glasses, with conquering eyes, their brows high and radiant.
— Ah! old fellow, old fellow, said one of them to his neighbor, his face illuminated, his eyes full of tears, ah! old fellow, you see. Today is the finest day of my life!
THE COLUMN
Survivors of Austerlitz
Tuesday, May 16, 1871. Vermersch and I have had lunch next to the newspaper office, at a little wine merchant’s where we sometimes go with Pyat, at the entrance to the narrow part of the rue du Croissant.
— Let us go to the Place Vendome, I say to Vermersch. Protot will surely give us a corner of the balcony at the ministry.
We have barely taken a few steps along the rue Montmartre when we meet Courbet. We both know him. Oh, the merry evenings at Laveur’s, at the Brasserie Suisse, at Andler’s! The Brasserie Suisse on the rue de l’Ecole de Medecine has long since vanished. The Brasserie Andler, rue Hautefeuille, vanished too. Vanished the last of them, the pension Laveur on the rue Serpente. Who will bring us back the noisy table parties, Pierre Dupont and Courbet, The Fir Trees and The Oxen, sung in a resounding voice, while we, the young ones, applauded?
Buckled into his gigantic indigo-blue frock coat, Courbet accosts us.
— Are you coming to the Place Vendome? Vermersch asks him.
Courbet does not answer. It seems to us that a certain unease darkens his face. Abruptly, he pulls from his pocket a bundle of papers of all sizes and all colors. He draws us toward an isolated corner of the street, and, thrusting under our noses one of the letters he holds in his hand:
— Read that. But read that…
I have barely glanced at the letter Courbet showed us when a mad desire to laugh seizes me.
— You are laughing, you little one, Courbet says to me, quite seriously.
Ah, if I am not laughing with all my might, it is because I am biting my lips until they bleed. Beside me, I see the turned-up nose of Vermersch, reddening with hilarity. At last, I can stand it no longer, and we both let ourselves go with all our heart.
The letter Courbet shows us is one of those idiotic missives that one is liable to receive in days of struggle like the one in the midst of which we are all living. The imbecile correspondent, or simply the prankster, threatens Courbet with all the thunderbolts of the universe if the column falls.
— The day when “my old emperor” falls, he writes, or words to that effect, the thread of your days shall be cut, wretched assassin… etc.
Courbet shows us a whole packet of them. In one, they threaten to stab him at night when he comes home alone. In another, he will be thrown into the Seine when he crosses the bridges — he lives on the left bank. A third predicts death at table by poison, etc. And there are comical signatures, crossed daggers, “old soldiers of Napoleon the First,” “survivors of Saint Helena,” who swear to avenge the victor of Austerlitz upon the hide of the poor great artist.
We reassure Courbet as best we can.
— Would you like us to have you escorted by a squad from the Children of Pere Duchene? we tell him. They are fellows who are not faint-hearted, and who don’t give a damn about your old grenadiers…
Courbet ends up laughing about it with us. He seems completely reassured when we arrive at the Place de l’Opera.
Place Vendome
An enormous crowd fills the rue de la Paix. Above it, straight in a sky of superb purity — a Floreal sky — the column rises. The red flag, fixed to the balustrade, softly caresses the face of Caesar. A triple cable hangs from the top, attaching to the capstan that, shortly, is going to turn and pull the monument toward it.
A rumble rises from the crowd. Is this already the column’s last hour?
— Let us hurry, Vermersch says to me. It looks like it is moving!
Step by step, we advance through the human mass.
We listen to what our neighbors are saying. Few people are protesting. The dominant note is the fear of seeing something collapse.
— It is going to burst the sewer of the rue de la Paix, says one.
— What if it demolished the houses on the square! says another.
Of the column itself, of Napoleon, of the Grande Armee, of Austerlitz, nothing.
The shops are shuttered. Pasted on the windowpanes, long strips of paper in a cross, to absorb the vibrations.
At last, we arrive at the barricade that closes off the square. We present our credentials to the sentry.
I examine at my leisure the capstan, held to the ground by an anchor, and the two pulleys around which the cables fixed to the top are wound.
As for the column itself, I climbed up on its pedestal only the day before. The demolition contractors’ plan is quite simple. The column, cut “on a bevel” at the base of the shaft, on the side facing the rue de la Paix, has been sawed on the opposite side. The notch and the sawed portion each represent a third of the thickness of the stone tube — and not bronze, the bronze forming only a thin covering. By the operation of the capstan, the column is to give way at its base, and its top to fall first onto the bed of fascines and manure that has been prepared below. The column, being only thirty-four meters in height, cannot, when toppled, reach the entrance to the rue de la Paix.
The barricade crossed, we head toward the Ministry of Justice. We have our best friends there. Almost every morning, I go to have lunch there. The table is set in the first-floor room that looks out onto the square, and of which I recall one detail, a canvas by Daubigny, a field of ripe grain weeded by a beautiful girl, with a very low sky and a cluster of trees.
— One fine day, I shall roll up this Daubigny and carry it off, I would say laughingly to Protot, who presided over the table.
Caesar Toppled
There is a crowd in the great hall of the ministry. The balcony is already fully occupied. Through the wide-open windows, the square appears, swarming with uniforms. The sun burns the paving stones. Standing, leaning against the balustrade of the column, a young commandant of one of those many battalions of Avengers, or Defenders, or Turcos, in a red jacket, upon which, resplendent, a triple row of aiguillettes glitters.
At the corners of the square, bands whose brasses sparkle.
Below us, five or six members of the Commune. Miot, with his tall stature and his long white beard. Ferre, very small, his face overgrown with a black beard, his hooked nose, two black eyes, very black, very gentle, which gleam nevertheless, behind the pince-nez, with a strange flame.
On the pedestal of the column, half a dozen men, conversing animatedly, studying with their gaze the gash in the shaft.
— A few more saw cuts, commands one of them.
And the saw resumes biting into the stone. A slight white cloud escapes.
— That will do. We can pull.
It is half past three.
They pull.
Crack… The capstan breaks. The cables go slack…
Murmurs of disappointment. They say there are wounded.
They go for other pulleys. A long hour of waiting.
And they roll into a corner of the square, out of harm’s way, the telescope of the open-air astronomer, left there and about to be crushed too, though it was quite innocent.
A quarter past five. On the pedestal, men are driving wedges into the wound at the foot of the shaft. The monster resists. The bands, to keep the crowd patient, play the Marseillaise. The rue de Castiglione, the rue de la Paix, are full of heads that one glimpses, swarming, behind the barricades.
The bands fall abruptly silent. An officer is at the top. He removes the red flag, which he replaces with a tricolor.
A shiver runs through my veins. It seems to me that the column is moving.
The officer has vanished. He is coming down the staircase.
If, at this moment, it fell with him!
But here he is.
I heave something like a sigh of relief. What madness crossed my brain! Ah, it is still solid. Surely the cable is going to pull in vain.
Before my eyes there passes suddenly, like the beating wing of a gigantic bird. A monstrous zigzag… Ah, I shall never forget it, that colossal shadow that crossed my gaze!…
Thud!…
A cloud of dust.
It is all over.
The column is on the ground, split open, its stone entrails to the wind… Caesar is lying on his back, decapitated.
The head, crowned with laurels, has rolled, like a pumpkin, to the edge of the sidewalk. The bronze Victory has not budged… By evening, she had disappeared.
Victory and Reverses
No luck, that little Victory! The history of her reverses is curious.
When the Bourbons returned in 1814, the statue of Napoleon was taken down from its pedestal for the first time.
Napoleon was, as he still is today, represented as a Roman emperor, standing, his brow wreathed in laurels, the imperial mantle held by a fibula on the right shoulder. Standing in his right hand, a winged Victory.
While the statue was being lowered, the Victory disappeared.
It is said that she was stolen by a workman, who abandoned her one day at a wine merchant’s, as security for an unpaid feast. Austerlitz at the tavern — that is no trifle!
The wine merchant, frightened by the responsibility he was incurring, rid himself of the Victory by taking her to the Prefecture of Police. Sold at auction among objects found on the public way and unclaimed, she was bought by an employee of the Prefecture, M. Boyenval, for the trifling sum of 32 francs.
Justly proud of his find, the happy possessor of the Victory had her mounted on a base, and he enjoyed for thirty years the sight of the work of art, placed in the position of honor on the mantelpiece of his drawing room.
M. Boyenval died. Louis-Napoleon, President of the Republic, bought the Victory and paid several thousand francs for her to the employee’s heirs.
When Louis-Napoleon became Emperor, the statue of Napoleon that reigned, by the grace of Louis-Philippe, at the summit of the column, was the one with the gray overcoat. It was only in 1863 that the sculptor Dumont received the order to execute a new statue in the Roman Caesar style.
Napoleon III sent for M. Dumont in his study, showed him the Victory he had bought, and expressed the wish to see this relic replaced in the hand of the new statue. It is this same Victory, which fell with the column on May 16, 1871, that disappeared for the second time.
Her traces have not yet been recovered.
Fragments of the column are, moreover, extremely rare. Those who had managed to pick some up hastened to get rid of them as soon as the Versailles troops entered. Just imagine if, during a search, the investigation squad, which quickly turned into a firing squad, laid hands on such evidence! The owner of the telltale bronze would have paid dearly for his love of mementos.
The Musee Carnavalet possesses in its display cases a very small piece of the monument broken on May 16. I know of two other specimens, one of which is a soldier’s head torn from the friezes. The other, more considerable, is one of the four enormous bolts that fastened the upper cap to the Caesar toppled by the Commune.
Four Years Later
One day in May 1875, I had gone to see Elisee Reclus at Vevey. The scholar had kept me at his table. Lunches were never drawn out at his place. A half hour of rapid conversation. A good handshake, and off you go. In the downstairs room, they were hard at work. The Universal Geography, of which only the first two volumes had been published, claimed every moment of the scholar’s time.
In the street, I run into my friend Slom, former secretary to Rigault.
— Will you come with me to La Tour-de-Peilz? Slom says to me. We shall go pick up Courbet and spend the day together.
We set off for La Tour-de-Peilz, where the great artist has taken refuge, pursued in Paris by fierce hatreds.
— Hey! Unbolter! Slom calls out to him as soon as we have passed through the gate of the little garden of the house at La Tour-de-Peilz.
Courbet does not turn around. He merely throws into the silence of the beautiful afternoon his broad laugh. We see, emerging through the leaves, a vast back, around which puffs a shirt open on a bull’s neck. Courbet is painting, pipe in mouth, seated on a stool, facing the lake. Two or three friends are there.
— Unbolter! Unbolter! What a joke! Well, yes, I asked that it be unbolted. You hear: un-bolt-ed. And not knocked down. Unbolted!
Courbet was here alluding to the petition he had addressed on September 14, 1870, to the Government of National Defense, expressing the wish — we insist on reproducing this text in full — that the Government of National Defense would be so good as to authorize him “to unbolt the column, or that it should itself take the initiative, entrusting the task to the administration of the Artillery Museum, and having the materials transported to the Hotel de la Monnaie.”
— Unbolt it! Courbet continues. Did you not believe then, as I did, and as everyone did, that the column was nothing but a gigantic bronze tube? They had boasted to us so much about the twelve hundred cannons of Austerlitz! Oh yes, all in bronze! You saw it well enough, when it was on the ground. There was not a nail’s thickness of it. To the point that the grenadiers’ noses let the stone show through. Twelve hundred cannons for a wretched sheet of metal!
And Courbet, after a moment of silence, tells us a strange story, which I regret not having noted down in time so as to find today the exact details with figures and dates.
— Their column! he told us, warming to his theme. Well, I wanted to rebuild it… And better than they did, and cheaper. I certainly had the right, since I am paying for it all by myself. For I am paying for it with my paintings, which they are seizing and selling. Before coming here, after they served me my first seizure notice, I went to the ministry, and I offered to rebuild the column according to plans that would be furnished to me. They sent me to the contractors.
The story was becoming interesting.
— I had drawn up an estimate, the artist continued. But when they showed me what they had spent on the scaffolding alone, my figure was already exceeded. I left them, and I went back to tell the minister about it. Today it is finished.
TO ARMS, CITIZENS!
The Night of April 3
Paris will never see again the extraordinary spectacle of the night of April 2 to 3, 1871, the eve-of-battle vigil of the first engagement. Those who had not yet reached manhood will find it hard to imagine. Those who were able to witness it will preserve until their last breath the indestructible memory.
All afternoon, the battalions had been filing past, descending from the faubourgs. The battalions of Belleville, through the Place de la Bastille or through the Place du Chateau-d’Eau — today the Place de la Republique — those of Montmartre through the streets that lead to the boulevards or through the outer roads. The meeting point was the Place de la Concorde.
With bands leading, flags and guidons floating in the wind, they arrived by the rue de Rivoli, by the rue Royale, by the quay, and, arms grounded, they waited.
When evening came, a great murmur ran through the crowd. A few bugles sounded in the distance. A clatter of arms broke the silence, and the ranks were seen to stir.
— Forward! Forward!
Since the end of the foreign war, the great square had not changed its aspect. The statues of the French cities had kept their long veils of mourning. Strasbourg had been decked with red flags and immortelles. She stood out like a bloody milestone, recalling the fallen city, the Rhine troubled by Teutonic horsemen, Alsace and Lorraine captive, Metz violated — the whole infamous work, summed up in a single word: Versailles.
— To Versailles! To Versailles!
The defeated generals were at Versailles. At Versailles those who had applauded the capitulation, the peace, and the dismemberment. At Versailles those who had sworn not to surrender a stone of our fortresses, not to yield an inch of our territory, not to divert a sou from the common fortune. At Versailles, there floated, in every memory, the flag of the new German Empire, hoisted by the victor. Versailles was the accursed city.
And from hearts swollen with enthusiasm and rage, there rose like an immense wave of reprobation against that capital of defeat, which, after having sheltered royalty, had lodged Wilhelm and now gave asylum to those who had allowed Paris to be vanquished.
— To Versailles!
The battalions moved out into the night.
That evening, I had followed a battalion from Montmartre, the 61st, the battalion of Razoua.
From the Place Pigalle to the grands boulevards, our march was one long ovation.
The thunderous acclamations, the resounding cries of triumph!
They ring still in my ears.
When we arrived at the Madeleine, night was falling, vaguely lit here and there by the pale glow of the streetlamps, barely fed by gas sparingly distributed.
The battalions were climbing the Avenue des Champs-Elysees. The bands were playing the Marseillaise.
At the Rond-Point, the spectacle that unfolded before my eyes rooted me to the spot. There they were, thousands and thousands, going off, their souls overflowing with joy and hope, their hearts burning with rapture. And from their wide-open mouths, the immortal strophes rang out…
— To arms! Citizens.
Battalions Filing Past
Every day, the same poignant spectacle. The battalions filing past, some returning from combat, others going off to the outposts. In the distance the cannon rumbles and the musketry crackles.
The sky is of impeccable purity. These two months of revolt have been superb.
— Magnificent, the park of Neuilly — a commandant back from the outposts tells me — marvelous. Everything is in bloom. We spend the night in gardens of extraordinary richness, under bowers where honeysuckle and periwinkle climb with fragrant scents…
— And where were you fighting?
— There, quite near the rue Perronet.
And breaking off abruptly to hail, with a joyful burst of laughter, the Federals passing by, flag unfurled:
— Hey! Good luck, comrades! You will find the place warm.
Rue de Rivoli, we cross the 147th, which has just made the traditional visit to the Hotel de Ville before going into action.
Preceding the battalion, a dozen nurses, the Geneva cross on their arms. After the nurses, the wagons. Big green wagons marked with a white shield bearing a red cross.
The men who follow are not particularly moved. They may be lying in those wagons tomorrow, torn and bleeding. Today they are entirely given over to the approaching action. What they see is not the hospital flag but the red standard with golden fringe floating against the blue sky.
Two other battalions follow, the 84th and the 115th. The bands play the Chant du Depart. Shortly, they will fall silent to let the bugles sound. But this time on a quite different, gayer note, which the fighters will accompany at full voice, as in the days of the siege, when they went to the ramparts.
It is the Sire de Fich-ton-Khan Who goes off to war.
In the ranks, a few of them, the old ones, have put on their Masonic insignia, a wide blue sash, with gilded temples, triangles, compasses.
Beside them, very young men, almost boys. Often their sons. Everyone is in it, in the Commune! If one could, today when the blood has faded through the grass, uncover the squares, the gardens, dig into the isolated corners where executions multiplied, it is by the thousands and thousands that one would find the remains of this multitude that vanished in the massacre.
Five or six years ago, they were digging a trench in the horrible charnel house of the Square de la Tour-Saint-Jacques. The workers struck with their picks, almost at ground level, the whitened bones of the victims of the great slaughter.
In the Lilacs
— What are we doing at Neuilly? my commandant continued. We are fighting right in the middle of the lilacs. Never in my life have I seen so much foliage, so many lawns, so many ornamental pools. I slept three nights in an admirable greenhouse, where rows of geraniums wrapped around me like a dazzling, multicolored tapestry. A real pasha’s bed from the Thousand and One Nights. It was only on the fourth day that a shell came and overturned my dream, sending geraniums and wallflowers to the devil. I nearly lost an eye to a cactus that came crashing against my left cheek, or rather against which I was flattened. At first, I thought I had rubbed against some kind of grapeshot and I expected to see it explode at my feet. When I recognized my cactus, I could not help laughing. My orderly, who had come running, picked up the vegetable and, over the barricade, sent it with a curse to the Versaillais.
— So you are that close to each other?
— That close. Why, about fifty paces. With a bit of goodwill, in the quiet moments, we could have a chat together…
— How long did you stay in the rue Perronet?
— We stayed eight days. As a matter of fact, we were with the 85th, which you met at the Ternes. The commandant told me. Even said you were not yet quite accustomed to shells.
— Come now. You can pay me compliments later.
— Why, of course! My men too had trouble getting used to them. I have, for my own part, no glory to claim in keeping my composure. Shells and bullets — I have been acquainted with them for a long time. In Mexico, for the first time. Bullets are like everything; you have to know how to get along with them, not do as that brave corporal I lost at the barricade, two days after our arrival, who had taken it into his head to stick his head above the loopholes. No sooner seen, no sooner killed. I had not had time to shout a warning before he fell, his forehead pierced…
TYPES OF INSURGENTS
The Hercules
April. At the Vallee Printing Works on the rue du Croissant (today the Presse Printing Works), we have, for composing our two newspapers — the Pere Duchene and the Sociale — two fine teams of typesetters.
True citizens. All from one battalion, that goes without saying.
But there are battalions and battalions. There are the battalions that perform some kind of service in the innumerable administrations, ministries, town halls, barracks, department of this or that. These battalions are the lucky battalions. The uniform always polished, rations assured, the thirty sous. There is nothing to worry about. To say it all, in those battalions, one does not risk getting one’s skin punctured.
There are, beside these privileged battalions, the battalions that do the fighting. One fine morning, the drums beat in the neighborhood. One dresses in haste. One grabs one’s gun in one hand, one’s cartridge belt in the other. One kisses the wife. And, quickly, to the rally point.
Flag unfurled, a little tour first to the Hotel de Ville, just to salute the Commune before going off to fight.
Then, off to the outposts.
The typesetters of the Pere Duchene and the Sociale belong to those battalions.
When we go to the composing room, it happens, from one day to the next, that we no longer find the same faces there.
The absent, those who have been replaced, are somewhere. Out there. Perhaps it is they who are firing the shots we hear, between two sentences of conversation, from the direction of Neuilly or Issy.
— When are they coming back?
— In eight days — or later.
Among our typesetters there is a fine fellow, a colossus with a muscular neck, his biceps bulging like two cannonballs. He has shoulders made for lifting a cart all by himself. Every evening, when the Pere Duchene is locked up, his little vanity is to take a form on each arm and walk around the workshop before going to set them on the press — those old flatbed presses that no one knows anymore today — with the same nonchalance as if he were carrying a couple of litre bottles.
His feats have earned our good colossus the nickname of “the Hercules.”
Since he has been with us, the Hercules has not been to the front.
Not that he hangs back. Oh no.
— God damn! When I get out there, the ones I am going to demolish.
One evening, we do not see the Hercules at his typesetting case. It is his turn. He left that morning with his battalion for the barricade on the rue Perronet, at Neuilly.
Eight or ten days pass. Those who had left are back with the team.
— And the Hercules?
— The Hercules, citizen. You don’t know… Well, he is at Beaujon.
— Wounded?
— Dead… He is being buried tomorrow… Yesterday, two hours before we buckled our belts to come back, he took a shell fragment in the kidneys… They brought him back in the canteen wagon… Poor Hercules! He will carry his forms no more… Luckily he leaves no one behind him. He told us one day that he had neither father nor mother. A foundling, you see… And we were fond of him, too… Strong as he was, he would not have hurt a fly…
Voltaire and Rousseau
At my lodgings.
Two of them have come to see me.
Two guards from my 248th, whom I have known since the first days of the siege, when we did drill at the Luxembourg.
One is holding a parcel. Something fairly bulky, in a checked red kerchief whose corners are knotted.
He begins speaking, while I sit at my table, going through the morning papers that my orderly has just brought me.
In the ground floor of my house is installed, in a shop — I look at it and greet it as an old friend from the past, that shop, when I pass in front of number 9 on the rue du Sommerard — a Federal post. My orderly is part of the post. As soon as he learned that the Pere Duchene — a third of the Pere Duchene — lived up there, on the fifth floor, he came to see me.
— Citizen lieutenant, he said to me, you have no orderly. Here I am. I shall run all your errands. And from the morning on, I shall be there, at your door.
I accepted.
My orderly has shown in the two guards. He has stayed with them.
My two visitors tell me they have come from the Moulin-Saquet, where they fought bravely. They had the luck not to be hit. They are going to rest for a week. And go back.
— Well then! What brings you here?
Hesitation. The one holding the knotted kerchief passes it from one hand to the other.
— Lieutenant…
— Speak up. Come on.
Silence.
But both at once, they have cast a glance at the orderly, as if his presence embarrassed them.
I send the orderly out to buy me some tobacco.
— Here it is, lieutenant, it is about what we are bringing you…
The one carrying the parcel has set it before me. He slowly unknots the corners of the kerchief, which spreads out, and reveals, to my astonished eyes, two charming bronzes, mounted on porphyry columns of red and black. Voltaire and Jean-Jacques. Two little well-known marvels of the eighteenth century.
There are the two little statuettes standing.
My two guards say nothing more.
Knowing that the Pere Duchene earns a fair amount of money, do they want to sell me the two statuettes?
— Citizen, says one of them to me, the two of us thought it would please you. We don’t know anything about such things. When we saw the two little fellows on the mantelpiece of the salon out there, we said to each other: “That — that will be for the lieutenant.” We also took some napkins, some handkerchiefs, which suited our women just fine. But statues — what do you expect us to do with that?
— So you have, I see, swiped all this from a villa at the outposts?
— Well, yes! When you’re getting your skull smashed in, too bad for the swine who have such fine houses… Surely they must be rejoicing, wherever they have taken refuge, to know that we are getting our skins riddled… Perhaps they are even shooting at us.
The argument was unanswerable. Useless to argue. I tried a few timid objections… The property of others…
Ah, they did not give a damn about the property of others… They always came back to the same thing:
— Do we not risk our skins every day?
I did not myself have the heart to press the point… Between those who were shooting at us, those who in Versailles were applauding the infamies of the fine ladies with their parasols, and the brave fellows of whom I had two specimens before me — my choice was made.
I could not, however, take the two statuettes.
— So, lieutenant, you don’t want them? That’s not kind. For two days, we have been having a real treat at the thought of pleasing you.
And slowly, they retied the checked red kerchief with, inside, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques.
They headed toward the door, a little sad.
Before disappearing, one of them thought again:
— What if we sold them! We can’t take them back to the outposts when we go back. Damn it all, we earned them fair and square…
The next day, I met on the boulevard one of my two fellows.
— Well? The two little chaps?
— Washed! What a spree that evening. The four of us. My friend’s wife, mine, and the two of us. We had a high time all evening… No matter, lieutenant, why didn’t you want them?
I almost reproached myself, at that moment, for not having accepted the two little busts.
And remorse seized me for having been able, even for an instant, to cause pain to those two good fellows.
THE CONVENT OF THE BIRDS
Long after the defeat, when we met again in London, in Brussels, or in Geneva, we spoke again of the days gone by — days of glory or days of defeat, massacres or apotheoses, the courage of some or the cowardice of others — of the dead whose memory we kept, of the living whose actions we sometimes bitterly criticized. Those days are forever unforgettable. Those who remain still speak of them.
That day — it was in Geneva — we were speaking of the capture of the convent and the park of Issy, of the extraordinary defense of that forgotten corner where they fought with heroic madness, and which was yielded only house by house, stone by stone, garden by garden, tree by tree.
— I was there, said one of us abruptly, Edmond Levraud. I am going to tell you about it.
— I was in the 199th, someone interrupted. I was there too, at Issy. Almost all of us stayed there.
When I arrived, after many dangers, on the other side of the wall that encloses the park, I could still hear the cries of those being shot… But there was no way to turn back. The Versaillais were firing at us through the loopholes…
— You all know the Convent of the Birds — Levraud resumed. We were there, in the first fortnight of May, half a dozen battalions. I recall the 5th, the 157th, the 167th, the 199th, others still, commanded by Lisbonne, a brave man that one, I assure you. Some of them had been there for twenty and thirty days. They did grumble a bit…
— I stayed more than three weeks, and gladly, the former fighter of the 199th interrupted again with a smile of pride. Ah yes, damn it! It was not fun, though!
— When we learned that the fort had been taken, Levraud continued, we felt that defeat was approaching. The news from Paris was not reassuring. We had just learned of Rossel’s resignation and his replacement by Delescluze. Vanves was within an inch of being taken too. In short, we were done for, or nearly so. The gunfire was drawing closer. They were killing each other from one side of the street to the other. Rifle barrels were passing through holes pierced in the walls. We could see them glinting even under the slate of the roofs, behind what remained of the chimneys, on the flanks of trees, amid the foliage and the flowers. A real hunt, without a cry, without a word. A silence, then a detonation coming from a bush, from a ray of sunlight cutting across the wall, from a dormer window whose position one had forgotten to note. A man fell. A guerrilla war, without truce or mercy…
— All that was nothing, replied once again the former fighter of the 199th; come now, colonel — Levraud had been a colonel — get to the evening of Friday, the great blow, the taking of the convent.
— Here we are, Levraud resumed.
We drew closer, silent. This episode of the capture of the convent of Issy had until that day remained quite obscure. I had personally questioned some friends from my 248th about that terrible day. But the battalion had returned two days before, decimated.
— It was Friday, toward five o’clock in the evening, Levraud resumed. The musketry begins to crackle furiously. I grab my field glass. It is the 46th of the line which, for some days, has been prowling around us. I have my men deployed as skirmishers. The red trousers appear in the depths of the wood. They are very close to us. Our men fall back from tree to tree. The soldiers advance. In a moment, they will be enveloped. A flanking movement, and that will be that… But now an entire battalion of line soldiers falls upon us. And another still. Our Federals fall back. We still hold the outermost houses. We barricade ourselves solidly in the convent buildings. There we believe ourselves invincible…
— Yes, but the bombs! What did you expect us to do against dynamite! cries our Federal.
— I was giving orders — Levraud resumed, a little impatient at being interrupted — when I hear a violent detonation, a sharp, rapid noise. I take cover as best I can and I see, crossing the street in the midst of a hail of bullets, a squad of sappers from the Versaillais engineers, who place a charge at the foot of the wall of the house that our Federals are still defending. The door collapses. The line soldiers advance with fixed bayonets. A few moments later, our men fall back toward us, shouting. One of them, wounded, falls. The soldiers pass over him as they run. When they are far away, I see the corpse again, torn and bleeding, pierced with blows, abandoned. The street is deserted. On the sidewalk, a dog howls, wounded too… My guards are massed in two or three large rooms. Suddenly, a tumult erupts. And, before we have had time to get our bearings, we see the red trousers burst through. I shout to jump through the windows, to fall back into the park. The struggle was appalling. At the turns of all the long corridors of the convent, detachments halted, fired their shots, then moved on. Many were caught between two fires, pitilessly massacred. The Versaillais, masters of the place, searched the cellars where some of the defenders had taken refuge… The wretches were dragged up to the upper rooms, and there by lamplight — night had fallen — they were shot…
We remained motionless, terrified.
This hunt for men in the convent of Issy, from corridor to corridor, from room to room, from chamber to chamber, this slaughter by gunfire, by rifle butt, or by bayonet, was surely one of the most appalling scenes of this two-month war.
Another witness, a Versaillais this one, told me later that in less than half an hour, they “skewered” more than two hundred Federals.
Long afterward, a foul stench came from the cellars, where the dead had remained lying.
FLIGHT THROUGH THE CATACOMBS
When the appalling news of the massacre at Issy reached Paris, brought by the survivors, even the bravest began to despair. For four days already, anxiety had been invading the stoutest hearts.
Vanves was, by Sunday, May 14 — seven days before the final defeat — nothing more than an appalling charnel house. The casemates had long since been blown open. The barracks burned and collapsed. The wounded filled the courtyards and the half-filled trenches.
They had to leave.
— It was during the night from Saturday to Sunday — one of the last defenders told me — that we left the fort. It was out of the question to escape through the countryside. The Versaillais surrounded us. One resource remained: the catacombs. It was through the catacombs that they decided to carry out the retreat.
— So the fort connected with the catacombs?
— Yes, through the postern gate of one of the curtain walls, we descended into an underground passage connecting with the quarries, whose entrance was on the road from Paris to Chatillon. But we did not all make it that far. I was among those who got lost in the labyrinth of passages.
— Were there not many of you? I said to the comrade… I have visited the catacombs. I know how dangerous it is to stay even a few steps behind the group one belongs to. Darkness envelops you suddenly. And then, it is isolation, the helpless call…
— Let me tell the story. We were saved. But after what trials! Many of us refused to follow us. They said we would surely get lost, and that they would rather be shot than die slowly of hunger in that terrifying darkness… They were taken prisoner, the wretches. On Sunday afternoon, the Versaillais, masters of the abandoned fort, fearing a counter-offensive, had the underground communication cut off through the postern, which they knew about. Our friends were there, massed…
— You do not know what became of them?
— I never heard of any of them again.
Taken with arms in hand, their bodies must now sleep in the trenches of the fort.
— We descended around nine o’clock, the witness of the grim retreat continued. We were a good five or six hundred. There were at the fort four battalions, the 103rd, the 105th, the 187th, and the 262nd. A good third had been killed. We divided into three groups. I was in the third.
Six of us went back up to get torches, which were distributed among us… We took some provisions.
Barely at the bottom of the shaft, we heard cries.
It was the Versaillais invading the fort… There were a good two hundred of us in the group I was in. Which way to go? One of us, who had worked in the quarries, told us that there were markings in black on the ceiling that would allow us to find our way in this labyrinth… Besides, there was no time to hesitate. We could be pursued, discovered, massacred without pity… For certain, if they found us, they would not bother to bring us back up. The cemetery was too well prepared for them not to make use of it. At last, we split up. One company takes the right, another the left. Soon, we lost sight of the light of the torches, which were going out at every turn… I counted my companions. A hundred and thirty-seven! Nine women, cantinieres and ambulance nurses… But now voices reach us. Surely they are searching for us. Flee! Flee! And we all flee in disorder, rallying as best we can around the few torches stuck on the ends of rifles. Oh, that race between those oozing walls, in the pools of water where you sink to mid-leg, over the blocks of stone that crush your ankles. How long did we run like that? I kept my eyes fixed on the torches. I felt suffocated. I am not quite sure I did not stumble over some bodies, those of us whom asphyxiation had felled. When we stopped, only one torch was still burning… I still see the faces it lit up, sinister, defeated.
We found ourselves at a crossroads where a dozen galleries converged. So many black doorways. Which one to take? We remained there, backs against the walls, silent. Little by little, an invincible fatigue overcame us, and we let ourselves, one after another, slide to the ground…
The narrator paused; his lips were trembling… At last he continued:
— When I awoke, the last torch had gone out. I took a few steps to make sure I was not alone. I groped around me… Suddenly, one of the ten black doorways was faintly illuminated, like a window where dawn appears… We all rise. Some hide, terrified. Are these newcomers not spies sent after us?… But no. I have recognized a good man’s face, a quarry supervisor who had set out to find us… But we must not linger… Let us march quickly… On the way, he tells us that he has already found our companions. They are free, under the stars they never thought they would see again.
The next day, we were on the Chaussee du Maine, at the review of the 14th legion. And how they feted us, when we told our comrades how we had escaped the most terrible of deaths!
HEROIC RABBLE
Two Testimonies
Someone was talking at Versailles with soldiers.
— Where do you come from?
— From Issy, where we had a very hard time.
— Do these insurgents fight well?
— It depends. There are some who surrender right away. Others, you have to kill them to get their rifles. The other day we had one who, riddled with bayonet thrusts to the last drop of blood, refused to surrender.
Others, at the muzzles of our rifles and facing certain death, shouted in our ears: “Long live the Commune!… Go on, shoot, since you’re at it! Others will come who will avenge us!”
A Versaillais general, returning from Paris after the battle of the Bloody Week, questioned by a member of the Government about the resistance of the insurgents:
— They are heroic rabble, he replied.
The Fine Brigands!
It was singing that they set off for combat. They came back equally joyous, ready to return to death, their souls full of gladness and faith.
On the Place de l’Hotel-de-Ville, every day there were new acclamations, new oaths to conquer and to die.
I shall never forget the battalion I met there in the first days of May, if one can call a battalion a mass of men barely equipped, armed haphazardly.
These are the ones the Versaillais call brigands.
Ah, the fine brigands!
No uniforms. Sometimes no kepis. Siege jackets, worn, ragged, trousers tucked into boots, frayed over old hobnailed shoes, berets, fur caps, flat caps.
Where did they come from? Who were their leaders?
And how they howled, under the windows of the Commune, resounding cries of “Long live the Social Republic!” fit to burst their solid chests!
At their acclamations, two or three members of the communal assembly come down, come to embrace the fighters.
— Go, friends, fight for justice, for right, for those who will come after us!
And they go off joyfully, their hearts lit with that flame which makes heroes.
Children of the Commune
I no longer know what errand led me to the Hotel de Ville in the last hours of the afternoon.
Five or six large covered wagons are lined up on the square, all decorated with red flags, on which flowers have been pinned. Large bouquets have been left on the benches. The wagons are empty. On one of them, I read: Children of the Commune, Eleventh Arrondissement.
After passing through the door of the Hotel de Ville, I take the grand staircase that leads to the first floor. I have barely pushed open the door of the great hall when a joyful troop rushes out, singing and chattering. There are a good hundred of them, girls and boys of eight to twelve years, who, under their teachers’ guidance, have just saluted the Commune.
Poor children! Their fathers have been killed or wounded at the outposts. The Commune has adopted them. That day, they had been taken to the Bois de Vincennes. The bouquets I saw below were picked by them.
Eight days later, when the bloody week will have begun, these same children, whom I saw so joyful, will be arrested, imprisoned, like insurgents… Perhaps, alas, shot… Who knows?
On the morning of Thursday, May 25, in that basement room of the Luxembourg where I passed before the hard gaze of the gendarmerie officer who presided over the court-martial, I saw, crouching in corners, their cheeks hollowed by tears, three children whom no one accompanied. Orphans? The same ones, perhaps, whom I had seen, their arms full of flowers and their mouths full of laughter and songs, in the great hall of the Hotel de Ville!
I always wonder, when I pass through the rue de Vaugirard and see again, just before reaching the entrance to the Senate presidency, the rusted-bar windows of the room where the infamous tribunal sat, what became of those three poor little prisoners…
THE COIN OF THE COMMUNE
From the Mint to the Eleventh
May. — I do not know what brought me to the quay.
I go up to see my friend Camelinat, who is installed at the Mint and is preparing to strike the new coin of the Commune.
— Well then! How is our five-franc piece coming along?
Camelinat tells me the difficulties he encounters in getting silver ingots delivered by the Bank. It was only after pledge upon pledge that M. de Ploeuc consented to give him, in lots of a hundred thousand francs, two million francs’ worth of silver destined for minting.
— But could the Commune not simply send a battalion?
Camelinat throws his hands up to heaven.
And after a silence:
— Well, I do have my ingots after all. I shall bring you my new coin one of these days.
That day never came. The five-franc pieces of the Commune were struck only on Saturday, May 20. The next day, the Versaillais were in Paris.
On Wednesday morning, in the thick of battle, when gunshots were already crackling in the neighborhood, through the door on the rue Guenegaud, two wagons rolled out, loaded with coins, exactly 153,000 francs’ worth.
After a thousand detours, stopped at every moment by barricades that had to be crossed, the two wagons arrived Place Voltaire, at the town hall of the eleventh arrondissement, where the Commune had relocated.
Long after the defeat, a witness told me of the fantastic scene. The fighters of the last hour receiving their pay in new coins of the Commune already marked by death.
The wagons had been sheltered in the inner courtyard of the town hall. They dipped with full hands into baskets brimming with coins barely out of the press.
The Coin “With the Trident”
The coins struck by the Commune are exceptionally rare. I possess a specimen of the known type, the one that can be seen in the display cases of the Musee Carnavalet, where a series of small objects and medals relating to the insurrectionary period of 1871 have been arranged.
Why have these coins, of which four hundred thousand were struck by Camelinat, become so rare? Simply because, by superior order, they were immediately withdrawn from circulation. Those that had remained in stock at the Mint were thrown back into the crucible. The large banking houses carefully set aside those they received. The finance directorate exchanged them for less subversive coins. It is only by the greatest and happiest of chances that one of these coins can still be discovered in daily circulation.
The five-franc piece struck by the Commune does not differ, at first glance, from the coins of the Republic of 1848, known as the Hercules type, engraved by Dupre. A single distinguishing mark, the mint mark, identifies them. The mint mark is the special mark of each director of the Mint. It is placed on the reverse, on the left, at the lower part of the coin. On the coins struck by the Commune, this mint mark is a small trident.
A strange feature of these coins. The famous legend God protect France runs in exergue all around.
One day when I was teasing Camelinat about this:
— You should at least, I told him, have put: God protect the Commune! That would have been funnier.
There is, of course, nothing here that is the fault of the Commune’s director. They had to strike quickly. The new dies were not ready. There was no time to change anything in the 1848 type. And so God continued to protect France and also the Commune of Paris, in May 1871.
Relics
The Mint had become, in a few days, the receptacle of everything that the ministries, administrations, and monuments possessed in precious metals, in the form of utensils or works of art of dubious value.
Certain ministries sent silverware bearing royal or imperial arms. The treasures of the churches were hardly troubled. Zealous patriots, probably quite unfamiliar with the cheap religious goods trade, kept coming to denounce to the Mint the incredible riches they had discovered, one evening at a club meeting, in this or that sanctuary.
Sometimes, to satisfy them, an employee was sent on reconnaissance. The gold and silver art objects quickly reduced, on first examination, to a few common modern lamp stands, in imitation gilded bronze, such as the religious goods trade manufactures wholesale.
The Tuileries furnished the Mint with an ample harvest of knick-knacks. The apartments of the Empress were a veritable shop of devotional objects. Reliquaries were found there in piles. Each of them copiously filled with remains of every provenance.
All the male and female saints were represented by some fragment of their bodily covering, in the oratory of the superstitious sovereign.
When the time came to throw all this bric-a-brac into the crucible, the smelter, a sturdy fellow, taking the reliquaries one by one from a basket, threw them into the furnace, accompanying his gesture with some merry apostrophe.
— Your turn, old Bridget!
— Old Nis (Saint Denis), you’re in for a rough quarter of an hour.
And so for all the saints whose toes or finger bones presented themselves to the incredulous smelter.
One day, he had reached the last one.
He turns it over, turns it back, opens it.
Behind a double door, a scrap of cloth. Beside it, a paper, bearing the following inscription: “Piece of the tibia of Saint Joseph.”
— Ah, God damn, this is too funny… the smelter exclaims. That must be better than a hangman’s rope…
And with his big fingers, he stuffs the relic into the pocket of his waistcoat.
What became of the piece of the tibia of Saint Joseph?
Camelinat, who told me the story, could not tell me.
AT SAINT-LAURENT
Late April. — The newspapers are full of extraordinary stories. Horrible discoveries have been made in the Church of Saint-Laurent. While digging in the crypt, skeletons were unearthed. First one. Then a whole pile. These skeletons are said to belong to individuals whose death would be rather recent. Blond hair still adheres to the skull of one. In the disturbed earth, a tortoiseshell comb was found… A woman’s hair… A comb fallen from that head of hair… They say the skeletons are all contorted… Were the unfortunate victims then buried while they were still alive?
Throughout the city, the hawkers cry a sheet, a poster, which shows the crypt and the skeletons.
— Buy the Corpses of Saint-Laurent!
And the crowd tears from the vendors’ hands the printed sheet.
I have kept this poster. The same one I bought on the rue du Croissant, in 1891.
At the top, a wood engraving, signed with the initials A. L., Auguste Lancon, the well-known painter, who died about twenty years ago. Collectors have fought over his etchings. Lancon was a member of the committee of the Federation of Artists, of which the sculptor Dalou, the author of the Triumph of the Republic on the Place du Trone, was also a member.
Ah, that poster! Must I give a tiny extract?
There are fourteen corpses, fourteen skeletons! Fourteen skeletons of women! Of young women buried here for ten years, twelve years, fifteen at most. A comb was also found, a blond head of hair, which visitors can see and touch. All these skeletons are in the same posture: legs spread as if by a convulsive movement, hands drawn together over the belly as if they had been bound… Can you see it, this horrible scene, these young women, these young girls, lured by promises or the hope of pleasure…
Let us go to Saint-Laurent.
On the way, I meet a friend. He is from the neighborhood. He believes in the skeletons. Or rather in the victims. He believes there is a terrifying mystery here. Saturnalia in the chapels. Young girls defiled. Scenes of sadism. Murder after defilement…
We are before the portal.
Groups talk and gesticulate. I approach. Everything I can catch from the conversations that cross one another, noisy, from the arguments that spring up around this or that detail, is that for a long time now, rumors have been circulating about the priests of Saint-Laurent. People spoke of deaths, especially of dead women, buried secretly, of bones that had been seen in the underground passages of the church.
Let us go in.
No skeletons outside or in the naves. One must descend into the crypt.
On the freshly turned, reddish earth, skeletons in pieces. One or two complete. The others decapitated. They are covered with that horrible rust of bones buried for a long time. On the wall, two kerosene lamps. Hideous.
— Where is the blond hair? Where is the comb?
I ask my neighbors.
No one can answer me.
At the bottom of the staircase, a National Guard, seated, smokes his pipe. He seems the guardian of this nightmare.
— Where is the woman with the blond hair?
— I have no idea…
— Have you seen her?
— Me… no…
And the guard, philosophically, draws a puff of smoke from his pipe.
All that was left for me was to go back up.
The faint smell of a freshly disturbed necropolis followed me to the porch of the church, where the hawkers were crying the famous poster.
— Buy the Corpses of Saint-Laurent!
I learned, a few days later, how the corpses — the skeletons — had been disturbed from their slumber. On Easter Day, April 7, a Federal captain named Godefroy, accompanied by some men from the 104th battalion, had searched the church. They said in the neighborhood that the priests were hiding weapons there. The captain found nothing.
Eight days later, a new search. This time more serious. The church is surrounded. Two police commissioners. The one from the Temple quarter, named Blond. The one from the Saint-Laurent quarter, Vinchon. The examining magistrate Moire. Three delegates from the town hall of the tenth arrondissement. The armed force is commanded by Captain Adjutant-Major Tribalet.
What are all these people looking for?
Weapons. Corpses.
The corpses that everyone is talking about in the neighborhood.
Police commissioner, examining magistrate, town hall delegates, captain, all descend into the crypt.
A few picks of the pickaxe, and the corpses appear.
In normal times, the slightest reflection would have sufficed to convince the most ardent enemy of priests. But under the Commune! When fever was heating brains! When the cannon was thundering! When every day they printed that the priests were betraying! When they were already in Mazas, soon at the Roquette!
Here is the letter that, upon leaving the church, after having visited the crypt, Captain Adjutant-Major Tribalet addressed to the newspapers. (Those who wish to verify the text need only open the collection of Valles’s Cri du Peuple, April 26, 1871.)
Citizen editor,
Yesterday, it was learned that strange things were occurring in the Church of Saint-Laurent. A staff officer received the mission to go there and inspect it thoroughly.
Upon entering the church, he saw various underground passages open, and great was his astonishment when he perceived a space of more than twenty cubic meters filled with human remains.
Farther on, some skeletons, of more recent date, were found. After a meticulous search, it was observed that these skeletons belonged to the female sex. One of them especially still had an abundant head of hair of an ashen blond.
There is here a mystery that must be cleared up, a series of crimes that must be exposed, for the edification of the timorous and the confusion of the hypocrites and people of bad faith who blame the measure concerning the closure of churches.
It is time, at last, for the blind to open their eyes, and for the light to burst forth upon the darkness that the men in black create around them.
Greetings and fraternity, Gustave TRIBALET.
The captain’s letter, reproduced everywhere, attracted the credulous crowd to Saint-Laurent, and also the curious.
The church and the crypt were conscientiously guarded by a detachment of the National Guard until the street fighting. After the entry of the troops, the presbytery, whose wall runs along the boulevard, was defended by the last men of the post that had been set up there. When the 3rd battalion of the 1st regiment of the line of the Versailles army, commanded by Captain Seran, burst in, the defenders escaped through a door opening onto the Faubourg Saint-Martin. But there, they found themselves again facing the soldiers. They had barely taken a few steps before they fell, shot point-blank.
AT THE CLUB SEVERIN
May. — One evening. Ten o’clock. I wander through the Quarter, in search of someone or something to help me pass the evening. I enter the brasserie on the rue Saint-Severin, toward which I have automatically directed myself. No one. The desert.
Actually, someone. Lying on a bench at the back, the General.
The General is one of our band. Jules Ducrocq. He inherited this nickname after Champigny. Ducrocq. Ducrot — the real one. They sound alike.
A medical student, Ducrocq is an assistant surgeon at the fort of Vanves.
He is there with his orderly. A tall devil who has the height of a drum major. Ducrocq himself is tiny. When they walk side by side, the assistant surgeon, small, so small, in his uniform, saber at his side and cavalry boots, the orderly, with trousers that come to mid-calf, talking loudly, sometimes a little tipsy, this giant and this pygmy are the joy of the Boulevard Michel.
Very brave, moreover, the General. A good comrade. A heart of gold. But small. And, my word, his elbow always ready to be raised.
— Well then, General, are you not at the fort?
— I am going back right now…
Ducrocq had risen. He sat down again when the beer was brought.
— And G…? I ask him. Still out there?
— G…? He is going to get himself killed one day like a target soldier. Just imagine, his pleasure is to sit on the bastion, his legs dangling over the outside… And while the grapeshot rains, he smokes his pipe… He does not give a damn…
The orderly interrupts his chief without ceremony.
— Come on, General. We must go. You know the carriage that takes us there has been waiting for an hour already.
Reluctantly, the General decides. He buckles his belt, puts on his kepi. I watch them leave, one behind the other, the giant and the dwarf.
Here I am alone. But the cafe door opens. The visitor throws, as I did a moment ago, a disappointed glance at the empty room. He has spotted me. It is Gill.
Gill sits down. Mute.
— But what is the matter with you this evening? You look all upset.
— What is the matter, old fellow, is that I am bored out of my mind…
— Yes. It is the end. We are done for. And what is going to happen to us? Deportation? Exile, at the very least?… Ah, what fun! Damn Commune… Someone who comes from Versailles came to see me just now, at Laveur’s. He told me that in eight days — you hear, eight days — the army will have entered. Ah yes, a fine mess…
— No, no. On the contrary… I too have news. I went this morning to see Protot at the Ministry of Justice. Things are going well… I assure you…
In truth, I was as worried as Gill. But why not reassure him?
— Really?
— Sure.
Gill has recovered his fair-weather face. Quick to pass from despair to confidence.
— What if we went to the Club? he says to me abruptly.
— The Club?
— Yes. The Club Severin. It has just opened. It must be amusing.
— Let us go.
We go out. We walk slowly along the sidewalk of the rue Saint-Severin, which narrows beyond the rue de la Harpe. Behind the half-lit windows of the wine merchants, here and there, groups of Federal guards, seated around tables. Here we are before the porch of the old, entirely black church. Two or three women climb the steps, push through the door curtain, and disappear.
— By God! exclaims Gill. One would think they were going to vespers.
And indeed, not a shout. Nothing that hints at a club, violent, rowdy. Nothing.
We enter.
The church is dark. In the middle of the central nave, a pool of light. The pulpit and the churchwardens’ pew. Kerosene lamps hung on the pillars. The side aisles, the choir, the apse, all in darkness. Let us bury ourselves in the dark. That way, we shall see more easily. And no one will see us. We shall not run the risk of being accosted, of being — who knows? — recruited as assessors.
Two chairs. Here we are installed behind a pillar.
A speaker is in the tribune — the preaching pulpit.
— Yes, citizens, it is Greek fire that we need… I demand that a battalion of Greek fire be organized… In a few sprays, the Versaillais are roasted…
The man disappears. We have, between two speeches, time to look around.
Stuck to the left side of the pulpit, a red flag. Opposite, in the churchwardens’ pew, as solemn as the churchwardens whose place they take, the citizens of the bureau. A president and four assessors. On the pew, a bugle. What on earth can that bugle be doing there?
The president has risen.
— Citizens, the floor belongs to the citizeness… (the name has not stayed with me).
The citizeness is already there, her elbows resting on the edge of the pulpit.
— Citizens.
But our attention is elsewhere.
— A pity, Gill tells me, that I don’t have a pencil. I would sketch this.
In the nave, a hundred or so listeners. No more. A dozen women. The men in Federal uniform. A few are smoking. The women in housedresses. Leaning against a pillar, two guards seated before an empty chair, on which they have just placed a bottle, a glass, and a loaf of bread. They eat and, taking turns, drink. In silence. No gestures. As if from a respect for what is still for them the holy place, where, perhaps, they were baptized and married.
The citizeness is still declaiming. The audience seems rather cold.
— So that is a club! Gill says to me. It is not very cheerful… And to think that later, historians will make of it blazing tableaux… Ah, History…
And Gill, seized again by his earlier spleen:
— Let us go. It is less fun than midnight Mass.
It was true. The interest was farther away. The cannon of the forts was thundering. And my thoughts, detached from the citizeness’s speech, from the preaching pulpit and the churchwardens’ pew, drifted to the outposts. Was it not at this very moment that the Versaillais, as Gill was saying a moment ago, were making the final push?
We were heading for the exit of the church when, abruptly, a shrill call bursts into the silence.
The bugle from the churchwardens’ pew!
Yes indeed! The president, standing in the midst of his assessors, holds in his hand the brass instrument he has just taken from his lips. The bugle replaces the bell to announce the closing.
On the tribune — from which the citizeness has descended — a Federal officer waves the red flag.
— Citizens, the Marseillaise!
And a hundred mouths open. Under the vaults of the old church, the song thunders…
— Well! I say to Gill, we have not wasted our evening.
The Marseillaise dies away. The audience disperses. Soon there remains in the nave only two or three women, who extinguish, one by one, the kerosene lamps. The red flag has been forgotten. One of them takes it, rolls it up, and puts it under her arm to carry it off.
We watched them slip away, gliding over the flagstones.
Some groups had paused at the foot of the porch steps, chatting quietly, like good bourgeois of the neighborhood.
Midnight was tolling at the old bell of Saint-Severin… When day breaks, the sacristan will sweep the nave, push into a pile the bread crusts, the sausage skins, and the pipe dottle. And the priest will say, as in less somber times, his customary mass.
CAFE D’ORSAY
May. — We have been browsing the bookstalls all morning along the quays, Vermersch and I.
We enter the Cafe d’Orsay to have lunch.
A group of friends arrives. Eudes. Regere. Two or three others, in full military dress. They must be coming from the Legion d’Honneur, very nearby, where Eudes has his headquarters.
Regere, in the uniform of a Federal colonel. Kepi with a five-strand silver braid, polished riding boots. Red sash around the waist. Pinned to the left side, the small rosette with gold fringe of the members of the Commune.
His friends have long since been seated, and he is still talking, gesticulating. His ruddy face lights up. His red mustache, his red hair, his red side-whiskers, graying, sparkle.
Abruptly, he lets himself drop onto a chair, his legs entangled in his saber.
He gets up, detaches the saber, seizes it, and, in a commanding voice, to the waiter at the other end of the room:
— Waiter, hang my sword on the peg.
Regere extends the sword, then the braided kepi.
Vermersch nudges me. And, through his teeth:
— He is magnificent.
Vermersch, detained at the outposts during the months of the siege — he was an assistant surgeon in the ambulances of Monseigneur Bauer — made only rare appearances at our brasserie on the rue Saint-Severin. He does not know his Regere.
And I tell him, still in an undertone — we are at the next table — that after October 31, Regere, who was being pursued, and who took his role very seriously, had gotten to the point of changing his costume almost every day.
One evening, we saw advancing toward the table where several of us were seated — Valles, Roullier, Paget-Lupicin, Fremine, and others — a citizen whom we did not recognize at first, buckled as he was in an impeccable uniform of a National Guard drummer, white and red piping on the cuffs and kepi, belt whitened with chalk. A real drummer! He only lacked the sticks — and the drum.
The drummer extends his hand to Edouard Roullier, stupefied.
— Citizen drummer, articulates Roullier…
The drummer has placed, with a mysterious air, his finger on his lips.
But Roullier is already seized with helpless laughter.
— You joker!
The drummer was Regere.
— Let us wait until they leave, Vermersch whispers in my ear. I want to see the warlike manner in which he will receive “his sword” from the hands of the waiter.
They have finished. The waiter distributes the kepis and sabers.
Regere, buckled up, waits.
We do not miss a single one of his gestures.
I must in truth say that the drummer of October 31, elevated by the voters of the fifth arrondissement to the dignity of member of the Commune, rehooked his saber to the clasp of his belt in the most martial fashion, just as if he had never done anything else in his life.
CONCERT AT THE TUILERIES
May. — Ten o’clock in the evening. The reserved garden of the Tuileries, which was still called the Garden of the Petit Prince. Vermersch and I are walking about. An enormous crowd. The shrubberies illuminated by red lanterns hung from the bushes. Red Chinese lanterns bordering the flower beds and the lawns. Red draperies on the platform of the musicians who play local tunes mixed with overtures of popular operas.
The music falls silent.
Through the windows of the Palace, streaming with light, gusts of noise and song reach us.
There is a concert in the Hall of the Marshals.
— Let us go see that, says Vermersch.
We pass through the portico of the pavilion — the Clock Pavilion. To the left, two Federals, elbows resting on their rifles, guard the entrance to a vast room where everyone enters without the slightest difficulty. We enter. Along its entire length, a long, long table. Glasses by the hundred, bottles, tankards full of blond beer, mountains of brioches, biscuits in packets. No one has, for the moment, the right to approach the table. The buffet for the intermission.
A staircase at the back. At the bottom, two marble lions, paw resting on a ball. And, leaning against the lions, two charming cantinieres, feathered hats and jackets with shining buttons, who offer, to those who pass near them, a pin, whose head bears a little Phrygian cap enameled in red.
We pin the badge to our buttonholes. The two cantinieres hold out a purse.
— For our wounded, citizens!
We go up. The door to the Hall of the Marshals. A wave of burning heat. The enormous chandeliers, suspended from the cupola, are resplendent. At the entrance, an impenetrable human mass. Twenty times we risk being flattened against the walls. Near us, women, imprisoned in a wave of citizens, are panting and mopping their brows.
What a crowd! The formidable breath that escapes from all these mouths, the dust raised by these thousands of soles in perpetual motion on the parquet, obscure the atmosphere of the hall. The gilding on the cornices, the velvet of the doors and the upper boxes, everything, down to the plumed silhouettes of the Marshals, appears only through an opaque haze. The sea of heads stirs, rises, shifts in every direction. Near me, an officer with quadruple silver braid, booted, saber at his flank, chats gallantly, standing, kepi in hand, with a stout lady of bourgeois bearing, who fans herself with her handkerchief.
A buzzing of impatience. Up there, in the gallery that runs around the cupola, a man, his red sash worn diagonally, leans toward the audience. He waves his arms. He speaks. Nothing can be heard.
The curtain rises. Silence.
On the stage a large woman has appeared. White peplum trailing behind her. Red sash at the waist.
Shouts. Howls. They stamp their feet. They clap their hands.
The woman sings. Her name flies across the benches. It is Bordas. She sings, she bellows the song that has already made her famous. At the refrain, it is delirium. The whole hall has taken up the chorus:
It is the rabble, Well! I am one of them!
I nudge Vermersch.
— You are not saying anything…
— Me? I am watching the Marshals…
Ah yes! What must they be saying to each other, the Marshals!
La Bordas makes a sign.
From the wings emerges a Federal guard, who holds in his hand a flag rolled around its staff. He hands it to the singer, who seizes it, slowly unfurls it, spreads it wide, and wraps herself in it…
She continues to sing.
And it is a gripping spectacle. All faces turn toward La Bordas. All hearts beat, surely.
I shall never forget that apparition. On the white peplum, like a large stain of blood, the red of the gold-fringed flag. The hair spread on the bare shoulders, the broad chest, the solid, muscular arm, the wide-open and twisted mouth, the gaze fixed up there, as in a brutal ecstasy. Do I not have before me the strong woman of Barbier’s Iambes — the one who wants to be kissed with arms red with blood…
La Bordas, while she sings The Rabble, does she not symbolize, for this fevered, attentive crowd, the army of the rebels, the army of that heroic rabble fighting out there, beyond the ramparts?
Stamping and acclamations cut short my reverie. The stage is empty again. The first part of the concert is over. Intermission.
— Let us go out, Vermersch says to me. Agar is supposed to come later. I am going to try to see her. I will meet you here.
Left alone, I survey the magnificent hall with my eyes, emptied in the blink of an eye, abandoned for the long table laden with bottles and glasses that I saw earlier. And I dream. I try to put names to the motionless features of the warriors of the great epic. There is Ney, Lannes, Davout. The others — Massena, Soult, Oudinot?… Only a few months ago, the brilliant imperial court was displaying, in this very place where I stand, its dazzling finery… How many things since then… And, if I could have guessed, how many things still, so close at hand… If I had known that, in a few days, all this gilding, all these chandeliers, everything, the Marshals along with them, would collapse in the most appalling conflagration!
Here, is that you? If we went to get some air, all the same…
A little door. A narrow staircase that climbs in the dark. Lissagaray leads me. The staircase leads, it seems, to the attic, from which we shall have the view over the gardens, and the cool air. We have arrived. Through an open dormer window, the sky full of stars. But it is not bright in here! So little bright that we can no longer find our starting point. It is only after half an hour of searching that we set foot again on the staircase steps. We are quickly down. Agar had just left the stage. Vermersch was gone.
Nothing remains but to leave. We pass again before the two charming cantinieres, who once more hold out their alms purse:
— Citizens, for the orphans of the Commune!
The long buffet table is still there. But thirst, quite excusable, has done its work. Bottles, tankards, and glasses are empty. The mountain of brioches has been leveled to the tablecloth.
The red lanterns in the garden are smoking and going out. The celebration is drawing to a close.
A few days more, and the Tuileries themselves will have ceased to exist.
Someone told me that on that sinister night when, in Paris in flames, the sky seemed a gigantic veil of purple and gold, on the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, May 24, 1871, Raoul Rigault went to ask a friend for shelter.
Rigault was coming from Sainte-Pelagie, where he had had Gustave Chaudey shot.
The apartment, on the fifth floor, had a balcony. Rigault went out on the balcony. Leaning on the railing, he contemplated the terrifying spectacle, the gigantic plumes of flame, the swirling smoke, shot through with holes of gold…
— Well, well, he cried suddenly, the Tuileries are going up in smoke…
What Rigault had just seen was the cupola of the Hall of the Marshals collapsing into the flames.
It was exactly a quarter past one in the morning.
BATTLE MORNING
Under the Odeon
Wednesday, May 24. — Ten o’clock. Fighting at the Croix-Rouge and the rue Vavin. The Luxembourg is about to be taken. I go down the rue de Medicis toward the Odeon. I pause a few moments under the gallery where the artists’ entrance opens. There, from time immemorial, whether it is fine or the wind is blowing, regulars — professors, students, simple neighbors, always the same — come at a set hour to read their newspapers.
Straw chairs are reserved for them. They appear, one after another, choose a chair, lean it against a pillar. They go and take a newspaper from the bookseller’s display, sit down, read. When they have finished, they carefully fold the paper and open another. And so on.
Several stay this way for half an hour, longer even, and do not leave until all the morning papers, or the evening ones — for they come back around five — have passed under their eyes.
The cost of the session is minimal. It is two sous, which they deposit, without a word, before leaving the gallery, on the saleswoman’s table.
I cast a quick glance over the row of chairs.
They are empty.
All but one. The reader is well known to me. I have drawn near. He interrupts his reading.
— Well! I told you so… It is the end.
And his gaze is full of commiseration. That gaze tells me that I am finished, that the hour is no longer for enthusiasm and madness. And that the only thing left for me to do is to find a corner where the reprisals, so near at hand, will not reach me.
The musketry crackles a few hundred paces away.
My word, my heart is heavy. I certainly do not think of fleeing. But all the same, I have a terrible weight on my chest…
I say nothing. The reader shakes my hand, sits down again, resumes his paper. I head for the rue Racine, which will lead me to the Boulevard Michel, where, since the day before, barricades have been rising.
A backward glance at the reader, whose red beard I see one last time, bent over his newspaper.
The regular of the Odeon is my former teacher at the Lycee of Nantes, who holds the chair of history — I believe I am not mistaken — at Louis-le-Grand, M. Lehugeur.
A Paving Stone, Citizen
Eleven o’clock. I have gone to see my old friend Paget-Lupicin at the Hotel-Dieu. Here I am, on the way back, Place Saint-Michel.
— Come on, citizen, your paving stone…
It is a beautiful dark-haired girl, in a black housedress and a pink calico skirt, who calls out to me.
In great haste, the barricade that defends at once the entrance to the quay and the Pont au Change is being finished.
I take my paving stone. I deposit it on the heap.
— Thank you, citizen.
And again:
— Come on, citizen, a paving stone.
— Alas, my dear young lady, I can no longer see clearly.
The one speaking — I recognize him. Bouton d’Or, an old bohemian, whose bloated, red-pitted face I see again in memory… Bouton d’Or! The friend of Paragot, the author of the famous ballad on the death of the Archbishop of Paris. The one who was killed in June.
Ah, he was nonetheless a very fine man, The Monseigneur Archbishop of Paris.
Poor Bouton d’Or! They say he held a post in a college. An usher at least, in a lycee. Absinthe laid him low. His ham-rimmed eyes have long been shedding incessant tears — tears of alcohol — that cloud his sight and burn his eyelids.
We would sometimes go — just to see assembled, pressed close together, their glass of absinthe within reach, their pipe between their teeth, these lamentable bohemians — to sit on one of the benches of the establishment that gave them shelter: the Academy on the rue Saint-Jacques, a few steps from the rue Soufflot.
Bouton d’Or had recognized me.
— Yes, I can no longer see clearly… What is to become of me in the midst of all this…
And the poor bohemian, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, as if to clear them, went back up the Boulevard Michel…
At Lapeyrouse
Half past eleven. — Here come some mitrailleuses. Two of them, being brought up. The tall barricade is finished. Armed men, belted in red, bustle about the square. Stacks of rifles. In a corner, a wide white banner with a red cross…
The ambulance.
Soon, they will be killing each other.
Where are the troops? What if I went for news, nearby, there on the quay, on the corner of the rue de Savoie, to Lapeyrouse?
Lapeyrouse is the restaurant where I sometimes have lunch. Rigault comes there, with friends from the Prefecture. Levraud, Sornet, Giffault, Da Costa, others.
I enter. Five or six tables are occupied.
At one of them, Cavalier — whom we familiarly call Pipe-en-Bois. Cavalier holds the post of director of parks and plantations, or of public roads; no one quite knows. In short, he is, as he was later called, the Alphand of the Commune. When he appeared before the court-martial, Alphand came to testify in his favor. While others tried to incriminate this brave and honest Cavalier, Alphand declared that he had directed his services with irreproachable correctness.
Two Federal officers have accosted Cavalier, who has risen abruptly. On his long, hatchet-shaped face, big drops of sweat run.
— I have nothing, nothing, he says. Go to the Hotel de Ville.
They are demanding from good Cavalier men for the barricades, wheelbarrows, shovels.
— The Hotel de Ville! It has been burning for an hour!
At a table near mine, three or four diners whom I do not know. One of them has, over his gray overcoat, a red sash without gold tassels. So he is not a member of the Commune. A police commissioner, perhaps. He has been telling aloud about the execution of a spy.
I learned later that they were speaking of Veysset, shot around nine o’clock on the Pont-Neuf.
A waiter rushes in.
— The Versaillais are very near… They can be seen arriving from the other quay… The barricade on the bridge is going to be taken from the rear…
Everyone stands up. Hubbub. The waiter has not forgotten the bills. He hands me mine. I have no change. I toss down a hundred-franc note…
But the hour presses. One must go.
— I shall come back, I say mechanically.
Alas, I was not to come back.
Yes, I did come back. But nine years later. One evening, a friend invited me to dinner at Lapeyrouse. I told him the story.
— But make your claim, he said to me laughing. We shall see the cashier’s face.
We had the manager called. I set forth my request.
The manager listened to me without for an instant departing from his professional gravity.
— It is a pity, monsieur, he said to me solemnly. Nine years. The establishment has changed owners.
Rue Gay-Lussac
Noon. — I have come back up the boulevard to the rue Soufflot.
I am alone. And I notice that around me, the silence is terrifying.
People everywhere, however. Fighters, arms grounded, beside the paving stones. All the house doors wide open. In the corridors, women, pressed against each other, on the lookout. Here, against the railing of the Luxembourg, shortly before the Ecole des Mines, a white tent — the ambulance. The assistant surgeons are seated at the entrance. At their feet, the surgical cases, the bundles of lint.
I recognize my friend A… We shake hands without a word. Rue Gay-Lussac, on the doorstep of a cafe, a woman whom everyone in the Quarter knows. The patroness of the old Cochon Fidele, on the rue des Cordiers. The old tavern, with its walls daubed by the regulars — they pointed out a sketch by Couture — had moved to the rue Gay-Lussac a year ago, without finding its former popularity.
Vermersch sometimes comes to have lunch here. Rigolette — as she is called — gives me a nod. She has seen us all, more or less often, at the rue des Cordiers, on evenings of “pomponettes.” Rigault used to make, like everyone, his appearances. When he will be, in a few hours, lying with his head shattered twenty paces from there, it is Rigolette, the good girl, who, braving the jeers of cowards, will go and throw a blanket over the dead man…
Corner of the rue Royer-Collard. A barricade blocks the street at its entrance on the rue Gay-Lussac. I pause there a moment. Two men, ready to fight. My gaze, instinctively, goes to the windows of the third floor of the corner house. There lives one of my former teachers. Joseph Moutier, who would later be a tutor at the Ecole Polytechnique. He was my physics teacher at the Institution Barbet on the rue des Feuillantines, and afterward my “quizzer” at Sainte-Barbe, along with the father of Da Costa, the mathematics quizzer.
Good “papa” Moutier! as we called him. He addresses me with the familiar tu, as he does with his favorite pupils, who have become his friends. I met him often during the siege, and also during these two months of turmoil…
— My boy, you see, it is going to end badly… I am the one telling you…
It is ending badly, indeed… very badly… And I think, with tenderness, of that good papa Moutier. What if I went up to his place… But no… I must stay. It would be cowardly to hide, to clear out… Never.
Rigault had been, like me, a pupil of Moutier. Or else he had known him at the Sorbonne. For, a detail certainly unknown to many people, Rigault, who styled himself a professor of mathematics, had some right to this title. It was he who edited what were then called the baccalaureate sheets, where, each day of the examination session, the solutions of the problems set for the candidates were given. A detail even less well known: for the editing of his lithographed sheets, sold by the booksellers of the rue de la Sorbonne, he had a collaborator, who was Alphonse Humbert.
Rigault’s corpse, killed around three o’clock on that same Wednesday, lay stretched out until the next evening, just below Moutier’s windows. Someone who was close to the excellent man told me, on my return from exile, of Moutier’s painful emotion, for, however far removed he was from approving our actions, Moutier was a good heart. He suffered cruelly at being forced to endure, for two days, the grim spectacle.
The Pantheon Is Going to Blow Up!
Half past twelve. — Let us go to the Town Hall. I go back down toward the Medici fountain. In the basin, which has been drained, two fighters have installed themselves. The packets of cartridges arranged in the middle. I point out to them that they are exposed on all sides.
— What do we care? We shall fire lying down.
On the balcony of the house at the corner of the boulevard and the rue Soufflot, half a dozen young men, rifles slung over their shoulders. I recognize a few of them. Maroteau, with his Christ-like face. Larochette, from Pyat’s Vengeur. Others.
Here is Valles. Sick, he tells me, exhausted. Three nights without sleep. He is in felt slippers, on the arm of a female friend.
— To the Town Hall?
I do not have time to answer. An appalling detonation freezes my lips.
A cloud of black smoke, with great patches of fire, rises from the Luxembourg, from the direction of the Observatory. Lisbonne has just blown up the powder magazine, set up on the grounds of the former Nursery.
The broken windowpanes clink on the sidewalks. The silence of a moment ago has been replaced by cries — terror and despair.
— The Pantheon is going to blow up! The Pantheon is going to blow up!…
And through the barricades, the ammunition, the ambulance wagons, a crowd presses forward. Where is it running? It does not know. With the Pantheon, is not the whole neighborhood going to collapse into the catacombs?
Women flee, distracted, dragging children behind them. Others with parcels. One has her clock under her arm… And always that cry:
— The Pantheon is going to blow up!
At the Town Hall, down below, at the door, I cross the chief of the 248th, Henri Regere, the son of the member of the Commune, who is tying his horse to the window railings. We go up together.
Up there, it is the chaos of the last hour. Seated at tables, clerks besieged with requests for requisitions. Signatures on provisions vouchers, on money for pay. I look around for members of the Commune. A few anxious faces. Others, resolved to fight.
Below, the square full of fighters. There are some on the steps of the Pantheon, behind the columns of the portico. Everywhere. There are even some beneath the dome, on the circular platform surrounded by the colonnade. It is those men who, fighting to the last minute, no longer having time to descend and flee, were shot on the very spot where they were taken prisoner.
For a long time, behind that colonnade, one could see, a reliable witness has assured me, large pools of blood.
THE RED STREET
Little Chasseurs
Thursday, May 25. — The day after the capture of the Pantheon. At the bottom of the rue Soufflot. Early morning hours. The barricade on the rue Gay-Lussac is still standing. Behind the railings of the Luxembourg, whose entrances are closed, soldiers come and go. Cavalrymen, their blue jackets with white braiding unbuttoned, forage caps cocked on their ears, chat and smoke near their horses, tied to the trees.
Boulevard Saint-Michel, soldiers. Cannons with their limbers hitched, ready to head toward the battle that rumbles in the distance. At every window, tricolor flags. Everywhere, on the ground, kepis, belts, cartridge pouches, hobnailed shoes. At the corner of the rue Monsieur-le-Prince, a heap of dead, five or six. Another dead man lying on his back, one arm folded on his chest, the other arm outstretched, his face covered with a Federal’s kepi. The blood stains the beard that shows beneath. He must have been struck full in the face. A last shred of modesty — very rare in those dreadful days — has moved someone to hide the horrible wound. I bend to look at the battalion number. What if I lifted that kepi… I dare not.
The basin of the Medici fountain is full of corpses. Pell-mell, victors and vanquished. Executioners and executed. Fighters cornered, killed against the paving stones. Little chasseurs in their slate-colored tunics, whom I saw, the day before, from the top of the Pantheon steps, cross the square at a run. The grapeshot from the Soufflot barricade mowed them down like blades of grass.
There they are, about twenty, crushed on top of each other, dusty, bloody. The eyes, which no one has come to close, have remained wide open. They were thrown into this basin the day before, after the battle, so that they would not clog the street. Shortly, the horrible death wagon — a yellow moving van — will come to collect them and tip them into the graves being hastily dug in the cemeteries…
Cluny
Not a passerby. Nothing but soldiers. It seems to me that all eyes are directed at the poor civilian fugitive that I am. The round hat that someone gave me just now to replace my Federal lieutenant’s kepi falls over my ears. It must make me look ridiculous. Perhaps someone will notice me, stare at me, recognize me… What if I quickened my pace… Where… Toward the Odeon?
A crowd, very near, rue de Medicis. Two men come out of a house, and after them, two others.
These last two with a tricolor armband on their sleeves. The crowd of soldiers surrounds them. The procession takes the road I meant to take.
No. Let us not go that way.
I have a kind of presentiment that the two men are being led somewhere where they will be interrogated, detained, perhaps killed.
Let us go down the boulevard.
Place de la Sorbonne, I pass quickly before the Cafe d’Harcourt, whose terrace is already occupied by patrons.
I hug the houses. I think that from every door, abruptly, a face may emerge… A friend? An informer?
The railings of the Cluny garden.
Seated in a circle on the wide flagstones that, before the door of the Thermes hall, mark the tomb of a Gallic chieftain, infantrymen are doing their cooking.
Others, sprawled on the lawns, on their bellies, rifles beside them.
Still others, seated on column drums, crouching between the paws of stone monsters torn from Notre-Dame or some ancient demolished church.
A gunshot… Another.
Where does that come from?
From the back of the garden.
I feel a jolt at my shoulder… I turn around.
— Yes, it is I.
That was said to me very softly, very softly.
The man who approaches me, I have known since the first days of the siege. An old guard from my 248th. I remember that we did not want to register him when he presented himself. Too old.
— Too old, me! he had cried. Is one too old when one has fought everywhere, at the Cloitre Saint-Merri, in February, in June?
How he was there, how he had once again escaped the firing, I did not have time to ask him. He hardly cared about life, however. He had told me twenty times: “I shall stay there. This is my last battle.” He had not bothered to shave his old white beard. He lived, a hundred paces away, in a garret on the rue de la Parcheminerie. He did not hide.
We walked side by side.
More gunshots.
— It is in the courtyard of Cluny, the old man tells me. They have been shooting there all night. I have just seen one shot down against the facade wall. They pushed him to the foot of the streetlamp.
I have often returned, since those sinister days, to the courtyard of Cluny. In the corner, at the back, on the right — that is where they killed. One can still see, effaced by time, the traces of the holes made in the stone by the bullets.
Roullier’s Shop
Rue des Ecoles. We come up against the great barricade of the College de France.
The day before, I had seen it a few hours before the battle. Blocking the entire road. High, thick. Two bulges for the mitrailleuses. In front, in the nearby construction site, like outworks, the enormous stones accumulated for the building of the new Sorbonne. Behind each of these stones, formidable blocks, raised like dolmens, one or two fighters. Later, when these stones are lifted — some knocked down by shells — one will be found, beneath one of them, crushed, the corpse — the skeleton — still clothed, of a Federal.
Very near, Roullier’s shop.
This shop, which still exists now, an annex of the College de France, is a morsel, a grain of dust, of the tragic history.
Edouard Roullier, cobbler — he signs with pride “Roullier, mender” — a fighter of June, a proscript of December.
Under the Commune, Roullier was a member of the commission on labor and exchange at the delegation for Commerce.
Valles, as a joke, took him along in the first days to Public Education.
— Roullier, sit down there. In Jules Simon’s armchair.
Roullier — need it be said? — is ignorant of spelling. And he glories in it.
— I am not like you, dirty little bourgeois, who had parents to get you an education! he proclaims into his long insurgent’s beard.
One day in February 1870, when I was producing, with Passedouet, who died in New Caledonia, a little firebrand sheet, La Misere, Roullier sent me, I no longer remember for what reason, an article to be published. I thought it my duty to correct the French mistakes. Ah, what it cost me!
— You have committed a forgery! he shouted. I do not permit you this. It is no longer Roullier. I am no writer!
Roullier lives, with his wife, a laundress, on the rue Montagne Sainte-Genevieve. He has innumerable children, whom he drags along to the Brasserie Saint-Severin, where he comes in a long blue smock, freshly pressed. One evening, at closing time, he forgot one, who was snoozing on the bench. The child spent the night there. Roullier had not, however, forgotten, on his belated departure for home, the eternal volume of Proudhon that he always carried under his arm, like a breviary.
— And you, Roullier, what are you?
Roullier would seize his book. Most often, the Confessions of a Revolutionary.
— A Proudhonian, damn it!
And he would carefully put the precious talisman back in his pocket.
One evening, one of us snatched the book in passing.
— But, you fool, the pages are not cut!
Roullier turned pale. His river-god beard trembled. We all thought he was about to knock the audacious fellow senseless. Valles was in stitches. He too had carried around for a long time a Theory of Taxation, of which he had certainly never read twenty lines. Roullier, caught red-handed, remained speechless.
Roullier is not only a Proudhonian. He tinges his admiration for Proudhon with a violent shade of anarchy. With some friends from the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve, he has founded the League of Anti-Landlords. Every member of the League pledges never to pay his rent. Moving out by moonlight is obligatory. Every member owes his help to the comrade threatened by Monsieur Vulture. From time to time, Roullier joins us at the cafe — at one of the five or six cafes that successively enjoyed the honor of our patronage, from the Cafe Huber on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince to the Brasserie Saint-Severin — looking weary, worn out. He drops into a seat.
— Well! What is it? Are you ill?
— Me? Why?
And, rising, solid and with a conquering eye:
— Bunch of oafs… of bourgeois… If you had, like me — and he would give a slap to his broad chest — been hauling the hand-cart all afternoon…
— What now? Another move?
— Yes… citizen so-and-so… Ah, our League of Anti-Landlords is doing well… Another one who won’t collect his rent.
And this good Roullier, cheered up, happy to have played the trick on one of those landlords to whom he wished mortal harm, would put down, to restore his strength, a foaming beer…
Would you believe it, Roullier, at bottom, was a wise man. When the Fourth of September came, he remembered that he was a cobbler. And that, by the same token, he could shoe his fellow citizens. He won the contract for furnishing shoes to several battalions of the National Guard in the neighborhood.
To set up his workshop, he was granted an unoccupied shop on the edge of the College de France.
We then saw this good Roullier wearing nothing but a ample, bourgeois frock coat. The blue smock, which he had formerly displayed as a symbol, was relegated to citizeness Roullier’s laundry.
Now and then, I would go to the shop to shake the old insurgent’s hand, momentarily master cobbler.
Ah, how he drove his “collaborators”!
Standing in his tall frame, on the threshold of the door, his eye on the alert, his beard bristling, Roullier would wait for them, the hour of return to work having struck.
— Come on! Faster than that! The hobnailed shoes are waiting for you.
When the Commune came, Roullier kept his “workshop.” I believe he also kept his shoe contracts for the Federals.
On Wednesday morning, before the attack on the Pantheon, passing along the rue des Ecoles, I entered the shop. A dozen women were sewing sandbags for the great barricade nearby.
Roullier was there. Also some mutual friends. Rifles leaning against the wall.
In his drawling voice, with its working-class intonation, Roullier was urging on the zeal of the citizennesses who were rapidly sewing the bags, as he did during the siege for the shoes.
I was not to see Roullier again until long, long after the fall of the Commune.
The blond beard threaded with silver of the old insurgent had turned all white. He was over seventy. Poor as he had always been, he was patching the ankle-boots of little servant girls in a narrow stall on the rue Beaubourg, where I would sometimes go to surprise him and talk about the old days. He confided to me his latest sorrows, the hard life, the days without food, his bitterness, often his desolation.
— What was the use, he would say to me in a bitter voice, of having fought June, December, and the Commune, only to starve like an old dog… One day, you’ll find me hanged…
I consoled the old comrade as best I could.
I met him for the last time at the Pere-Lachaise, at Longuet’s funeral.
With two or three friends, we had left the procession to go take a turn at the Wall.
— Well? I said to him, taking him aside.
— I am a little more content. Mesureur has put me down for a small sum each month, from Public Assistance…
That evening — we had stayed chatting at the tavern facing the entrance to the Pere-Lachaise — the conversation fell on the barricade of the rue des Ecoles, on the sandbags, and on the shop at the College de France.
— Yes, said Roullier, whom these memories cheered up. Yes, those were the good days.
A few days later, I was told of Roullier’s end.
The old insurgent had been found, one morning, dead in his narrow little room on the rue Beaubourg, where apoplexy, merciful, had struck him down.
He was eighty years old.
Saint-Severin
— I have already been all through the Quarter, the old guard continued. There is a whole heap of dead at Saint-Severin. They say they were killed inside the church, where they had locked themselves in when they found themselves surrounded. They are lined up on the little square, behind the apse, facing the rue Galande.
We were on the rue de la Harpe. The old man had fallen silent. Suddenly, he seized my arm.
— They should have killed me too… I have no one in the world… It would have been better for me to die at the foot of a wall than to die of hunger…
And the poor old insurgent confided to me, in a few brief words, his distress. Return to his garret on the rue de la Parcheminerie, he could not. He had not paid his rent since the war. No bread either. What to do? Go throw himself in the Seine. Get himself arrested. That was all he had left…
I slipped him, as I left him, a few coins. I never saw him again.
And, going down alone toward the rue Saint-Severin, I thought of the sadness of that obscure fighter of all the revolutions, reduced to the blackest misery, after having so many times risked his skin, known every enthusiasm, and seen all his dreams collapse…
Where am I going?
I think of Flotte, who lives on the rue de la Huchette. Flotte is safe. He served as intermediary for the plan to exchange the hostages. They know at Versailles — where he saw Thiers — that he accepted no post from the Commune. I gave him, the day before yesterday, the archbishop’s letters. He must certainly be at home.
It seems to me that, this time, I shall truly be safe. I walk fast. The Hotel du Mont-Blanc, where Flotte lives, at number 16, is only a few steps from me. A heavy cart is stopped before the door. I am about to set foot on the threshold when a shiver shakes me from head to foot. A terrible sight, which the vehicle had hidden from me…
In a recess of the street, formed by the setback of the new building line, three women lying, half covered with straw. I turn my gaze away. I flee, having had only time to see a pool of blackish blood, and the red skirt of one of the unfortunate women.
I flee, no longer thinking of Flotte, no longer thinking of anything, to the Place Saint-Michel.
Nine o’clock was tolling at the bell tower of Saint-Severin.
At eleven o’clock, I was at the court-martial.