Complete Works of Emile Zola (1227 page)

Maurice himself this time felt that the end was come. For four hours he had remained in the park of Buzanval with the National Guards under the galling fire from the Prussian intrenchments, and later, when he got back to the city, he spoke of their courage in the highest terms. It was undisputed that the Guards fought bravely on that occasion; after that was it not self-evident that all the disasters of the army were to be attributed solely to the imbecility and treason of its leaders? In the Rue de Rivoli he encountered bands of men shouting: “Hurrah for the Commune! down with Trochu!” It was the leaven of revolution beginning to work again in the popular mind, a fresh outbreak of public opinion, and so formidable this time that the Government of National Defense, in order to preserve its own existence, thought it necessary to compel General Trochu’s resignation and put General Vinoy in his place. On that same day Maurice, chancing to enter a hall in Belleville where a public meeting was going on, again heard the
levee en masse
demanded with clamorous shouts. He knew the thing to be chimerical, and yet it set his heart a-beating more rapidly to see such a determined will to conquer. When all is ended, is it not left us to attempt the impossible? All that night he dreamed of miracles.

Then a long week went by, during which Paris lay agonizing without a murmur. The shops had ceased to open their doors; in the lonely streets the infrequent wayfarer never met a carriage. Forty thousand horses had been eaten; dogs, cats and rats were now luxuries, commanding a high price. Ever since the supply of wheat had given out the bread was made from rice and oats, and was black, damp, and slimy, and hard to digest; to obtain the ten ounces that constituted a day’s ration involved a wait, often of many hours, in line before the bake-house. Ah, the sorrowful spectacle it was, to see those poor women shivering in the pouring rain, their feet in the ice-cold mud and water! the misery and heroism of the great city that would not surrender! The death rate had increased threefold; the theaters were converted into hospitals. As soon as it became dark the quarters where luxury and vice had formerly held carnival were shrouded in funereal blackness, like the faubourgs of some accursed city, smitten by pestilence. And in that silence, in that obscurity, naught was to be heard save the unceasing roar of the cannonade and the crash of bursting shells, naught to be seen save the red flash of the guns illuminating the wintry sky.

On the 28th of January the news burst on Paris like a thunderclap that for the past two days negotiations had been going on, between Jules Favre and M. von Bismarck, looking to an armistice, and at the same time it learned that there was bread for only ten days longer, a space of time that would hardly suffice to revictual the city. Capitulation was become a matter of material necessity. Paris, stupefied by the hard truths that were imparted to it at that late day, remained sullenly silent and made no sign. Midnight of that day heard the last shot from the German guns, and on the 29th, when the Prussians had taken possession of the forts, Maurice went with his regiment into the camp that was assigned them over by Montrouge, within the fortifications. The life that he led there was an aimless one, made up of idleness and feverish unrest. Discipline was relaxed; the soldiers did pretty much as they pleased, waiting in inactivity to be dismissed to their homes. He, however, continued to hang around the camp in a semi-dazed condition, moody, nervous, irritable, prompt to take offense on the most trivial provocation. He read with avidity all the revolutionary newspapers he could lay hands on; that three weeks’ armistice, concluded solely for the purpose of allowing France to elect an assembly that should ratify the conditions of peace, appeared to him a delusion and a snare, another and a final instance of treason. Even if Paris were forced to capitulate, he was with Gambetta for the prosecution of the war in the north and on the line of the Loire. He overflowed with indignation at the disaster of Bourbaki’s army in the east, which had been compelled to throw itself into Switzerland, and the result of the elections made him furious: it would be just as he had always predicted; the base, cowardly provinces, irritated by Paris’ protracted resistance, would insist on peace at any price and restore the monarchy while the Prussian guns were still directed on the city. After the first sessions, at Bordeaux, Thiers, elected in twenty-six departments and constituted by unanimous acclaim the chief executive, appeared to his eyes a monster of iniquity, the father of lies, a man capable of every crime. The terms of the peace concluded by that assemblage of monarchists seemed to him to put the finishing touch to their infamy, his blood boiled merely at the thought of those hard conditions: an indemnity of five milliards, Metz to be given up, Alsace to be ceded, France’s blood and treasure pouring from the gaping wound, thenceforth incurable, that was thus opened in her flank.

Late in February Maurice, unable to endure his situation longer, made up his mind he would desert. A stipulation of the treaty provided that the troops encamped about Paris should be disarmed and returned to their abodes, but he did not wait to see it enforced; it seemed to him that it would break his heart to leave brave, glorious Paris, which only famine had been able to subdue, and so he bade farewell to army life and hired for himself a small furnished room next the roof of a tall apartment house in the Rue des Orties, at the top of the butte des Moulins, whence he had an outlook over the immense sea of roofs from the Tuileries to the Bastille. An old friend, whom he had known while pursuing his law studies, had loaned him a hundred francs. In addition to that he had caused his name to be inscribed on the roster of a battalion of National Guards as soon as he was settled in his new quarters, and his pay, thirty sous a day, would be enough to keep him alive. The idea of going to the country and there leading a tranquil life, unmindful of what was happening to the country, filled him with horror; the letters even that he received from his sister Henriette, to whom he had written immediately after the armistice, annoyed him by their tone of entreaty, their ardent solicitations that he would come home to Remilly and rest. He refused point-blank; he would go later on when the Prussians should be no longer there.

And so Maurice went on leading an idle, vagabondish sort of life, in a state of constant feverish agitation. He had ceased to be tormented by hunger; he devoured the first white bread he got with infinite gusto; but the city was a prison still: German guards were posted at the gates, and no one was allowed to pass them until he had been made to give an account of himself. There had been no resumption of social life as yet; industry and trade were at a standstill; the people lived from day to day, watching to see what would happen next, doing nothing, simply vegetating in the bright sunshine of the spring that was now coming on apace. During the siege there had been the military service to occupy men’s minds and tire their limbs, while now the entire population, isolated from all the world, had suddenly been reduced to a state of utter stagnation, mental as well as physical. He did as others did, loitering his time away from morning till night, living in an atmosphere that for months had been vitiated by the germs arising from the half-crazed mob. He read the newspapers and was an assiduous frequenter of public meetings, where he would often smile and shrug his shoulders at the rant and fustian of the speakers, but nevertheless would go away with the most ultra notions teeming in his brain, ready to engage in any desperate undertaking in the defense of what he considered truth and justice. And sitting by the window in his little bedroom, and looking out over the city, he would still beguile himself with dreams of victory; would tell himself that France and the Republic might yet be saved, so long as the treaty of peace remained unsigned.

The 1st of March was the day fixed for the entrance of the Prussians into Paris, and a long-drawn howl of wrath and execration went up from every heart. Maurice never attended a meeting now that he did not hear Thiers, the Assembly, even the men of September 4th themselves, cursed and reviled because they had not spared the great heroic city that crowning degradation. He was himself one night aroused to such a pitch of frenzy that he took the floor and shouted that it was the duty of all Paris to go and die on the ramparts rather than suffer the entrance of a single Prussian. It was quite natural that the spirit of insurrection should show itself thus, should bud and blossom in the full light of day, among that populace that had first been maddened by months of distress and famine and then had found itself reduced to a condition of idleness that afforded it abundant leisure to brood on the suspicions and fancied wrongs that were largely the product of its own disordered imagination. It was one of those moral crises that have been noticed as occurring after every great siege, in which excessive patriotism, thwarted in its aims and aspirations, after having fired men’s minds, degenerates into a blind rage for vengeance and destruction. The Central Committee, elected by delegates from the National Guard battalions, had protested against any attempt to disarm their constituents. Then came an immense popular demonstration on the Place de la Bastille, where there were red flags, incendiary speeches and a crowd that overflowed the square, the affair ending with the murder of a poor inoffensive agent of police, who was bound to a plank, thrown into the canal, and then stoned to death. And forty-eight hours later, during the night of the 26th of February, Maurice, awakened by the beating of the long roll and the sound of the tocsin, beheld bands of men and women streaming along the Boulevard des Batignolles and dragging cannon after them. He descended to the street, and laying hold of the rope of a gun along with some twenty others, was told how the people had gone to the Place Wagram and taken the pieces in order that the Assembly might not deliver them to the Prussians. There were seventy of them; teams were wanting, but the strong arms of the mob, tugging at the ropes and pushing at the limbers and axles, finally brought them to the summit of Montmartre with the mad impetuosity of a barbarian horde assuring the safety of its idols. When on March 1 the Prussians took possession of the quarter of the Champs Elysees, which they were to occupy only for one day, keeping themselves strictly within the limits of the barriers, Paris looked on in sullen silence, its streets deserted, its houses closed, the entire city lifeless and shrouded in its dense veil of mourning.

Two weeks more went by, during which Maurice could hardly have told how he spent his time while awaiting the approach of the momentous events of which he had a distinct presentiment. Peace was concluded definitely at last, the Assembly was to commence its regular sessions at Versailles on the 20th of the month; and yet for him nothing was concluded: he felt that they were ere long to witness the beginning of a dreadful drama of atonement. On the 18th of March, as he was about to leave his room, he received a letter from Henriette urging him to come and join her at Remilly, coupled with a playful threat that she would come and carry him off with her if he delayed too long to afford her that great pleasure. Then she went on to speak of Jean, concerning whose affairs she was extremely anxious; she told how, after leaving her late in December to join the Army of the North, he had been seized with a low fever that had kept him long a prisoner in a Belgian hospital, and only the preceding week he had written her that he was about to start for Paris, notwithstanding his enfeebled condition, where he was determined to seek active service once again. Henriette closed her letter by begging her brother to give her a faithful account of how matters were with Jean as soon as he should have seen him. Maurice laid the open letter before him on the table and sank into a confused revery. Henriette, Jean; his sister whom he loved so fondly, his brother in suffering and privation; how absent from his daily thoughts had those dear ones been since the tempest had been raging in his bosom! He aroused himself, however, and as his sister advised him that she had been unable to give Jean the number of the house in the Rue des Orties, promised himself to go that very day to the office where the regimental records were kept and hunt up his friend. But he had barely got beyond his door and was crossing the Rue Saint-Honore when he encountered two fellow-soldiers of his battalion, who gave him an account of what had happened that morning and during the night before at Montmartre, and the three men started off on a run toward the scene of the disturbance.

Ah, that day of the 18th of March, the elation and enthusiasm that it aroused in Maurice! In after days he could never remember clearly what he said and did. First he beheld himself dimly, as through a veil of mist, convulsed with rage at the recital of how the troops had attempted, in the darkness and quiet that precedes the dawn, to disarm Paris by seizing the guns on Montmartre heights. It was evident that Thiers, who had arrived from Bordeaux, had been meditating the blow for the last two days, in order that the Assembly at Versailles might proceed without fear to proclaim the monarchy. Then the scene shifted, and he was on the ground at Montmartre itself — about nine o’clock it was — fired by the narrative of the people’s victory: how the soldiery had come sneaking up in the darkness, how the delay in bringing up the teams had given the National Guards an opportunity to fly to arms, the troops, having no heart to fire on women and children, reversing their muskets and fraternizing with the people. Then he had wandered desultorily about the city, wherever chance directed his footsteps, and by midday had satisfied himself that the Commune was master of Paris, without even the necessity of striking a blow, for Thiers and the ministers had decamped from their quarters in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the entire government was flying in disorder to Versailles, the thirty thousand troops had been hastily conducted from the city, leaving more than five thousand deserters from their numbers along the line of their retreat. And later, about half-past five in the afternoon, he could recall being at a corner of the exterior boulevard in the midst of a mob of howling lunatics, listening without the slightest evidence of disapproval to the abominable story of the murder of Generals Lecomte and Clement Thomas. Generals, they called themselves; fine generals, they! The leaders they had had at Sedan rose before his memory, voluptuaries and imbeciles; one more, one less, what odds did it make! And the remainder of the day passed in the same state of half-crazed excitement, which served to distort everything to his vision; it was an insurrection that the very stones of the streets seemed to have favored, spreading, swelling, finally becoming master of all at a stroke in the unforeseen fatality of its triumph, and at ten o’clock in the evening delivering the Hotel de Ville over to the members of the Central Committee, who were greatly surprised to find themselves there.