Complete Works of Emile Zola (1230 page)

Hours passed, and still he fought on, but with a bitter feeling of distress, with no other wish than that he might die. If he had erred, let him at least atone for his error with his blood! The barricade across the Rue de Lille, near its intersection with the Rue du Bac, was a formidable one, composed of bags and casks filled with earth and faced by a deep ditch. He and a scant dozen of other federates were its only defenders, resting in a semi-recumbent position on the ground, infallibly causing every soldier who exposed himself to bite the dust. He lay there, without even changing his position, until nightfall, using up his cartridges in silence, in the dogged sullenness of his despair. The dense clouds of smoke from the Palace of the Legion of Honor were billowing upward in denser masses, the flames undistinguishable as yet in the dying daylight, and he watched the fantastic, changing forms they took as the wind whirled them downward to the street. Another fire had broken out in an hotel not far away. And all at once a comrade came running up to tell him that the enemy, not daring to advance along the street, were making a way for themselves through the houses and gardens, breaking down the walls with picks. The end was close at hand; they might come out in the rear of the barricade at any moment. A shot having been fired from an upper window of a house on the corner, he saw Chouteau and his gang, with their petroleum and their lighted torch, rush with frantic speed to the buildings on either side and climb the stairs, and half an hour later, in the increasing darkness, the entire square was in flames, while he, still prone on the ground behind his shelter, availed himself of the vivid light to pick off any venturesome soldier who stepped from his protecting doorway into the narrow street.

How long did Maurice keep on firing? He could not tell; he had lost all consciousness of time and place. It might be nine o’clock, or ten, perhaps. He continued to load and fire; his condition of hopelessness and gloom was pitiable; death seemed to him long in coming. The detestable work he was engaged in gave him now a sensation of nausea, as the fumes of the wine he has drunk rise and nauseate the drunkard. An intense heat began to beat on him from the houses that were burning on every side — an air that scorched and asphyxiated. The carrefour, with the barricades that closed it in, was become an intrenched camp, guarded by the roaring flames that rose on every side and sent down showers of sparks. Those were the orders, were they not? to fire the adjacent houses before they abandoned the barricades, arrest the progress of the troops by an impassable sea of flame, burn Paris in the face of the enemy advancing to take possession of it. And presently he became aware that the houses in the Rue du Bac were not the only ones that were devoted to destruction; looking behind him he beheld the whole sky suffused with a bright, ruddy glow; he heard an ominous roar in the distance, as if all Paris were bursting into conflagration. Chouteau was no longer to be seen; he had long since fled to save his skin from the bullets. His comrades, too, even those most zealous in the cause, had one by one stolen away, affrighted at the approaching prospect of being outflanked. At last he was left alone, stretched at length between two sand bags, his every faculty bent on defending the front of the barricade, when the soldiers, who had made their way through the gardens in the middle of the block, emerged from a house in the Rue du Bac and pounced on him from the rear.

For two whole days, in the fevered excitement of the supreme conflict, Maurice had not once thought of Jean, nor had Jean, since he entered Paris with his regiment, which had been assigned to Bruat’s division, for a single moment remembered Maurice. The day before his duties had kept him in the neighborhood of the Champ de Mars and the Esplanade of the Invalides, and on this day he had remained in the Place du Palais-Bourbon until nearly noon, when the troops were sent forward to clean out the barricades of the quartier, as far as the Rue des Saints-Peres. A feeling of deep exasperation against the rioters had gradually taken possession of him, usually so calm and self-contained, as it had of all his comrades, whose ardent wish it was to be allowed to go home and rest after so many months of fatigue. But of all the atrocities of the Commune that stirred his placid nature and made him forgetful even of his tenderest affections, there were none that angered him as did those conflagrations. What, burn houses, set fire to palaces, and simply because they had lost the battle! Only robbers and murderers were capable of such work as that. And he who but the day before had sorrowed over the summary executions of the insurgents was now like a madman, ready to rend and tear, yelling, shouting, his eyes starting from their sockets.

Jean burst like a hurricane into the Rue du Bac with the few men of his squad. At first he could distinguish no one; he thought the barricade had been abandoned. Then, looking more closely, he perceived a communard extended on the ground between two sand bags; he stirred, he brought his piece to the shoulder, was about to discharge it down the Rue du Bac. And impelled by blind fate, Jean rushed upon the man and thrust his bayonet through him, nailing him to the barricade.

Maurice had not had time to turn. He gave a cry and raised his head. The blinding light of the burning buildings fell full on their faces.

“O Jean, dear old boy, is it you?”

To die, that was what he wished, what he had been longing for. But to die by his brother’s hand, ah! the cup was too bitter; the thought of death no longer smiled on him.

“Is it you, Jean, old friend?”

Jean, sobered by the terrible shock, looked at him with wild eyes. They were alone; the other soldiers had gone in pursuit of the fugitives. About them the conflagrations roared and crackled and blazed up higher than before; great sheets of white flame poured from the windows, while from within came the crash of falling ceilings. And Jean cast himself on the ground at Maurice’s side, sobbing, feeling him, trying to raise him to see if he might not yet be saved.

“My boy, oh! my poor, poor boy!”

VIII.

When at about nine o’clock the train from Sedan, after innumerable delays along the way, rolled into the Saint-Denis station, the sky to the south was lit up by a fiery glow as if all Paris was burning. The light had increased with the growing darkness, and now it filled the horizon, climbing constantly higher up the heavens and tingeing with blood-red hues some clouds, that lay off to the eastward in the gloom which the contrast rendered more opaque than ever.

The travelers alighted, Henriette among the first, alarmed by the glare they had beheld from the windows of the cars as they rushed onward across the darkling fields. The soldiers of a Prussian detachment, moreover, that had been sent to occupy the station, went through the train and compelled the passengers to leave it, while two of their number, stationed on the platform, shouted in guttural French:

“Paris is burning. All out here! this train goes no further. Paris is burning, Paris is burning!”

Henriette experienced a terrible shock.
Mon Dieu!
was she too late, then? Receiving no reply from Maurice to her two last letters, the alarming news from Paris had filled her with such mortal terror that she determined to leave Remilly and come and try to find her brother in the great city. For months past her life at Uncle Fouchard’s had been a melancholy one; the troops occupying the village and the surrounding country had become harsher and more exacting as the resistance of Paris was protracted, and now that peace was declared and the regiments were stringing along the roads, one by one, on their way home to Germany, the country and the cities through which they passed were taxed to their utmost to feed the hungry soldiers. The morning when she arose at daybreak to go and take the train at Sedan, looking out into the courtyard of the farmhouse she had seen a body of cavalry who had slept there all night, scattered promiscuously on the bare ground, wrapped in their long cloaks. They were so numerous that the earth was hidden by them. Then, at the shrill summons of a trumpet call, all had risen to their feet, silent, draped in the folds of those long mantles, and in such serried, close array that she involuntarily thought of the graves of a battlefield opening and giving up their dead at the call of the last trump. And here again at Saint-Denis she encountered the Prussians, and it was from Prussian lips that came that cry which caused her such distress:

“All out here! this train goes no further. Paris is burning!”

Henriette, her little satchel in her hand, rushed distractedly up to the men in quest of information. There had been heavy fighting in Paris for the last two days, they told her, the railway had been destroyed, the Germans were watching the course of events. But she insisted on pursuing her journey at every risk, and catching sight upon the platform of the officer in command of the detachment detailed to guard the station, she hurried up to him.

“Sir, I am terribly distressed about my brother, and am trying to get to him. I entreat you, furnish me with the means to reach Paris.” The light from a gas jet fell full on the captain’s face she stopped in surprise. “What, Otto, is it you! Oh,
mon Dieu
, be good to me, since chance has once more brought us together!”

It was Otto Gunther, the cousin, as stiff and ceremonious as ever, tight-buttoned in his Guard’s uniform, the picture of a narrow-minded martinet. At first he failed to recognize the little, thin, insignificant-looking woman, with the handsome light hair and the pale, gentle face; it was only by the brave, honest look that filled her eyes that he finally remembered her. His only answer was a slight shrug of the shoulders.

“You know I have a brother in the army,” Henriette eagerly went on. “He is in Paris; I fear he has allowed himself to become mixed up with this horrible conflict. O Otto, I beseech you, assist me to continue my journey.”

At last he condescended to speak. “But I can do nothing to help you; really I cannot. There have been no trains running since yesterday; I believe the rails have been torn up over by the ramparts somewhere. And I have neither a horse and carriage nor a man to guide you at my disposal.”

She looked him in the face with a low, stifled murmur of pain and sorrow to behold him thus obdurate. “Oh, you will do nothing to aid me. My God, to whom then can I turn!”

It was an unlikely story for one of those Prussians to tell, whose hosts were everywhere all-powerful, who had the city at their beck and call, could have requisitioned a hundred carriages and brought a thousand horses from their stables. And he denied her prayer with the haughty air of a victor who has made it a law to himself not to interfere with the concerns of the vanquished, lest thereby he might defile himself and tarnish the luster of his new-won laurels.

“At all events,” continued Henriette, “you know what is going on in the city; you won’t refuse to tell me that much.”

He gave a smile, so faint as scarce to be perceptible. “Paris is burning. Look! come this way, you can see more clearly.”

Leaving the station, he preceded her along the track for a hundred steps or so until they came to an iron foot-bridge that spanned the road. When they had climbed the narrow stairs and reached the floor of the structure, resting their elbows on the railing, they beheld the broad level plain outstretched before them, at the foot of the slope of the embankment.

“You see, Paris is burning.”

It was in the neighborhood of ten o’clock. The fierce red glare that lit the southern sky was ever mounting higher. The blood-red clouds had disappeared from where they had floated in the east; the zenith was like a great inverted bowl of inky blackness, across which ran the reflections of the distant flames. The horizon was one unbroken line of fire, but to the right they could distinguish spots where the conflagration was raging with greater fury, sending up great spires and pinnacles of flame, of the most vivid scarlet, to pierce the dense opacity above, amid billowing clouds of smoke. It was like the burning of some great forest, where the fire bridges intervening space, and leaps from tree to tree; one would have said the very earth must be calcined and reduced to ashes beneath the heat of Paris’ gigantic funeral pyre.

“Look,” said Otto, “that eminence that you see profiled in black against the red background is Montmartre. There on the left, at Belleville and la Villette, there has not been a house burned yet; it must be they are selecting the districts of the wealthy for their work; and it spreads, it spreads. Look! there is another conflagration breaking out; watch the flames there to the right, how they seethe and rise and fall; observe the shifting tints of the vapors that rise from the blazing furnace. And others, and others still; the heavens are on fire!”

He did not raise his voice or manifest any sign of feeling, and it froze Henriette’s blood that a human being could stand by and witness such a spectacle unmoved. Ah, that those Prussians should be there to see that sight! She saw an insult in his studied calmness, in the faint smile that played upon his lips, as if he had long foreseen and been watching for that unparalleled disaster. So, Paris was burning then at last, Paris, upon whose monuments the German shells had scarce been able to inflict more than a scratch! and he was there to see it burn, and in the spectacle found compensation for all his grievances, the inordinate length to which the siege had been protracted, the bitter, freezing weather, the difficulties they had surmounted only to see them present themselves anew under some other shape, the toil and trouble they had had in mounting their heavy guns, while all the time Germany from behind was reproaching them with their dilatoriness. Nothing in all the glory of their victory, neither the ceded provinces nor the indemnity of five milliards, appealed to him so strongly as did that sight of Paris, in a fit of furious madness, immolating herself and going up in smoke and flame on that beautiful spring night.

“Ah, it was sure to come,” he added in a lower voice. “Fine work, my masters!”

It seemed to Henriette as if her heart would break in presence of that dire catastrophe. Her personal grief was lost to sight for some minutes, swallowed up in the great drama of a people’s atonement that was being enacted before her eyes. The thought of the lives that would be sacrificed to the devouring flames, the sight of the great capital blazing on the horizon, emitting the infernal light of the cities that were accursed and smitten for their iniquity, elicited from her an involuntary cry of anguish. She clasped her hands, asking: