by Umberto Eco
By mid-September the Prussians had reached the gates of
Paris, had occupied the forts that should have protected the
city, and were shelling it.
* * *
"My dear Simonini," he said, "you must do for us what you were doing for the Prussians, and keep us informed. I've just had those two wretches you were working with arrested. The pigeons have returned where they were trained to go, but we can make use of the darkroom materials. We had our own fast line of communication for military information between Issy fort and an attic room in the Notre Dame area. You'll send us your information there."
"You'll send 'us'—us who? You were, how do you say, a member of the imperial police. You ought to have gone with your emperor. Now it seems you're speaking as an emissary of the Thiers government."
"Captain Simonini, I am one of those who remain even when governments go. I'm following my government to Versailles — if I stay here, I'll end up like Lecomte and Thomas. These lunatics are quick to shoot, but we can give just as good as we get. When we need to know something specific you'll receive more detailed orders."
Something specific . . . Easier said than done, given that different things were going on in different parts of the city — platoons of the National Guard were parading with the red flag and with flowers in their rifle barrels in the same districts where respectable families had locked themselves inside their houses waiting for the return of the lawful government. Among those elected to the Commune, it was impossible to understand, either from the newspapers or from the gossip in the marketplace, who was on which side, since they included laborers, doctors, journalists, moderate republicans, angry socialists and diehard Jacobins who dreamt of returning not to the Commune of 1789 but to the Terror of '93. But the atmosphere in the streets was of great gaiety. Had it not been for the men in uniform, you might have imagined a large popular celebration. The soldiers were playing what, in Turin, we used to call sussi and here is called au bouchon, while officers strutted about in front of the girls.
This morning I remembered I had among my old belongings a large box full of clippings from that period, which come in handy for reconstructing what my memory alone cannot do. They were from newspapers of all leanings: Le Rappel, Le Réveil du Peuple, La Marseillaise, Le Bonnet Rouge, Paris Libre, Le Moniteur du Peuple and others. I don't know who read them — perhaps only those who wrote them. I had bought them to see whether they had any facts or opinions that might have been of interest to Lagrange.
I could see how confused the situation was when I met Maurice Joly one day among a confused crowd in an equally confused demonstration. He barely recognized me because of my beard and then, remembering I was a Carbonaro or something similar, assumed I was a supporter of the Commune. For him I had been a kind and generous companion in a difficult time. He took me by the arm, led me to his house (a very modest apartment on quai Voltaire) and confided in me over a glass of green Chartreuse.
"Simonini," Joly said, "after Sedan I took part in the first republican revolts. I marched to support the continuation of war, but I realized these fanatics wanted too much. During the Revolution, the Commune saved France from invasion, but such miracles of history don't happen twice. Revolution isn't proclaimed by decree, it is born from the womb of the people. There's been a moral canker in this country for twenty years; it cannot be cured in two days. France is capable only of emasculating its finest offspring. I suffered two years' imprisonment for opposing Bonaparte, and when I left prison I was unable to find a publisher who would print my new books. You'll say there was still the empire. But when the empire fell this republican government indicted me for taking part in a peaceful invasion of the Hôtel de Ville at the end of October. All right, I was acquitted, as they couldn't prove I used violence, but this is the reward for those who have fought against the empire and against that vile armistice. Now it seems the whole of Paris is basking in this Communard utopia, but you have no idea how many are trying to leave the city to avoid military service. It is said they are about to introduce conscription for all men between eighteen and forty, but look how many young men are wandering brazenly in the streets and in the districts where the National Guard won't dare to enter. Not many people want to get killed for the revolution. How sad."
Joly seemed an incurable idealist who would never be content with things as they were, though I have to say things always seemed to go wrong for him. I was concerned about his mention of conscription and decided it was time to whiten my beard and my hair. Now I looked like a dignified sixty-year-old.
In the squares and marketplaces I found many who, unlike Joly, supported the new laws, laws such as the cancellation of rent increases imposed by landlords during the siege, the return of all work tools that workers had pledged to pawnshops during the same period, the granting of pensions to the wives and children of National Guardsmen killed in action and the postponement of obligations on commercial debts. All these fine things bled the coffers of the Commune and benefited the rabble.
But that same mob (as was clear from discussions around place Maubert and in the local brasseries), while applauding the abolition of the guillotine, condemned (of course) the law that prohibited prostitution, turning onto the streets so many women in the district. So all the Paris whores emigrated to Versailles, and I have no idea where those brave National Guardsmen went to slake their lust.
Then, to alienate the bourgeoisie, there were the anticlerical laws, such as the separation of church and state and the confiscation of church property, and many rumors circulated about the arrest of priests and monks.
In mid-April an army advance guard from Versailles penetrated the northwestern districts near Neuilly, shooting every fédéré they captured. The Arc de Triomphe was shelled from Mont-Valérien. A few days later I witnessed the most incredible moment of the siege: the procession of Freemasons. I didn't think of the Masons as Communards, but there they were with their standards and their aprons, asking the government in Versailles to agree to a truce so the wounded could be evacuated from the districts that had been shelled. They got as far as the Arc de Triomphe, where on that occasion they met no cannon fire, as it was clear that most of their brethren were outside the city with the monarchists. In short, though there may be honor among thieves, and though the Freemasons at Versailles had worked to obtain a one-day truce, the agreement stopped there and the Freemasons in Paris were siding with the Commune.
If I remember little else about what happened on the surface during the days of the Commune, it is because I was moving around Paris under the ground. A message from Lagrange informed me of what the military high command wanted to know. It is well known that Paris is perforated by its system of drains, so often described by novelists, but beneath the network of sewers, stretching as far as its boundaries and beyond, is a maze of limestone and chalk caves and ancient catacombs. Much is known about some of these, but little about others. The army knew about the tunnels connecting the ring of fortresses outside central Paris, and when the Prussians arrived they hurriedly blocked many entrances so as to prevent the enemy from organizing an unwelcome surprise. The Prussians, however, hadn't considered entering that maze of tunnels, even when the opportunity arose, for fear of being unable to get out and losing their way in a minefield.
Very few, in fact, knew anything about the tunnels and catacombs, and most of these were criminals who used the labyrinths for smuggling goods past the city customs posts, and to escape from police roundups. My job was to question as many blackguards as possible, so as to learn my way around these passageways.
I remember, when acknowledging receipt of my orders, that I couldn't resist asking: "Doesn't the army already have detailed maps?" To which Lagrange answered: "Don't ask stupid questions. At the beginning of the war our military leaders were so sure of winning that they distributed only maps of Germany and none of France."
In times when good food and wine were scarce, it was easy to renew acquaintance with people I'd met at
some tapis-francs and take them to a more reputable tavern where I could offer them chicken and the finest wine. They'd not only talk, but would take me on some fascinating subterranean excursions. It was just a question of having good lamps and of noting various features along the way so as to remember when to turn left or right, such as the outline of a guillotine, an old sign, a charcoal sketch or a name, perhaps drawn by someone who was never to leave that place again. The ossuaries shouldn't deter you either, since by following the right sequence of skulls, you'll arrive at some stairway leading up into the cellar of an obliging establishment from where you can emerge to see the stars again.
Some of these places were soon to be opened to visitors, but others were known at that time only to my informants.
In short, between late March and the end of May, I gained a certain expertise and sent sketches to Lagrange indicating several possible routes. Then I realized my messages were of very little use, since the government forces were now entering Paris without using the underground passageways. Versailles had five army corps by then, whose soldiers were well trained and briefed and had only one purpose, as was quickly apparent: not to take prisoners — every fédéré they captured had to be killed. Orders were even given, as I was to see with my own eyes, that when a group of prisoners exceeded ten, the firing squad would be replaced by a machine gun. And the regular soldiers were reinforced with brassardiers — convicts or worse — wearing tricolor armbands, who were more ruthless than the regular troops.
On Sunday the 21st of May, at two o'clock in the afternoon, eight thousand people gathered in festive spirit for a concert in the Jardin des Tuileries to aid the widows and orphans of the National Guard, no one yet realizing that the number of unfortunates to benefit was soon to increase alarmingly. At four-thirty, while the concert was still in progress (though this was only discovered later), the government forces entered Paris by the city gate at Saint-Cloud, occupied Auteuil and Passy and shot all the captured National Guardsmen. It is said that by seven o'clock that evening at least twenty thousand Versaillais were in the city, but heaven knows what the leaders of the Commune were doing. It all goes to show that organizing a revolution requires men with good military training. But such people don't get involved, and stay on the side with the power. Which is why I can see no reason (by which I mean no good reason) for staging a revolution.
On Monday morning the men from Versailles set up their cannon at the Arc de Triomphe, and someone seemed to have ordered the Communards to abandon a coordinated defense of the city and for each squad to barricade itself in its own district. If this is true, the stupidity of the fédéré commanders was able to shine through once again.
Barricades were erected everywhere, with the help of an apparently enthusiastic population, even in the most hostile districts of the Commune, such as those of the Opéra or Faubourg Saint-Germain, where the National Guardsmen drove the most elegant women out of their homes, spurring them to pile their finest furniture in the street. A rope was drawn across the street to mark the line of the next barricade, and everyone began depositing uprooted paving slabs or sandbags there; chairs, chests of drawers, benches and mattresses were thrown down from the windows, sometimes with the consent of the occupants, sometimes with their owners in tears, cowering in the back room of a now empty apartment.
An officer pointed to his men at work and said to me: "You too can lend a hand, citizen. We're here to die for your liberty as well!"
I pretended to join in, and made as if to pick up a stool at the far end of the street, then continued on around the corner.
The fact that Parisians have enjoyed building barricades for at least a century, and then taking them down at the first cannon shot, seems quite irrelevant: barricades are built out of a feeling of heroism, though I'd like to see how many of those who build them stay there up to the right moment. They'll follow my example, and only the stupidest ones will be left to defend them, and will be shot where they stand.
The only way to understand how events were proceeding in Paris would have been to observe them from a dirigible balloon. Some rumors suggested that the École Militaire, where the cannon of the National Guard were kept, had been occupied, others that there was fighting at place Clichy, while others claimed that the Germans were allowing the government forces to enter from the north. Montmartre was seized on the Tuesday, and forty men, three women and four children were taken to the place where the Communards had shot Lecomte and Thomas, made to kneel, and were shot one by one.
On the Wednesday I saw many public buildings in flames, including the Tuileries Palace. Some said the garden had been set ablaze by the Communards to stop the advance of the government troops, and indeed there were mad Jacobins, les petroleuses, who went around with a bucket of kerosene to start fires; others swore they had been caused by government howitzers; yet others blamed old Bonapartists who were taking advantage of the situation to destroy compromising archives. At first I thought that was what I would have done if I had been in Lagrange's position, but then it occurred to me that a good secret service agent hides information but never destroys it, since it may come in handy one day against someone.
Out of an excess of scruples, and with much fear of finding myself in the midst of fighting, I went for the last time to the pigeon loft, where I found a message from Lagrange. He told me I need no longer communicate by pigeon, and gave me an address at the Louvre, which had been occupied by now, and a password to get me through the government roadblocks.
At the same time I heard that government forces had reached Montparnasse. I remembered how at Montparnasse I had been taken to visit a vintner's cellar. From there you entered an underground passageway that followed rue d'Assas as far as rue du Cherche-Midi and then emerged in an abandoned storeroom in a building at carrefour de la Croix-Rouge, a crossroads still heavily occupied by Communards. Seeing that my underground investigations had so far been of no benefit, and that I had to obtain some results in order to earn my pay, I went to see Lagrange.
It wasn't difficult to reach the Louvre from the Île de la Cité, but behind Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois I saw a scene that, I confess, made quite an impression on me. A man and woman with a child were passing by, and they didn't seem to be running away from a stormed barricade; but there was a squad of drunken brassardiers who were obviously celebrating the capture of the Louvre, and they tried to pull the man from the arms of his wife, who was holding on to him, crying, and the brassardiers pushed all three against the wall and riddled them with bullets.
I made sure I passed only through the lines of regular soldiers to whom I could give my password, and was then led to a room where several people were marking a large map of the city with colored pins. I couldn't see Lagrange, and asked for him. A middle-aged man with an excessively normal face (by which I mean that if I had to describe him I could point out no salient feature) turned and greeted me courteously, not extending his hand.
"Captain Simonini, I presume. My name is Hébuterne. From now on, whatever you had to do with Monsieur Lagrange you will do with me. You are aware that change is necessary, even in state services, especially at the end of a war. Monsieur Lagrange deserved an honorable retirement, and perhaps he is right now fishing à la ligne somewhere or other, away from this disagreeable confusion."
This wasn't the moment to ask questions. I told him about the underground passage from rue d'Assas to the Croix-Rouge, and Hébuterne commented that an operation at the Croix-Rouge would be extremely useful, as he had received news that the Communards were amassing large numbers of troops there, awaiting the arrival of government forces from the south. He therefore ordered me to go to the vintner's shop, whose address I had given, and to wait there for a squad of brassardiers.
I was thinking of taking it slowly from the Seine to Montparnasse, to allow enough time for Hébuterne's messenger to arrive before me, when I saw, there on the pavement on the right bank, twenty corpses laid out in a line. They must have just been shot, and seemed to be of
various ages and social classes. There was a young man who looked like a laborer, his mouth gaping open. Next to him was an older, more respectable man with curly hair and a well-groomed mustache, with hands crossed over a slightly rumpled frock coat. Beside him was someone with the face of an artist, and another whose features were almost unrecognizable, with a black hole where his left eye should have been and a towel tied around his head, as if some pious soul, or some ruthless renegade, had sought to bind up his head, which had been blown apart by who knows how many bullets. There was also a woman who had perhaps once been pretty.
* * *
A middle-aged man with an excessively normal
face . . . turned and greeted me . . . "Captain
Simonini, I presume. My name is Hébuterne."
* * *
The bodies lay in the late May sun, the first flies of the season buzzing around them, attracted by the feast. They looked as if they had been taken at random and shot just to set an example, and had been lined up on the pavement to clear the street for a platoon of government soldiers who were passing at that very moment, pulling a cannon behind them. What struck me about those faces was . . . I find it difficult to write down . . . was their casualness: in their sleep they seemed to show an acceptance of their common destiny.
Having reached the end of the row, I was shocked to see the corpse of the last executed man, slightly apart from the others, as if it had been added to the group later. Part of the face was caked with blood, but I had no difficulty in recognizing Lagrange. Changes certainly were under way in the secret service.
I have no womanish sensitivity, and had been perfectly capable of dragging a priest's corpse down into the sewers, but this sight disturbed me. Not out of pity, but because I realized it could have happened to me. All that was needed was to meet someone on the way to Montparnasse who recognized me as one of Lagrange's men — it could just as well have been a Versaillais or a Communard. Both sides had reason to distrust me — and distrust, in those days, meant death.
