Liberty's Fire

by Lydia Syson

  Two began to search the apartment. The third, their leader, started the interrogation.

  ‘You are sheltering a Communard. We have been informed.’

  Jules’s eyebrows rose. If he stiffened his face into disdain, he could make a mask of it. Masks were, after all, one of his strengths.

  ‘How interesting,’ he said lightly. ‘I wonder who told you that. And I wonder who they could possibly mean?’

  The officer was used to this already. ‘That’s confidential, and none of your business.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Jules and shut his mouth. Bluff and quick to colour, this man was possibly a drinker, certainly volatile. He must be careful not to push him. But it was difficult.

  ‘Of course, you are most welcome to root out this putative Communard,’ he continued. ‘And I’m very touched at your concern for my safety. I hope you’ll make yourself at home. An aperitif, meanwhile, perhaps?’ Jules made a faint bow.

  The eyes opposite narrowed. The man didn’t understand the word ‘putative’. He thought he was being mocked. ‘Certainly not.’

  He joined the corridor-stalkers, listening for evidence. Only Anatole’s door was closed. The leader banged his stick against it.

  ‘What’s in here?’

  Jules ignored the dent. A pulse in his neck started to throb, and his hand brushed against it. It felt as if a trapped frog were trying to break free. Surely they could see its movement?

  ‘I’ll show you,’ he said.

  At that moment there was a call from the sitting room.

  ‘Something in here, sir, quick.’

  They both hurried in, and Jules saw the two other men staring at one of the curtains, not quite daring to approach it. The heavy lined velvet was trembling, first at the top, then the bottom. Another moment, and the ripple raced up to the top again. Jules knew exactly what was going on.

  ‘Come out of there, whoever you are!’ shouted the officer, and the movement stopped. ‘I told you —’ He strode furiously forward, and pulled back the curtain with a dramatic sweep. Fur on end, yellow eyes practically flashing, Minou clung to the top of the lining, all four sets of claws dug in to the cloth. The officer flung her to the floor, and she yowled and skittered away.

  ‘A cat,’ he said disgustedly. And led the way straight back to Anatole’s door.

  The bedroom was tidy now, the bed neatly made, Anatole’s clothes folded and packed in the trunk. Jules had even considered blowing dust around the place, but realised he couldn’t make such squalor convincing. What did this room say about Anatole? What could Jules say about him? Stay away now, he told him, wishing he believed in telepathy. Even more than he’d been longing to hear Anatole’s clumping feet and reassuring whistle coming up the stairs, he wanted not to hear them now.

  ‘Who sleeps here?’ The man opened a drawer. It was more dangerous to deny Anatole’s existence than confirm it.

  ‘His name is Anatole Clément.’

  By then the invader had pulled Anatole’s violin case out from under the bed, and was pawing at the catches. Jules winced as he pulled at the silk cloth in which the instrument was shrouded. They seemed almost disappointed that it was just a violin.

  ‘He’s a musician,’ he said. ‘At the Théâtre Lyrique.’

  ‘Heavy fighting round there now. Is that where he is?’ The officer waited. His harsh breathing seemed to rob the room of oxygen. Down the corridor, Jules heard the other men shifting furniture, opening windows and banging them shut. Noises echoed in the walls of the well down which he’d very nearly dropped Anatole’s uniform. They were all taking their duties very seriously.

  ‘No,’ said Jules, trying to keep his eyes still and steady – the hardest thing in the world, he decided. He looked at his shoes very intently, and tried to work out what to say next.

  ‘So where is he?’

  Down the corridor, a discordant shimmer of sound, muffled. They were rummaging in the piano. It was possible, in theory, to hide a man in a piano. Jules felt alternately hot and clammy. He wondered how long he could keep up this breezy act.

  ‘Oh, he left Paris about a week ago. It was quite a palaver getting him out, I can tell you.’ Just in time, he remembered Marie, and the dress she’d borrowed for her portrait. ‘Luckily the wardrobe mistress – from the theatre, you know? – she was able to lend a hand. Monsieur Clément made a very fetching young lady.’

  ‘Did he indeed? Somehow you don’t surprise me. And who exactly is this Anatole to you, that you should go to so much trouble for him?’

  ‘A friend. Just a friend.’

  It was the officer’s turn to raise his eyebrows, and curl his lip. Veined nostrils opened. Jules had been on the receiving end of looks like that before.

  ‘A friend,’ the man said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Really. That kind of friend, I suppose.’ He took a step backwards, as if, for all his bluster, he was suddenly afraid of infection.

  Jules stepped forward, and held out his hand for the violin. The man was gripping it too hard, holding it like a shield. The bridge would snap if he wasn’t careful. Jules’s foot knocked against the violin case, which was still open on the floor between them. At exactly the same time, two pairs of eyes noticed something neither had spotted before.

  Jules hadn’t been able to bring himself to burn his photographs – burning was harder to hide. Anyway, he couldn’t bear to destroy them. So the ones he didn’t want found, he’d hidden. They were flattened under carpets and rugs, taped behind pictures, walled up behind books and tucked between pages. Guardsmen and barricades. The fallen column. Zéphyrine and Anatole. Anatole. So many that could prove incriminating. Almost every single one, one way or another. But he hadn’t thought to check the violin case.

  A photograph of Zéphyrine, the carte de visite Jules had made, was tucked into the green baize lid of the violin case, wedged behind the two bows, and faintly filmed with rosin dust. Before Jules knew quite what had happened, Anatole’s violin was in his own hands, and the photograph in the officer’s. The man inspected it very closely. He seemed to take in every detail: the newspaper, the hair, the clothes, the defiance. With an ever-growing look of disgust, he turned it over once – the reverse was blank, but Zéphyrine’s name was on the front – and back again.

  ‘Or maybe not,’ he sneered.

  A shout came from upstairs – from the studio. The photograph was tucked inside a jacket. There was nothing Jules could do to retrieve it.

  ‘Follow me,’ came the order.

  Cradling the fiddle, Jules obeyed. The pulse in his neck still throbbed. The studio looked worse than he remembered.

  ‘What the hell has been going on here? This mess can’t be the work of a shell.’

  Jules supposed it couldn’t.

  ‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I think I’m going to have to give up photography. It’s so damnably dangerous. The chemicals, you know … and just look at my hands!’

  He held them out. It was nearly impossible to remove every last trace of silver nitrate. He wasn’t going to risk these idiots mistaking its shadowy stains for gunpowder marks. He thought about Anatole’s left fingertips, very faintly hardened from a lifetime of pressing down on strings. The men poked around in the chaos, boots on broken glass like chips of ice. Jules felt his nostrils prickling. A new smell was drifting into the studio, a different kind of acridity. He looked out across the rooftops, and the others followed his gaze. Smoke was creeping into the sky, as buildings began to burn.

  ‘Scum!’ The youngest invader spat, a shining tobacco-stained globule that glistened on the studio floor. His companion kept staring at the sky, disbelieving.

  ‘Who’d credit such a thing?’

  ‘They’d rather be buried in the rubble of Paris than surrender.’

  Jules wondered how you could tell who was responsible for what. Faced with a flaming projectile, a building could hardly choose its loyalty.

  ‘Where is it, do you think?’

  ‘Hard to tell from here.’
/>
  ‘Near the river?’

  ‘We’ll find out soon enough.’

  Yes. Go. Go and find out, thought Jules. Get out before you see anything else you shouldn’t.

  As if they’d overheard, the three men turned and stared at him. He disgusted them in every way; they were happy to make this plain.

  ‘Let’s move on.’

  At two o’clock Anatole was lying on his stomach, wedged between sandbags, trying to get a crick out of his neck. A shot zinged into the hessian, and sand spurted out in a steady hiss, sounding like rain. He wished it would stop. Eventually it petered out, stopping less suddenly than it had begun. Then came the news that Montmartre had fallen.

  His own face echoed the chorus around him – stunned disbelief.

  ‘Already?’

  ‘How?’

  Everyone mouthed the same question. Montmartre, of all places in Paris. How could it have crumbled so quickly? Montmartre was meant to be unconquerable, unassailable. The people of Montmartre would never let their neighbourhood be taken. Yet it had fallen in a matter of hours, humiliation arriving with devastating speed and efficiency. So what had happened to the people?

  The fédérés here shook their heads at the shame of it: blue, white and red flying over the heights of Montmartre. They wondered if the Commune might end where it had begun. Vengeance for March’s triumph had been precise, they heard. In the rue des Rosiers, at the very wall where the two generals had been shot in March, over forty men were made to kneel. Three women and four children were rounded up with them. One mother, her child in her arms, refused to get to her knees: she preferred to be executed on her feet.

  Anatole thought only of Zéphyrine. Where could she be? How could he possibly find out? She had to be safe somewhere, didn’t she? She had to be.

  Preoccupied with these thoughts, he didn’t notice that the ranks around him were thinning, and not by death. One by one, white-faced men slunk away. They slid off to find a bolthole, a safe spot where they could scrub the powder stains from their hands. Somewhere to stash a uniform, cast away a rifle or cartridges. Sewers and cesspits were filling up. Men wandered away from the barricades to crawl into anonymous workers’ smocks, ready to get back to work, all innocence. Who, me?

  Safe in her room in the cité Bergère, Marie knitted with the shutters closed, and her heart and ears shuttered too. It was too much. She didn’t want to know what was happening out there.

  In through the front door

  Around the back

  Out through the window

  And off jumps Jack.

  Montmartre taken, another column marched south to the crossroads of Paris, down the long road that led to Les Halles.

  Later, different men came to the barricade. Anatole looked over his shoulder and saw them wiping their hands, looking for water, refusing to pick up weapons until they were clean again. They smelled of petrol. Their hair was singed. Their cans were empty. What had they done?

  Anatole didn’t want to ask, but soon he didn’t have to. Smoke, then flames, and finally swirling ashes. The rue Royale was burning in a single sheet of fire. It was the only hope left, the only way the Commune could stop the Versailles troops from hollowing through the houses, or gunning down the fédérés from above and behind and outflanking them. The fire began to spread, from street to street, until all around the barricade the air was dense and dark. Anatole felt hot with outrage, but remained mute. This was no time for protest.

  ‘Brunel says to keep going. Orders. There’s more petrol at the garrison. Any volunteers?’

  Anatole shook his head, and went back to squinting at the enemy.

  Artillery duelled across the huge empty space all afternoon. By then, the Place de la Concorde was strewn with chunks of fountain, twisted lamp posts. The statue of Lille had lost her head. With thirty cannon ranged in front of the Tuileries Palace, returning fire for fire with vigour, the fédérés seemed to have a chance. But as the afternoon shadows lengthened, making it ever harder to hit your mark, Anatole realised that this was just a postponement. Retreat was muttered.

  On the other side of the gardens, invisible through trees that had sheltered concertgoers two days earlier, something else was escaping. Oil and turpentine gurgled free, arcs of liquid sluicing out, darkening velvet and brocade, drapes, hangings, embroidered imperial bees, dust sheets. All drenched without discrimination. Boots skidded and slipped on parquet mother-of-pearled with paraffin. At the foot of the grand staircase, and in the courtyard, barrels of gunpowder were rolled into place, fuses laid.

  By the time they had been lit, most of the Guardsmen were gone. Protected by the gunboats on the Seine, ignorant of the conflagration still to come, the fédérés were sent along the riverbanks, past the empty theatres, and ordered to rendezvous at the Hôtel de Ville. At their backs, an east wind fanned the flames. Soon crackling thunder rolled through gilded corridors, spitting and crashing and creaking, consuming the last vestiges of Empire.

  30.

  24th May

  Wednesday was the worst. Black bats escaped across the dirty sky in streams, shiny, flimsy wings disintegrating as they flew. Fragments of black silk attached themselves to Anatole’s salt-sticky face as they retreated eastward. Moths in mourning, edge-crinkled. Where had this dark blizzard come from? Who had fashioned these grim funereal petals, which crumbled to the touch? What was all this stuff?

  Not silk, but paper, so much paper: all the records from the Hôtel de Ville, released to roam through Paris, undoing births and deaths and marriages and deeds of ownership in a moment and forever. The documents of generations – families of shopkeepers, aristocrats, orphans, beggars – were dispersed within hours. Not a trace would remain. As the Palais de Justice burned too, every name of every criminal, every record of every revolutionary, every Second-Empire denunciation blackened and took to the air.

  Zéphyrine spent the night huddled under the roof beams of an abandoned house. She couldn’t sleep, but nor could she keep moving. Her knees were bleeding, her dress torn. On all fours she had crawled out of Montmartre through attics, led in her escape by a roofer who knew the secret spaces of the neighbourhood, an old workmate of her grandfather. There was more safety in height, he persuaded her. Better a bird than a rat. And then he’d left her here. She had no idea where here might be.

  Each time she closed her eyes, the image of Rose’s dead face ground into the corners of her mind. She hated herself for leaving her there. And what had become of Madame Mouton? What of her little girl? There seemed so little chance of survival for anyone in Montmartre. Your crime was simply to live there. From one attic window, she had glimpsed a dog licking the blood from the face of its dead owner. Licking and whining, and then giving up and simply howling.

  Now she rolled herself into a ball, knees up, fists clenched. She shivered uncontrollably until dawn, her teeth clattering against each other so loudly that the noise in her head drowned out the rattle of machine guns outside.

  At first light, she returned to the ground. Zéphyrine kept herself out of sight as much as possible, sliding into doorways and courtyards at the slightest sign of people. Her smoke-stained, ragged clothes would betray her in an instant, she knew. All day yesterday she had pictured Anatole at the crest of a barricade, a flag in his hand, defiant and daring. Now she hoped with all her heart that he had not found the courage to fight. That his neighbourhood had been swiftly defeated and that he had stayed safely in a cellar.

  The entire city seemed under a grey pall. By this third day of fighting, fires were raging right across Paris. Zéphyrine’s head roared, so she couldn’t tell if the noise she heard was inside her or outside. Listing from street to street, unable to get her bearings, she began to wonder if she might even be weaving in circles.

  Then hope came at last. A name – Balard – picked out in gold. It appeared ahead of her with a sign on either side – a snake coiled round a tree – and she knew where she was at last. Hope hiccupped in her chest as she read it for a se
cond time. This was the pharmacy her grandmother had shown her. Just before she died, Zéphyrine had nearly sought it out. They used to pass here each week on their way to delivering the flowers to the milliners, and every time, without fail, Gran’mère would bob a curtsey at the open door, and smile, and nod her head. And then, as they turned the corner, she would remind Zéphyrine of the pharmacist’s kindness in those dreadful weeks following her grandfather’s fall. ‘I know he did not tell the truth about the cost of the bandages and the medicines. Impossible, because each week, he charged less. Such a good man. Dear monsieur. How the world needs more like him.’

  But the shopfront was shuttered. The place looked dead. Zéphyrine crossed the road anyway, and hurled herself at the glass-fronted door, which felt like ice against her burning forehead.

  ‘Please. Oh please. Oh please,’ she cried.

  And then the blind whipped up in front of her, and there was Monsieur Balard, his elongated frame almost doubled over in the effort to identify her. Just behind the wavering glass, gold-rimmed spectacles magnified kindly eyes. At last he nodded recognition, then turned away and back, and nodded again. Thank God! He reached up to release the bolts and let her in.

  Cool and consoling. Chemicals, camphor and cotton wool. As soon as the door shut tinkling behind her, and the blind was lowered once more, Zéphyrine found herself in a world of order. Rows of glass jars, each one identical, neatly labelled. Mahogany shelves. A polished counter. Columns of drawers with brass handles. Quietness. Everything was in the right place, except for her. Monsieur Balard kept talking; she didn’t know what he was saying. He brought out a chair and sat her down, and then his wife came in from the back of the shop – a woman almost as tall as her scarecrow husband. She was talking too. They both asked questions, lots of questions, and her own mouth seemed to open and shut too, some sort of noise coming out of it.