Then quite suddenly the presents began again. One morning Anna found a little spray of artificial flowers and a bag of sweets upon her table; and, looking up in surprise, she saw the black, hungry eyes of M. Duvivier doting upon her. Only it was not quite the same M. Duvivier. During the anguish of the past five days and nights he had been drinking just a little too much, had been seeking the speediest and least glorious of all means of escape. Faced by the defeat of his country, and by the ruination of his business and of his so-hopeful marriage, he had sought oblivion. And found it. He had drawn one bottle after another. In the result, his outline as a man was now slightly blurred. He was a trifle out of touch with the world.
But he was more loving than ever.
Chapter XXI
I
It Was the nearness of the Germans that was spreading alarm in Paris. Imaginative ladies with opera glasses, standing in the Champs Elysées, reported that they could see Prussian soldiers on the skyline. But it was no imagination that in places the German cannon actually overshot the city.
The morale of the people, however, remained the admiration of the civilised world. Down in the slums of Belleville and La Villette, where food, always scarce, was now almost unobtainable, there were already murmurs of the rising that was to come. But the slums are never the whole of a city. And on the boulevards and in the big cafes the extraordinary belief lingered that France was not only holding her own, but was actually winning. The carrier-pigeons which Gambetta had released—the Germans were now using falcons in an attempt to interrupt this aerial mail—had come safely home to roost; and the knowledge that this Hercules among statesmen had descended safely from the clouds and was now raising an army in the provinces was taken as nothing less than a token of victory. There was also the belief that the solution of the whole thing still lay in the power of money; that Favre, on behalf of the French nation, would get Bismarck to accept a lump sum to stop molesting them, and that the war would then be over. Moreover, the defences of the city had been transformed into something pretty formidable. Soldiers were camped by the Arc de Triomphe; the Gare du Nord was an aerodrome for balloons. And new forts had been erected. These forts gradually came to occupy the place in the popular imagaination which famous battleships do in the mind of a sea-loving nation. Streets and boroughs “adopted” them.
There were other indications, too, that General Trochu was taking his task seriously. The woods to the North and East of Paris had all been fired, and fresh rows of houses were demolished to give a clear field to the gunners.
In this atmosphere of furious energy and improvisation the natural lunacy of inventors bloomed and flourished. One man came forward with proposals for an incendiary gas which would cover an advancing enemy with an all-enfolding blanket of naked flame. And another inventor proposed nothing less than the induced combustion of explosive elements in the soil, so that the Germans would find the very ground that they were marching on suddenly disappearing under their feet in a titanic upheaval of fire and smoke and dissolving fragments. In the sheer pressure of his task, the inventor had not yet had time to work out the actual details of his scheme. But the idea was there just the same.
Most important of all, however, in supporting the public morale were two fundamental feelings that united everyone. These were hatred of the deposed Emperor and resentment of the English. Crude caricatures of the abdicated and despised Badinguet were still on sale in the streets. And the figure of John Bull, irritatingly fat and well-fed, appeared in the cartoons.
The double-facedness of this nation just across the Channel seemed to the French to surpass all existing levels in hypocrisy. The English papers were full of condemnations of Prussianism in general and Bismarck in particular. They talked about the Huns and quoted Tacitus. They published articles on the art and culture of France—and they did precisely nothing to assist this neighbourly, exalted nation in its misery. Perfidious seemed the least of adjectives to characterise such behaviour.
And, in the result, the position of English journalists in Paris was more than a little invidious. They came over, these gentlemen, Mr. Frederick Hardman of the Times, Mr. Labouchere of the Telegraph, Sir Archibald Forbes of the Daily News, and the rest, and the French did not quite know what to make of them. For all the good-will of these correspondents—and every one of them had the educated Englishmen’s fervent love of Paris—they seemed to the Parisians to be taking a rather box-office view of things. That they were risking their lives was in a sense a token of their sincerity. But it is one thing to risk one’s own life because it is one’s job. And it is quite another to sit by and see one’s wife and children being blown to bits by bombs.
The position of the British Embassy was the cause of further puzzlement. Lord Clarendon sat there in the Faubourg St. Honoré issuing passports right up into December, as though the siege of Paris were a kind of game in which the French happened to hold all the low cards, the Prussians the trumps, and the English the joker.
But there was one trick which even the joker could not win. And that was a square meal. The rationing of food had been vigorously stiffened, and a severe control imposed. But the control had come too late. Those herds of sheep and oxen in the Bois had already been consumed. The Parisians had quietly and almost unthinkingly eaten their way through the whole lot of them. And there had been no control at all over the supplies of horse-meat. As many as five hundred horses a day were being slaughtered, and the horse-market in the rue d’Enfer did a roaring and sanguinary trade. But not for long. The horses, like the sheep and cows that had gone before them, were gradually exterminated; and the people of Paris were forced to turn to stranger meats.
At first no one admitted the origin of the new dishes that appeared at table. But the rate at which poodles disappeared from the parks the moment their owners’ backs were turned, the way cats, particularly the cream-fed kind, vanished from the streets and courtyards, gave sufficient indication. And by the middle of December all concealment was at an end: dogs at ten francs a piece and cats, plump ones, at eight francs, were being eagerly bid for, even by people who happened to have lost their own domestic pets in mysterious circumstances.
In the face of hunger, squeamishness had already been extinguished. By the first weeks of January, dogs and cats seemed the daintiest of diet. Rats had by now become luxuries; anything and everything in fact that had flesh on its bones was greedily and hungrily picked clean. One man—a banker—boasted of having dined off a crow and a dahlia-root.
II
The decision to slaughter the animals in the Jardin Zoologique was therefore a natural and perfectly logical one. It would have been too much for human nature to endure to expect the keepers of the great cats to go on thrusting huge joints of meat through the bars when they were in need of it themselves. And the joints in any case were no longer obtainable.
But the death sentences of these unfortunate beasts was a particularly hard one to pronounce. The keepers had grown up with their animals and had come to love them like their own children; they could not bring themselves to cut the throats of creatures that put their heads up against the cage-door ready to be tickled. And for a time the same humane feelings permeated the minds of the committee of management; it was even proposed that, as a compromise, the smaller animals should be slaughtered first to provide food for the larger, so that at the end of the war one or two sleek and well-fed lions might still be able to sit back importantly on their haunches and survey all round them the waste of empty cages whose occupants they had methodically devoured.
There were, however, other and hungrier eyes already fixed on those same smaller animals; and it was the demand for antelope steak in the restaurants that in the end decided down which throats they should go. The order for this new massacre, this slaughter of the dumb innocents, was given, and the grim work began.
Interlude with a Parisian Lady
It was early morning when Mitsou, the big elephant, was brought out into the daylight.
The
re was a bright film of snow spread out over the ground and she stopped and examined it incredulously for a moment, first drawing a little up into her trunk and then blowing it out again in a tiny blizzard. The game evidently delighted her, for she repeated it. Standing at the door of her house, she played with the snow like a child. Then, because the point of the mahout’s whip was sticking into the soft part of the flesh behind her ears, she began reluctantly to move forward, still sniffing suspiciously at the keen winter air. So far she had suffered nothing from the cold. The large charcoal stove in the elephant-house had been kept fed with the painted woodwork of the chopped-up pleasure kiosks.
The mahout who followed her was weeping. He was a small, fleshless Oriental, muffled up in a. greatcoat so large that his feet appeared immediately beneath the hem, where his knees should have been. The spongy jute slippers which he was wearing seemed to suck up the snow and absorb it; in consequence he walked slowly, padding insignificantly along in the rear of his enormous pet. He would raise his eyes occasionally to take another look at her. And, each time, at the sight of those prodigious hauches, those legs like gutta-percha tree trunks, the absurd trivial tail, he would weep again. He was in love with her.
In love with her, and he had been ordered to be her executioner. The gun with which the sentence was to be carried out was under his left arm. It was a formidable weapon, nearly six feet long, and with a commendable show of nice feeling he had concealed it from her when he had unlocked her cell door that morning. As it was, she for her part was frisking ponderously down the main avenue in a mood of happy unconcern. She pulled little twigs off the bare overhanging branches, overturned a wooden bench, and scattered a pile of leaves that had been swept industriously into a corner. Altogether, she was in the mahout’s eyes at her most adorable; as gay and skittish as a young actress. And the act that he was about to perform seemed more like murder every moment.
At the end of the avenue he steered her into a wide gravel enclosure at the back of the lion-house. It was the slaughter-pen. Two massive wooden posts had been fixed in the ground, and there were hooks and rings for chains let into them. On the far side stood a pair of steps. Mitsou ambled amiably up to the posts and began rubbing herself against one of them. Then her quick little eyes saw the gun, and with the natural curiosity of her sex and kind she stretched forth her trunk as if to take it from him. The mahout stepped back and put it down well out of her reach. Then he came back to the execution block. He told the elephant to kneel and she did so with the easy grace of long training; in this attitude she had the appearance of a house that has collapsed suddenly into its front area. He went round behind and began gently prodding her in the back of the knees with his spike. She took the hint as prettily as before, and folded herself up like a kitten.
The mahout now appeared at her head again and busied himself with the chains. Mitsou accepted everything, even this curious indignity, without so much as a single moment of misgiving. When she had first been ordered down on to her knees she had expected this little man, her master, to climb upon her head and mount her; now that she was down in this position she told herself that it was her teeth that were going to be attended to. But the mahout made no attempt to begin. Instead, he began searching in the pocket of his enormous greatcoat and produced some leaves of cabbage which he fed to her lovingly, handful by handful, as though it were the prisoner’s last tot of rum on the gallows that he was administering.
It was now nearly eight o’clock, the hour fixed for the sentence to be carried out. The mahout paused and listened. There was the sound of voices on the air, and soon round the corner of the neighbouring building a little procession came into sight. It was headed by the director-general of the society. Behind him came a small group of Parisian journalists, a black-and-white artist, and a surgeon. Mitsou was drawing her last audience.
The journalists inspected the animal and inquired about her weight. The artist took out his note-book and began sketching in the background. And the surgeon tried ambitiously to find her heart. The director-general was chiefly concerned to see that the chains were secure: he was as nervous as the descendant of a long line of men who had all been trampled to death by such creatures. When he was finally satisfied, he withdrew to a suitable distance and shouted to the mahout to do his work.
The little man seemed almost painfully slow. He brought the step-ladder and placed it in front of Mitsou’s forehead. Then he loaded the rifle and thrust a ball the size of a walnut down the long barrel. And at last, all concealment at an end, he mounted the ladder and placed the muzzle against the one weak spot in the armour of his beloved’s forehead. There was absolute silence in the little group, and the director-general placed his hands over his ears in readiness.
The noise of the explosion was even louder than they had expected: the charge behind the massive ball had been a double one. But even so it was not enough. The skin had burst open, the bone had splintered and the bright little trickles of blood began to run down the grey cheeks. The bullet itself, however, was harmlessly embedded somewhere.
As for Mitsou, she had uttered a shrill, trumpeting roar of pain and astonishment. Nearly thirty years of faithful trust in humankind had exploded in her very face. And she was in agony. She rocked to and fro, and the massive posts quivered. The chains creaked and rattled but they held fast. Large tears began to fill Mitsou’s eyes.
“Imbecile. Put another bullet into her,” the director-general was roaring.…
It was the third bullet that destroyed Mitsou. Through the gaping hole that had been torn there it found its way into the brain, and she became no more than a profitable memory. This monumental daughter of Benares was now simply so much meat for enterprising butchers to bid for.
The little funeral party broke up and made its way to the main gate.
Only the black and white artist remained. He was pencilling in a quick sketch of the mahout, who was lying spread out on the snowy gravel, clasping Mitsou’s trunk in his arms and sobbing over her.
III
M. Duvivier was still drinking.
There was another reason than his uncertain marriage for his prodigious consumption. The cellars under the restaurant were full—no one was ordering anything but the cheapest carafe stuff—and he could not bear to think of the real wine, the vintage cases, falling into German hands. In the result he brought up the tall bottles of fine champagne one by one, wiped off the dust, and settled down to empty them in the dual name of oblivion and anti-Prussianism.
The effect upon him was accumulative and deplorable: he grew slovenly in his dress and untidy in his habits. He allowed soiled tablecloths to go unchanged, and no longer examined the cutlery before it was put out. Within the restaurant the hand of precision was suddenly lifted.
Every morning at the usual hour he still set out for the market, but his journeys were now casual and perfunctory. Rival restaurtateurs brought up the last joint from under his very nose. He paid for things and did not get them. He took stall-holders at their word and bought vegetables on the evidence of the top ones in the sack. He was swindled. It was, in fact, no longer the original M. Duvivier who faced these rapacious provision men, but a M. Duvivier who was separated from reality by the mist of last night’s alcohol. He greeted each new dawn with a coated tongue and a raging headache. And it was at dawn the markets opened.
A mood of defeat and surrender came over him. Standing in the half-light of the great produce halls he would pass his hands damply across his forehead as if brushing something tangible away, and say: “It’s the end: I recognise it. Things can’t go on much longer. The customers have all gone away, and the business is dying. I’m dying too: I can feel it in my bones. I shan’t be here in the Spring—I’ve nothing to live for now that I know that she doesn’t love me. I’m just an old man waiting for a German shell to come and finish me off. It’ll come, it’ll come.”
The nature of the despair was not, of course, always so complete, so abject, as that. On his return to the rest
aurant, after he had made one or two dips into the bottle, he would begin to see things in a broader, less personal perspective. He would comfort himself with the thought that there were other businesses in Paris which had been ruined beside his own. And as the afternoon wore on, shy rays of sunshine would filter through into his landscape and he would begin congratulating himself once more upon those varicose veins of his that had kept him out of the army. But at night, as soon as the last of the few customers had departed and the lights in the restaurant had been turned down, and he was alone in his empty salon, his mood of despair would return again.
“Is there another man in Paris so miserable as I am?” he would ask himself. “Is there another man in all France who has made such a ruin of his life?”
And he would bury his head in his hands and let his thoughts take possession of him.
“If I go up to her now, she will be cold to me,” he would complain. “She will try to avoid me. She will pretend that she is sleeping; and perhaps she will have been crying again. Can’t she realise? Can’t she understand? Doesn’t she know that a man must have some love from his wife?”
Chapter XXII
I
“And to eat?” M. Duvivier inquired.
The officer only glanced at the menu. He saw the cynical concealing names—the entrecôte Gambetta, Tournedos des Essais des Ballons, Vol-au- Vent Mitrailleuse, and handed it back again.
“Anything you like,” he said. “But I don’t eat cat.”
Having given his order, he sat back and closed his eyes. He was clearly more dead than alive; and when the food came he ate it casually, even leaving some of it on his plate.
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