The Debacle: (1870-71)

by Emile Zola

  He dropped his arm and merely said:

  ‘It’s all over… Another district is catching fire, see, that fire over there, further to the left… You can see that big streak spreading like a river of glowing embers.’

  They said no more, and there was a terrified silence. And indeed sudden new bursts of flame were continually rising, filling the sky like a furnace overflowing. Every minute the sea of fire went on broadening to infinity like an incandescent tide from which there were now going up columns of smoke that gathered together above the city into an immense dark copper-coloured cloud. A light wind must be blowing it, for it was slowly moving away through the black night, filling the vault of heaven with its foul rain of ash and soot.

  With a jerk Henriette seemed to come back out of a nightmare and, overcome once more with anguish at the thought of her brother, she implored him yet again.

  ‘So you can’t do anything for him, and won’t help me to get into Paris?’

  Once again Otto seemed to sweep the horizon with a wave of the arm.

  ‘What’s the use, because by tomorrow there won’t be anything left but rubble?’

  That was all, and she walked down from the footbridge without even saying good-bye, and ran off, holding her little case. But he stayed up there a long time, slender and motionless, tightly buttoned in his uniform, lost in the night and letting his eyes drink their fill of this monstrous spectacle of Babylon in flames.

  As Henriette was leaving the station she was lucky enough to come upon a heavily-built lady bargaining with a cabby to take her immediately to the rue de Richelieu in Paris; and Henriette begged so hard and her tears were so touching that the lady agreed to take her as well. The cabby, a dark little man, whipped up his horse and never said a word all through the journey, but the lady never stopped talking about how, when she had left her shop two days previously and locked it up, she had been silly enough to leave some bonds there in a hiding-place in a wall. So for the past two hours, since the city had been on fire, she had been obsessed with the one idea of going back and recovering her property even though it meant going through the fire. At the barrier there was only a sleepy guard, and the cab went through with little trouble, especially as the lady made up a tale about having gone to fetch her niece so that the two of them could nurse her husband who had been wounded by the Versailles troops. The real obstacles began in the streets, where barricades blocked the roadway at every point and they had to make continual detours. Finally at the Boulevard Poissonnière the cabby refused to go any further, and the two women had to continue on foot through the rue du Sentier, rue des Jeûneurs and the Bourse area. As they were approaching the fortifications the fiery glow in the sky had lighted them up as if it were broad daylight. Now they were amazed at the emptiness of this part of the city, where the only sound to reach them was a distant pulsating roar. But by the time they reached the Bourse they heard shots and had to slip along close to the buildings. Having found her shop in the rue de Richelieu intact the large lady was delighted and insisted on showing her friend the way along the rue du Hasard and rue Sainte-Anne right to the rue des Orties. For a moment some Federals, still occupying the rue Sainte-Anne, tried to prevent their passing. It was four in the morning and already light when at last Henriette, worn out with emotion and fatigue, found the door of the old house in the rue des Orties wide open. After climbing the narrow, dark stairs she had to go through a door and up a ladder that led to the roof.

  At the barricade in the rue du Bac Maurice, between the two sandbags, had managed to get himself on to his knees, and Jean was filled with hope, for he thought he had pinned him to the ground.

  ‘Oh my dear boy, you’re still alive then! Is it possible I could be so lucky, foul brute that I am?… Just a moment, let’s have a look.’

  With very great care he examined the wound by the light from the fires. The bayonet had gone through the arm near the right shoulder, and the worst thing about it was that it had then penetrated between two ribs and probably involved the lung. Yet the wounded man was breathing without too much trouble. But the arm hung down, inert.

  ‘Poor old chap, don’t be so upset! I’m glad, really. I’d rather get it over… You did enough for me long ago, and without you I should have pegged out at the side of some road.’

  But hearing him talk like this, Jean’s bitter grief came back.

  ‘Shut up, do! Twice you got me out of the Prussians’ clutches. We were quits, and it was my turn to give my life, and then I go and kill you… Oh, God Almighty, I must have been loaded to the eyeballs through having drunk too much blood already!’

  Tears ran down from his eyes as he thought of their separation back at Remilly when they had parted wondering whether they would see each other some day, and where and in what circumstances of joy or sorrow. Was there no point, then, in their having lived days together without food, nights without sleep and with death ever present? Had their hearts been as one for those few weeks of heroic life shared together, and all to lead them to this abomination, this monstrous, stupid fratricide? No, no, he refused to think of it.

  ‘Leave it to me, boy, I’ve got to save you.’

  First he had to get him away from there, because the soldiers were finishing off the wounded. By great good fortune they happened to be alone, and there was not a minute to lose. Using his knife he quickly slit the sleeve and then removed the whole tunic. Blood was being lost, so he hastened to bandage the arm tight with strips torn out of the lining. Then he put a pad on the body-wound and tied the arm over it. Fortunately he had a bit of cord and he tightened this rough and ready dressing as hard as he could, which had the advantage of immobilizing all the affected side and preventing haemorrhage.

  ‘Can you walk?’

  ‘I think so.’

  But he dared not take him away like that, in his shirtsleeves. On a sudden inspiration he ran round the corner, where he had seen a dead soldier, and he came back with a greatcoat and a képi. He threw the coat over his shoulders and helped him to put his good arm into the left sleeve. Then, having stuck the képi on his head:

  ‘There, now you’re one of us… Where are we to go?’

  That was the great problem. His anguish of mind suddenly came back amidst his renewed hope and courage. Where could they find a safe enough place to hide? Houses were being searched, and all Communards found with weapons were shot. What was more, neither of them knew anyone in that part of Paris; there was not a soul they could ask for shelter, no hiding-place where they could disappear.

  ‘The best thing really would be my place,’ said Maurice. ‘The house is isolated and nobody on earth will come there… But it’s the other side of the river, in the rue des Orties.’

  Jean was in hopeless despair, distraught and swearing to himself.

  ‘Bloody hell! What can we do?’

  It was unthinkable to cross the Pont Royal which owing to the fires was as brightly lit as on a sunny day. The firing on both sides of the river was continuous. And besides, they would have come up against the Tuileries in flames, the Louvre barricaded and guarded, in fact an impassable barrier.

  ‘So it’s no fucking good that way!’ declared Jean, who had lived for six months in Paris after the Italian campaign.

  He had a sudden inspiration. If there were any boats under the bridge, as there used to be, they might try and bring it off. It would be very long, dangerous and awkward, but there was no choice and they must make up their minds at once.

  ‘Look, kid, let’s get out of here in any case, it isn’t healthy… I can tell my lieutenant that the Communards captured me and I escaped.’

  He took him by the good arm, supported him and helped him along the end bit of the rue du Bac, between houses in flames from top to bottom like huge torches. Bits of blazing wood rained down on them and the heat was so intense that it singed all the hair on their faces. When they came out on to the embankment they were momentarily blinded by the dreadful light from fires burning in huge sheaves of flame on b
oth sides of the Seine.

  ‘No lack of candles,’ growled Jean, vexed at this strong light.

  He didn’t feel the slightest bit safer until he had got Maurice down the steps to the towpath to the left of the Pont Royal, downstream. They remained hidden there under the big trees by the water. For a quarter of an hour they were worried about some black figures moving about on the opposite bank. Some shots were fired, there was a shriek and something plopped into the water throwing up a big splash. Obviously the bridge was guarded.

  ‘Suppose we stayed for the night in that hut?’ Maurice suggested, pointing to a wooden office of the river transport authority.

  ‘Not on your life! And get nabbed in the morning?’

  Jean still stuck to his idea. He had found a whole flotilla of small boats. But they were chained up, and how could he free one and get the oars out? But in the end he did manage to find an old pair of oars and was able to force a padlock – not properly locked, no doubt – and having laid Maurice in the bows he at once cautiously let himself drift with the current, hugging the bank in the shadow of the bathing establishment and barges. Neither said a word, for they were appalled by the dreadful spectacle unfolding itself. As they went downstream the horror seemed to get worse and the horizon receded. When they reached the Solferino bridge they could take in at a glance both banks in flames.

  On the left the Tuileries was burning. By nightfall the Communards had set fire to both ends of the palace, the Pavillon de Flore and the Pavillon de Marsan, and the fire was rapidly moving towards the Pavillon de l’Horloge in the middle, where a big explosive charge had been set – barrels of powder piled up in the Salle des Maréchaux. At that moment there were issuing from the broken windows of the connecting blocks whirling clouds of reddish smoke pierced by long blue tongues of fire. The roofs were catching, splitting open into blazing cracks, like volcanic earth from the pressure of the fire within. It was the Pavillon de Flore, the first to be set on fire, which was burning most fiercely, with a mighty roaring from the ground floor to the great roof. The paraffin, with which the floors and hangings had been soaked, gave the flames such an intense heat that the ironwork of balconies could be seen buckling and the tall monumental chimneys burst, with their great carved suns red-hot.

  Then to the right there was first the Palace of the Legion of Honour which had been fired at five in the afternoon and had been burning for nearly seven hours, and now it was being consumed like a great bonfire in which all the wood is burning up at once. Next there was the Palais du Conseil d’Etat, the most immense, ghastly and terrifying blaze of all, a gigantic cube of masonry with two superimposed colonnades belching forth flames. The four blocks surrounding the inner courtyard had caught fire simultaneously, and there the paraffin, emptied in barrelfuls down the four corner staircases, had run in cataracts of hell-fire all down the steps. On the river frontage the clear outline of the attic storey stood out in black tiers against the red tongues licking its edges, while the colonnades, entablatures, friezes and sculptures took on an extraordinary relief in the blinding light of a furnace. In this building above all there was such a strong rush of flame that the colossal pile seemed to be almost lifted by it, shaking and rumbling on its foundations, keeping only its carcass of thick walls in this violent eruption that was hurling its zinc roofing up into the sky. And next door one whole side of the Orsay barracks was burning in a lofty white column like a tower of light. And finally behind all this there were still more fires, the seven houses in the rue du Bac, the twenty-two houses in the rue de Lille, lighting up the horizon, flames on flames in an endless, bloody sea.

  Jean could only manage to murmur:

  ‘Oh God, it isn’t possible! The river itself will catch fire.’

  And indeed the boat seemed to be floating on a river of fire. In the dancing reflections of these huge conflagrations the Seine appeared to be bearing along blazing coals. Sudden red flashes played over it in shimmering patches of flame. And they were still floating downstream on this burning water, between these palaces in flames, as if in an endless street in an accursed city, burning on each side of a roadway of molten lava.

  ‘Oh,’ exclaimed Maurice in his turn, his frenzy returning in the face of this destruction he had wanted to see, ‘let the whole lot go up in flames!’

  Jean stopped him with a terrified gesture, as though afraid such a blasphemy would bring a curse upon them. Could it possibly be that a man he loved so dearly, who was so well educated, so delicate in mind, had come down to such notions? He was now rowing harder, for he had passed the Solferino bridge and was in a broad, open reach. The light was as bright as a noonday sun shining straight down on the river without casting any shadow. The smallest details could be picked out with astonishing precision, the flecks of the current, heaps of stones on the towpaths, little trees on the embankments. The bridges especially stood out in blinding whiteness, so clear that you could have counted the blocks of stone, and they looked like narrow, intact passages from one fire to another over the fiery water. Occasionally, in the continuous roaring noise, sudden crashes could be heard. Flurries of soot came down and foul stenches were borne on the wind. The terrifying thing was that Paris, that is to say all the other districts further away along the trench of the Seine, had ceased to exist. On either side the very violence of the conflagration so dazzled the eyes that there was nothing but a black abyss beyond. Nothing could be seen but an enormous darkness, a void, as if the whole of Paris had been seized and devoured by the fire and disappeared into eternal night. The sky was dead too, for the flames shot so high that they put out the stars.

  Maurice, now in the delirium of fever, gave vent to the cackle of a madman.

  ‘Lovely party going on at the Conseil d’Etat and the Tuileries… the outside all illuminated, lustres all glittering, women dancing… Go on, dance in your smoking petticoats and flaming hair!’

  With his good arm he sketched visions of the galas in Sodom and Gomorrah, with music, flowers and unnatural orgies, palaces bursting with such debaucheries, the disgusting nudities illuminated with such a riot of candles that they themselves were set on fire. Then there was a fearful crash. The fire in the Tuileries had worked its way along from both ends and reached the Salle des Maréchaux. The barrels of gunpowder had caught and the Pavillon de l’Horloge went up like an exploding magazine. An immense fountain of fire rose like a plume and filled the black sky – the final set-piece of the gruesome fête.

  ‘Hurrah for the dance!’ screamed Maurice, as though at the end of a show when everything falls back into darkness.

  Jean was almost speechless and in disjointed words begged him to stop. No, no, one mustn’t wish for evil! If it meant total destruction wouldn’t they perish as well? He had only one urgent job, to land and get away from this awful sight. All the same he was prudent enough to go past the Concorde bridge so as not to leave the boat until the towpath below the Quai de la Conférence, beyond the bend in the Seine. Yet at that critical moment, instead of just letting the boat drift away he lost several minutes mooring it safely, with his instinctive respect for other people’s property. His plan was to reach the rue des Orties by way of the Place de la Concorde and the rue Saint-Honoré. Having sat Maurice down on the towpath he went up the steps to the roadway alone, and once again he was very worried when he realized what difficulty they would have in getting past the obstacles piled up there. For this was the impregnable fortress of the Commune, the Tuileries terrace fortified with guns and the rue Royale, rue Saint-Florentin and rue de Rivoli blocked by high barricades strongly constructed. This explained the tactics of the Versailles army, whose lines that night formed a huge concave angle with its apex at the Place de la Concorde and one extremity, the one on the right bank, at the goods yard of the Northern Railway and the other, on the left bank, at a bastion of the fortifications near the Arcueil gate. But it would soon be daybreak, the Communards had evacuated the Tuileries and the barricades, and the troops had just taken over the area, amid stil
l more fires – twelve more houses that had been burning since nine at the intersection of the rue Saint-Honoré and the rue Royale.

  When Jean came down again from the embankment he found Maurice dozing as though he had relapsed into lethargy after the crisis of over-excitement.

  ‘It’s not going to be easy… Anyway, can you walk a bit further, kid?’

  ‘Yes, yes, don’t you worry. I shall get there somehow, dead or alive.’

  His worst trouble was to climb the stone steps. Once up on the embankment he moved along slowly on Jean’s arm, like a sleepwalker. Although the day was not yet dawning the light from the fires near-by threw a livid dawn over the huge square. They crossed its empty spaces, their hearts aching at this dreary devastation. At the two extremities, beyond the bridge and at the further end of the rue Royale, they could just make out the phantom shapes of the Palais-Bourbon and the Madeleine, damaged by gunfire. The terrace of the Tuileries, which had been battered in forcing an entry, had partially collapsed. On the square itself bullets had made holes in the bronze of the fountains, the colossal trunk of the statue of Lille lay on the ground, broken in two by a shell, while the statue of Strasbourg hard by, still veiled, seemed to be in mourning for so much ruin. In a trench near the obelisk, which was unscathed, a gas-main, split open by someone with a pick and which by chance had ignited, was shooting up a long jet of flame with a hissing noise.

  Jean avoided the barricade across the rue Royale, between the Ministry of Marine and the Garde-Meuble, which had escaped the fire. He could hear loud voices of soldiers behind the sandbags and barrels of earth. In front of it there was a ditch full of stagnant water with the corpse of a Federal floating in it, and through a breach could be seen buildings at the crossing with the rue Saint-Honoré still burning in spite of pumps brought in from the suburbs that could be heard throbbing. On either side the little trees and news kiosks were broken and riddled with shot. There was a lot of shouting, the firemen had discovered in a cellar the half-charred remains of seven tenants of one of the buildings.