The Debacle: (1870-71)

by Emile Zola

  Although the barricade cutting off the rue Saint-Florentin and the rue de Rivoli looked still more daunting, with its well-constructed high defences, Jean felt that it would be less dangerous to get through that way. And indeed it was quite deserted, and so far the army had not ventured to enter into occupation. Abandoned cannons lay there in a heavy slumber. There was not a soul behind this invincible rampart – nothing but a stray dog that ran off. But as Jean was hurrying along the rue Saint-Florentin, supporting Maurice who was losing strength, what he had dreaded happened, and they ran into a whole company of the 88th infantry which had gone round the barricade.

  ‘Sir,’ he explained to the captain, ‘this is a comrade of mine those buggers have wounded, and I’m taking him to an ambulance station.’

  The greatcoat thrown over Maurice’s shoulders was his salvation, and Jean’s heart was beating wildly as at last they were going together down the rue Saint-Honoré. It was hardly light and shots could be heard in side streets, for there was still fighting going on all over the district. It was a miracle that they managed to reach the rue des Frondeurs without any other unfortunate encounter. Now they were only getting along very slowly, and the three or four hundred metres left to do seemed endless. In the rue des Frondeurs they came upon a post of Communards but the latter, thinking a whole company was on the way, took fright and ran off. Only a bit of the rue d’Argenteuil to do and they would be in the rue des Orties.

  How impatiently Jean had been longing for four endless hours to see that rue des Orties! What a deliverance when they had turned into it! It was dark, empty and silent and might have been a hundred leagues away from the battle. The house, an old and narrow one with no concierge, was sleeping the deep sleep of death.

  ‘The keys are in my pocket,’ Maurice managed to say. ‘The big one is the street door and the little one my room, right up top.’

  Then he collapsed fainting in Jean’s arms, which worried and embarrassed him terribly, so much so that he forgot to shut the street door behind them, and had to grope his way up this unknown staircase, trying not to bump into anything for fear of attracting attention. At the top he was quite lost and had to put the wounded man down on a step and look for the door by striking some matches which fortunately he had on him, and it was only when he had found it that he came down again and picked him up. At last he laid the boy on the little iron bed opposite the window with its view over Paris, and he opened it wide, wanting some light and air. Day was now breaking, and he fell down beside the bed, weeping and utterly broken and exhausted, as the dreadful thought came back that he had killed his friend.

  Some minutes must have gone by and he was scarcely surprised when he saw Henriette. Nothing was more natural, her brother was dying and she had come. He had not even noticed her come in, and she might have been there for hours. Now he slumped into a chair and listlessly watched her as she moved about in mortal grief at the sight of her brother unconscious and covered with blood. At last something came back into his mind and he asked:

  ‘I say, did you shut the street door behind you?’

  But she was shattered, and merely nodded an affirmative. Then, as she came over and gave him both her hands, in need of affection and help, he went on:

  ‘You know, I’m the one who’s killed him.’

  She did not understand or believe him. He felt her two hands still quite calm in his.

  ‘I’ve killed him… Yes, on a barricade somewhere… He was on one side and I was on the other.’

  The little hands began trembling.

  ‘We were all like drunken men, we didn’t know what we were doing… I’ve killed him.’

  Then Henriette withdrew her hands, shuddering, white and staring at him with horrified eyes. So this was the end of it all, and nothing would survive in her broken heart? Oh, Jean, she had been thinking about him that very evening and been so happy in the faint hope of seeing him again! And he had done this unspeakable thing, and yet he had saved Maurice once again, for he had brought him back here through so many dangers! She could not give him her hands again without a revulsion in her whole being. Yet she uttered a cry into which she put the last hope of her divided heart.

  ‘Oh, I’ll make him better – I must, now!’

  Her long watches at the hospital at Remilly had made her very skilful at nursing and dressing wounds. She insisted on examining her brother’s wound at once, and undressed him, but that did not revive him. Yet as she undid the emergency dressing Jean had improvised he did move, made a little noise, then opened wide, feverish eyes. He recognized her at once and smiled.

  ‘So you are here. Oh, how glad I am to see you before I die!’

  She silenced him with a gesture of confidence.

  ‘Die! But I won’t have it! I mean you to live… Stop talking and leave it to me.’

  But when she examined the gashed arm and punctured ribs she went very serious and her eyes looked worried. She quickly took the room over, managed to find a little oil, tore up some old shirts for bandages, while Jean went downstairs for a jug of water. He never opened his mouth, but watched her washing the wounds and skilfully bandaging them, but he was powerless to help her, for since she had been there he had been utterly exhausted. Yet when she had finished and he saw how worried she was he did offer to go and look for a doctor. But she kept all her clearheadedness—oh no, not the first doctor he could find, who might denounce her brother! It must be somebody safe, and they could wait a few hours. Finally when Jean talked of going back to his regiment it was understood that as soon as he could get away he would come back and try to bring a surgeon with him.

  But still he did not go, and seemed unable to make up his mind to leave this room, where everything spoke of the evil he had done. The window, which had been shut for a little while, had just been opened again. And from his bed, with his head propped up, the wounded man was looking out. And the others, too, let their eyes wander into the distance, in the oppressive silence that had fallen on them.

  From this high position on the Butte des Moulins quite half of Paris stretched out below them, first the central area from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré as far as the Bastille, then the whole course of the Seine with the distant busy life of the left bank, a sea of roofs, treetops, steeples, domes and towers. It was getting much lighter, and that unspeakable night, one of the most terrible in history, was over. But in the pure light of the rising sun, under the rose-pink sky, the fires went on burning. Straight opposite them the Tuileries was still burning, and the flames, and those of the Orsay barracks, the palaces of the Conseil d’Etat and the Legion of Honour, scarcely visible in the strong light, made the air quiver. Even beyond the houses in the rue de Lille and the rue du Bac other buildings must be burning, for columns of sparks were going up from the Croix-Rouge crossroads, and still further away in the rue Vavin and rue Notre-Dame des Champs. Quite near, to the right, the fires in the rue Saint-Honoré were burning themselves out and to the left, at the Palais-Royal and new Louvre, later fires lit in the small hours were petering out. But the thing they could not understand at first was dense black smoke that the west wind was blowing right under their window. Since three in the morning the Ministry of Finance had been burning, but without any high flames, in thick clouds of soot, because there were such enormous masses of paper in low-ceilinged rooms in a rough-cast building. It was true that the great city, awakening to a new day, no longer gave the tragic impression of the night, the horror of total destruction, with the Seine a river of blazing fire and Paris lit up from end to end, but now a hopeless, dreary misery hovered over the districts that had been spared, with this continual thick smoke in an ever-widening cloud. Soon the sun, which had come up clear and bright, was hidden by it, leaving nothing but gloom in the menacing sky.

  Maurice, who looked as if his delirium was coming back, took in the endless horizon with a sweeping gesture and murmured:

  ‘Is it all burning? Oh, what a long time it’s taking!’

  Henriette’s eyes fi
lled with tears, as if her sorrow had been still more deepened by these immense disasters in which her brother had had a share. Jean dared not take her hand again, nor embrace his friend, but rushed away wild-eyed.

  ‘I’ll be seeing you again soon!’

  It was evening, at about eight and dark, before he could come back. Although he was so worried he felt happy because his regiment was out of the fighting and had been put on the reserve, with orders to guard this district, so that as he was camping with his company in the Place du Carrousel he hoped to be able to come up every evening for news of the sick man. And he was not alone this time, for by chance he had run into the former medical officer of the 106th, and he brought him in desperation, not having been able to find any other doctor, telling himself that this terrible man with the leonine head was a good chap really.

  When Bouroche, not knowing for whom the soldier had disturbed his peace, and grumbling about how far he had to climb, realized that he was looking at a Communard he first fell into a furious rage.

  ‘Good God, what do you take me for?… A lot of criminals sated with plunder, murder and arson! Your thug’s case is clear, and I’ll see that he’s cured, that I will, with three bullets through the head!’

  But seeing Henriette there, so pale in her black dress, with her beautiful fair hair falling on her shoulders, he suddenly relented.

  ‘It’s my brother, sir, one of your soldiers at Sedan.’

  Without answering he took off the bandages and silently examined the wounds, took some phials out of his pocket and made a fresh dressing, showing her how to set about it. Then in his rough way he suddenly asked the patient:

  ‘Why did you side with those hooligans, why did you do such a vile thing?’

  Maurice had watched him with glittering eyes all the time he had been there but had said nothing. Now, in his feverish state, he said with blazing conviction:

  ‘Because there’s too much suffering, too much iniquity and shame!’

  At that Bouroche made a grand gesture suggesting that when you went in for those kinds of ideas you went too far. He was on the point of saying something else, but decided not to. So he left, just adding:

  ‘I’ll be back.’

  On the landing he told Henriette that he could not guarantee anything. The lung had been gravely affected and there might be a haemorrhage which would finish him.

  Coming back Henriette forced herself to smile in spite of the blow her heart had received. Would she not save him yet, wasn’t she going to prevent this awful thing, the eternal separation of the three of them who were now still united in their ardent longing for life? She had never left that room all day, and an elderly neighbour had kindly undertaken to do her errands. Now she took her place again on a chair by the bed.

  Giving in to his nervous excitement Maurice kept questioning Jean and trying to find out things. Jean did not tell him everything, avoiding the blind hatred rising against the expiring Commune now that Paris was free again. It was already Wednesday. Since Sunday evening, that is for two whole days, the residents had been living in cellars sweating with terror, and on the Wednesday morning when they had been able to venture out, the sight of dug-up streets, ruins, blood and above all the terrible fires, had filled them with a terrible lust for vengeance. The reprisals were going to be tremendous. Houses were being searched and crowds of men and women suspects were being chucked in front of summary firing squads. By six in the evening of that day the Versailles army was in control of half Paris, from the Montsouris park to the Gare du Nord, including the main arteries. The last members of the Commune, a score or so of them, had had to take refuge in the town hall of the XIth arrondissement in the Boulevard Voltaire.

  There was a silence, and then Maurice, gazing at the distant city through the window thrown open on that warm night, murmured:

  ‘Well, it’s still going on, Paris is burning!’

  It was true; the flames had returned with the end of daylight, and once again the sky was glowing with a murderous, bloody light. That afternoon, when the powder magazine at the Luxembourg had blown up with a terrible noise, it had been rumoured that the Pantheon had collapsed into the crypt. All day long the previous day’s fires in the Conseil d’Etat and the Tuileries had gone on burning, and the Finance Ministry still belched forth thick black smoke. Ten times she had had to shut the window because of the threat of a swarm of black butterflies, bits of burnt paper incessantly flying about, having been lifted high into the air by the heat of the fire, whence they came down like gentle rain. The whole of Paris was covered with them and some were picked up even in Normandy, twenty leagues away. And now it was not only the western and southern districts that were burning – the buildings in the rue Royale, the Croix-Rouge crossroads and the rue Notre-Dame des Champs. All the east of the city seemed to be in flames, and the immense furnace of the Hôtel de Ville filled the horizon with one gigantic blaze. In that direction too, like flaming torches, were the Théâtre Lyrique and the town hall of the IVth arrondissement, more than thirty houses in adjoining streets, to say nothing of the Porte-Saint-Martin theatre further north, glowing red in isolation like a haystack in the middle of black fields. Private revenges were being carried out, and perhaps also criminal elements calculated that by persisting they could destroy certain dossiers. It was no longer a matter of self-defence or holding up victorious troops by fire. Hysteria reigned supreme, and the Palais de Justice, the Hôtel-Dieu, the cathedral of Notre-Dame had only been saved by sheer chance. It was destruction for destruction’s sake so as to bury the ancient, rotten human society beneath the ashes of the world in the hope that a new society would spring up, happy and innocent, in the earthly paradise of primitive legends!

  ‘Oh war, vile war!’ whispered Henriette, looking at this city of ruin, destruction and death.

  Wasn’t this in fact the final, inevitable act, the blood-lust that had come into being in the disastrous fields of Sedan and Metz, the epidemic of destruction born in the siege of Paris, the final paroxysm of a nation in danger of death amidst all this slaughter and wreckage?

  But Maurice, still gazing at the areas burning out there, said haltingly and with difficulty:

  ‘No, no, don’t curse war… War is a good thing, it is doing its work…’

  Jean cut him short with a cry of hatred and remorse.

  ‘Oh my God, when I see you there, and it is all my fault… Don’t defend war, it’s a vile thing.’

  The sick man vaguely waved his hand.

  ‘Oh, what do I matter? There are plenty of others… Perhaps the blood-letting is necessary. War is life, and it cannot exist without death.’

  Maurice’s eyes closed, for he was tired from the effort these few words had cost him. Henriette signalled to Jean not to argue. In her anger against human suffering she herself felt a wave of protest taking possession of her, for all her brave, feminine quietness, and in her clear eyes shone the heroic soul of their grandfather, the hero of Napoleonic legend.

  Two more days went by, Thursday and Friday, with the same fires and the same massacres. The din of gunfire never stopped, and the batteries up on Montmartre, captured by the Versailles army, were mercilessly pounding the ones the Federals had set up at Belleville and in the Père-Lachaise cemetry. The latter were firing at random on Paris and shells had fallen in the rue de Richelieu and Place Vendôme. By the evening of the 25th the whole of the left bank was in the army’s hands. But on the right bank the barricades at the Place du Château d’Eau and the Place de la Bastille were still holding out, in fact they were real fortresses defended by incessant, withering fire. At dusk, in the final disarray of the last members of the Commune, Delescluze had picked up his walking-stick and coolly strolled along to the barricade blocking the Boulevard Voltaire, where he had fallen, killed instantly in a hero’s death. By dawn on the next day, the 26th, the Château d’Eau and the Bastille had been overcome, and the Communards occupied only La Villette, Belleville and Charonne, and in smaller and smaller numbers, now r
educed to the hard core of desperadoes determined to die. For two more days they were to go on resisting and fighting furiously.

  On Friday evening, as Jean was making his escape from the Place du Carrousel to go back to the rue des Orties, he witnessed at the bottom of the rue de Richelieu a summary execution which left him thoroughly shaken. For a couple of days two courts martial had been in session, one at the Luxembourg and the other at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Those condemned by the first were shot in the garden, while the victims of the second were dragged to the Lobau barracks where full-time firing squads shot them in the courtyard at almost point-blank range. It was there in particular that the butchery was frightful: men and even children condemned on just one piece of evidence, such as hands dirty with powder or feet that happened to be wearing army boots; innocent people falsely denounced, victims of personal vendettas, screaming explanations but unable to make themselves heard; droves of people herded in front of rifle-barrels, so many poor devils at once that there were not enough bullets to go round and the wounded were finished off with the butts of the rifles. Blood ran in streams and carts were taking away the bodies from morning till night. All over the conquered city other executions were going on, wherever some personal lust for revenge found a chance, in front of barricades, against walls in empty streets, on steps of public buildings. So it was that Jean saw some people who lived in that neighbourhood bring a woman and two men to the post guarding the Théâtre Français. The ordinary citizens were more ferocious than the soldiers, and the newspapers that had resumed publication were howling for extermination. The whole mob was particularly violent against the woman, who was one of the fire-raisers, fear of whom haunted people’s over-wrought imagination, and whom they accused of prowling in the night in front of well-to-do houses and throwing cans of lighted oil into the cellars. This one had been caught, it was alleged, crouching in front of a grating in the rue Sainte-Anne. In spite of her protestations and tears she was flung with the two men into the trench of a barricade not yet filled in and they were shot in this black pit like wolves caught in a trap. People strolling by watched this, and a lady and her husband stopped for a look, while a baker’s boy delivering a pie whistled a hunting-song.