by Emile Zola
Jean was hurrying on to the rue des Orties, feeling nauseated, when something suddenly came to his mind. Wasn’t that Chouteau, the former soldier in his squad, he had just seen, clad in the respectable white overall of the working man and watching the execution with signs of approval? And he knew the part played by this criminal, traitor, thief and murderer! For a moment he was on the point of going back again and denouncing him so as to have him shot across the bodies of the other three. Oh, how heartbreaking it was, the most guilty ones escaping punishment and flaunting their impunity in broad daylight while the innocent rotted in the ground!
Hearing steps on the stairs, Henriette had come out on to the landing.
‘Do be careful, today he is in a terribly worked-up state… The doctor has been back and he has upset me!’
Indeed Bouroche had shaken his head and been unable to make any promise as yet. It was still possible that the patient’s youth would bring him through the complications he was afraid of.
‘Ah, it’s you!’ Maurice said feverishly as soon as he saw Jean. ‘I was waiting for you, what’s going on, where have they got to now?’
Propped against his pillow, facing the window he had forced his sister to open, he pointed to the city, now in darkness again but lit up by a new glow from a fire:
‘Look, it’s starting again, Paris is burning. The whole lot of it is burning this time!’
As soon as the sun set, the fire at the Grenier d’Abondance had lit up the districts far away up the Seine. In the Tuileries and the Conseil d’Etat ceilings must have been falling in and reviving the glowing timbers, for small fires had started again and flakes of flame and sparks shot up now and again. Many of the buildings thought to be burnt out flared up again like this. For three days it no sooner got dark than the city seemed to burn up again, as though the darkness itself had blown on the red embers and revived them and scattered them to every point on the horizon. What a hellish city it was, that glowed red when dusk came and illumined with monstrous torches the nights of all that bloody week! On that particular night, when the warehouses of La Villette were burned, the light was so bright all over the great city that this time it was really possible to think it was on fire everywhere, overwhelmed and submerged by the flames… Under a bloody sky the districts of Paris, red as far as the eye could see, were like a rolling sea of fiery roofs.
‘It’s all over!’ Maurice said again. ‘Paris is burning.’
He was intoxicating himself with these words, repeated a score of times in a feverish urge to go on talking after the heavy sleepiness that had kept him silent for three days. But a sound of stifled sobs made him look round.
‘What, little sister, you, so brave!… Crying because I’m going to die?’
She protested, cutting him short.
‘But you aren’t going to die!’
‘Oh yes, I am, and it’s better I should, I must… You know, nothing of any value will go with me. Before the war I gave you so much trouble and cost your heart and your purse so much… All the silly things, all the mad things I’ve done, who knows, they might have brought me to a bad end, prison, the gutter…’
She stopped him again, this time angrily.
‘Shut up, shut up! You’ve paid for it all!’
He fell silent and thoughtful for a moment.
‘When I am dead, perhaps… Oh, dear old Jean, you really did us all a damn good turn when you ran me through with that bayonet.’
But Jean, in tears too, protested.
‘Don’t talk like that! Do you want me to go and bash my brains out against a wall?’
But Maurice went on passionately:
‘Remember what you said the day after Sedan when you maintained that it did no harm sometimes to get a good bashing. And you said, too, that if something had gone rotten somewhere, like a poisoned limb, it was better to see it hacked off and lying on the ground than to die of it like the cholera… I’ve often thought about that since I’ve been on my own and shut up in this crazy, starving Paris… Well, I’m the rotten limb you have lopped off…’
He was growing more delirious and paid no heed to the supplications of Henriette and Jean, who were terrified. In a raging fever he went on pouring out symbols and vivid pictures. It was the healthy part of France, the reasonable, solid, peasant part, the part which had stayed closest to the land, that was putting an end to the silly, crazy part which had been spoilt by the Empire, unhinged by dreams and debauches. And France had had to cut into her own flesh and tear our her vitals, hardly knowing what she was doing. But the blood-bath was necessary, and it had to be French blood, the unspeakable holocaust, the living sacrifice in the purifying fire. Now she had climbed the hill of Calvary to the most horrible of agonies, the nation was being crucified, atoning for her sins and about to be born again.
‘My dear old Jean, you are the pure in heart, the stout-hearted one… Go and take up your pick and trowel, turn over the soil and rebuild the house!… As for me, you did the best thing when you cut me out, for I was the ulcer clinging to your bones!’
He went on wandering, tried to get up and look out of the window.
‘Paris is burning and there’ll be nothing left… This fire which is taking everything away and healing everything was my idea, yes, it’s doing a good job… Let me go down and finish off the work of humanity and freedom…’
Jean had all the trouble in the world to get him back into bed, while Henriette in tears went on talking to him about their childhood together, begging him to calm down in the name of their love for each other. Over the vast space of Paris the fiery glow had spread still more, and the sea of flame seemed to be reaching the dark limits of the horizon, the sky was like the vault of a gigantic furnace, heated up to bright red. The dense smoke clouds from the Ministry of Finance, which had been steadily burning for two days without any flames, still floated across this lurid background of fires like a stately cloud of deepest mourning.
The next day, Saturday, brought a sudden improvement in Maurice’s condition, and he was much calmer, his temperature had gone down, and it was a great joy to Jean when he found Henriette smiling and going back to the dream of an intimate life for the three of them, in a future happiness which still seemed possible but which she did not want to put into so many words. Was fate about to relent? She spent the nights in that room which she never left, and which her busy Cinderella sweetness, her gentle, silent care filled with a continual caress. That evening Jean lingered there with his friends and his pleasure surprised him and made him tremble. During the day the troops had taken Belleville and the Buttes-Chaumont. Only the Père-Lachaise cemetery, which had been turned into an armed camp, still held out. It seemed to him that it was all over and he even said that there were no more shootings. He simply mentioned convoys of prisoners setting off for Versailles. He had seen one that morning going along by the river, men in overalls, coats or shirtsleeves, women of all ages, some with the wrinkled faces of old harridans, others in the flower of their youth, children of barely fifteen – a stream of misery and revolt being moved on by soldiers in the bright sunshine, and whom the good people of Versailles, it was said, welcomed with catcalls and hit with sticks and sunshades.
But on Sunday Jean was horrified. It was the last day of that hateful week. As soon as the sun rose in glory on a clear and warm holiday morning he had the eerie sensation that this was to be the final agony. News had only just broken of renewed slaughter of hostages. The archbishop, the parish priest of the Madeleine and others had been shot on the Wednesday at La Roquette, and on Thursday the Dominicans of Arcueil had been picked off on the run like hares, on Friday more priests and forty-seven gendarmes had been shot point blank in the rue Haxo sector, and a fury of reprisals had flared up again, the troops executing en masse their most recent prisoners. All through that lovely Sunday the crackle of the firing-squads had never stopped in the courtyard of the Lobau barracks, which was full of death-cries, blood and smoke. At La Roquette two hundred and twenty-seven wre
tched creatures, rounded up more or less at random, were machine-gunned in a heap, riddled with bullets. In Père-Lachaise, which had been bombarded for four days and finally captured grave by grave, one hundred and forty-eight were thrown against a wall, and the plaster dripped great red tears. Three of them, who were only wounded and escaping, were recaptured and finished off. Of the twelve thousand poor creatures who had lost their lives through the Commune how many harmless people were there for each rogue! It was said that an order to stop the executions had come from Versailles. But the killing went on just the same. Thiers, for all his pure glory as the liberator of the country, was to go down for ever as the legendary butcher of Paris, while Marshal MacMahon, the defeated soldier of Froeschwiller, whose proclamations of victory covered the walls, was henceforward to be nothing but the conqueror of Père-Lachaise. Paris, in the sunshine, was dressed in her Sunday best and in holiday mood, an enormous crowd thronged the recaptured streets, people out for a walk went like jolly sightseers to have a look at the smoking ruins, mothers holding laughing children by the hand paused for a moment and listened with interest to the distant firing in the Lobau barracks.
As Jean went up the dark stairs of the house in the rue des Orties in the evening twilight on that Sunday he felt sick with awful foreboding. He went in and at once saw the inevitable end, Maurice dead on the little bed, choked by the haemorrhage that Bouroche had feared. The sun’s red farewell stole in through the open window and two candles were already burning on the table beside the bed. Henriette, in her widow’s weeds, was on her knees, quietly weeping.
Hearing a noise she looked up and seeing Jean enter shuddered visibly. He, distraught with grief, was on the point of rushing forward and taking her hands to unite his sorrow and hers in an embrace. But he felt her little trembling hands, her whole being chilled and repelled, recoiling, snatching herself away for ever. Was it not all over between them now? Maurice’s grave separated them for ever, like a bottomless abyss. All he too could do was fall on his knees, quietly sobbing.
But after a pause Henriette spoke.
‘My back was turned, and I had a cup of broth in my hand when he cried out… I didn’t even have time to run across the room, he died calling for me and calling for you, too, as he vomited blood…’
Her brother, oh God, her Maurice whom she had worshipped even from their mother’s womb, who was her second self, whom she had brought up and saved! Her only love since she had seen her poor Weiss’s body riddled with bullets against a wall in Bazeilles! So the war was taking her whole heart, and she would be left alone in the world, a lonely widow with no one to love her.
‘Oh my God!’ Jean said in tears. ‘It’s my fault!… My dearest boy, for whom I would have given my life, and I have to slaughter him like some animal… What will become of us? Will you ever forgive me?’
At that moment they looked into each other’s eyes, and they were heartbroken at what at last they could clearly read in them. The past came to life, the secluded room at Remilly in which they had lived such sad, sweet days together. It brought him back to his daydream, unconscious at first and even later never clearly formulated, life down there, marriage, a little house and work on a plot of land that would suffice to keep a family of honest, humble folk. But now it had become a passionate longing, a painful certainty that with a woman like her, so tender, so active, so brave, life might have become a real paradise. She too, who formerly had not even been touched by this dream, though unconsciously giving her heart in perfect purity, now saw plainly and suddenly understood. This eventual marriage was what she herself had wanted, without realizing it. The seed had quickened and imperceptibly grown and now she loved with real love this man with whom at first she had only found consolation. Their eyes told each other all this, and now they loved each other openly only in time to say an eternal farewell. This one more dreadful sacrifice had to be made, this final tearing asunder; their happiness, still feasible yesterday, was now crumbling into dust like everything else, and being washed away in the stream of blood that had taken their brother.
With a long painful effort Jean got to his feet.
‘Good-bye!’
Henriette remained motionless on the floor.
‘Good-bye!’
Yet Jean went over to Maurice’s body. He looked at him, and his lofty brow looked even more lofty, and from his long, thin face and expressionless eyes, formerly a bit wild, the wildness had gone. He would have liked to kiss his dear kid, as he had called him so many times, but he dared not. He saw himself covered with his blood, and recoiled before the horror of fate. What a death, beneath the ruins of a world! On the last day, amid the last bits of wreckage of the dying Commune, one more victim had been claimed! The poor man had departed still thirsting for justice in the final convulsion of the great dark dream he had dreamed, in the grandiose and monstrous conception of the destruction of the old society, Paris destroyed by fire, the field ploughed up and cleansed so that the idyll of a new golden age might spring up into life.
Full of anguish, Jean turned away and looked at Paris. At this radiant end of a lovely Sunday the slanting sun, low on the horizon, cast over the huge city a blazing red light. It might have been a sun of blood over a limitless sea. The panes of thousands of windows blazed fire as though blown upon by invisible bellows, roofs were catching fire like burning coals, golden yellow walls and tall, rust-coloured monuments seemed to be flaring up in the evening air like spurting wood fires. Was this not the final set-piece, the gigantic fountain of flame, all Paris burning like some huge sacrificial fire, an ancient, dried-up forest shooting up to heaven in a volley of sparks and tongues of flame? The fires were still burning, huge russet clouds of smoke were still billowing up, and a great clamour could be heard, maybe the last death-cries of the shot victims in the Lobau barracks, or perhaps happy women and laughing children eating out of doors after a nice walk or sitting outside cafés. From the looted houses and public buildings, from the disembowelled streets, from so much ruin and suffering, life was still stirring in the blaze of this splendid sunset in which Paris seemed to be burning itself out.
Then Jean felt an extraordinary sensation. It seemed to him, as day was slowly dying over this burning city, that a new dawn was already breaking. Yet it was the end of everything, fate pursuing its relentless course in a series of disasters greater than any nation had ever undergone: continual defeats, provinces lost, milliards to pay, the blood-bath of the most dreadful of civil wars, whole districts full of ruins and dead, no money left, no honour left, a whole world to build up again. He himself was leaving his broken heart here, Maurice, Henriette, his happy future life swept away in the storm. And yet, beyond the still roaring furnace, undying hope was reviving up in that great calm sky so supremely limpid. It was the sure renewal of eternal nature, eternal humanity, the renewal promised to all who hope and toil, the tree throwing up a strong new shoot after the dead branch, whose poisonous sap had yellowed the leaves, had been cut away.
Still weeping, Jean said again:
‘Good-bye!’
Henriette did not look up, but kept her face buried in her hands.
‘Good-bye!’
The ravaged field was lying fallow, the burnt house was down to the ground, and Jean, the most humble and grief-stricken of men, went away, walking into the future to set about the great, hard job of building a new France.
*(Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, vol. 3, p. 9. Penguin Books, 1965)
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