III.

Eleven years later, in 1870, we were grown men. Louis had reached the rank of captain. Julien, after various beginnings, had settled down to the idle, ever-occupied life of those wealthy Parisians who frequent literary and artistic society without themselves ever touching pen or paint brush.

There was great excitement at the first report of a war with Germany. People’s brains were fevered: there was talk about our natural frontier on the Rhine, and about avenging Waterloo, which had remained a weight on our hearts. If the campaign had been opened by a victory, France would certainly have blessed this war which she ought to have cursed.

Paris certainly would have felt disappointed if peace had been maintained, after the stormy sittings of the Corps Legislatif. On the day when conflict became inevitable, all hearts beat high. I am not speaking now of the scenes which took place in the evenings on the boulevards, of the shrieking crowds, or the shouts of men who may have been paid, as, later on, it was declared that they had been. I only say that, among sober citizens, the greater number were marking out on maps the different stages of our army as far as Berlin. The Prussians were to be driven back with the butt end of the rifle. This absolute confidence of victory was our inheritance from the days in which our soldiers had passed, always conquering, from one end of Europe to the other. Nowadays we are thoroughly cured of that very dangerous patriotic vanity.

One evening when I was on the Boulevard des Capucines, watching hordes of men in blouses who passed along, yelling, “À Berlin! À Berlin,” I felt someone touch me on the shoulder. It was Julien. He was very gloomy. I reproached him with his lack of enthusiasm.

“We shall be beaten,” said he, quietly.

I protested, but he shook his head, without giving any reasons. He felt it, he said. I spoke of his brother. Louis was already at Metz with his regiment, and Julien showed me a letter which he had received the night before, a letter full of gaiety, in which the captain declared that he should have died of barrack-life if the war had not come to lift him out of it. He vowed that he would come home a colonel, with a medal.

But when I tried to use this letter as an argument against Julien’s dark prognostications, he merely repeated:

“We shall be beaten.”

Paris’s time of anxiety began once more. I knew that solemn silence of the great city; I had witnessed it in 1859 before the first hostilities of the Italian campaign. But this time the silence seemed more tremulous. No one seemed in doubt about the victory; yet sinister rumours were current, coming no one knew whence. Surprise was felt that our army had not taken the initiative and carried the war at once into the enemy’s territory.

One afternoon on the Exchange a great piece of news broke forth; we had gained an immense victory, taken a considerable number of cannons, and made prisoners a whole division. Houses were actually beginning to be decorated, people were embracing one another in the street, when the falsehood of the news had to be acknowledged. There had been no battle. The victory had not seemed natural in the expected order of events, but the sudden contradiction, the trick played on a populace that had been too ready with its rejoicings and had to put off its enthusiasm to another day, struck a chill to my heart. All at once I felt an immense sadness, I felt the quivering wing of some unexampled disaster passing over us.

I shall always remember that ill-omened Sunday. It was a Sunday again, and many people must have remembered the radiant Sunday of Magenta. It was early in August; the sunshine had not the young brightness of June. The weather was heavy, great flags of stormcloud weighed upon the city. I was returning from a little town in Normandy, and I was particularly struck by the funereal aspect of Paris. On the boulevards, people were standing about in groups of three or four, and talking in low tones. At last I heard the horrible news: we had been defeated at Wörth, and the torrent of invasion was flowing into France.

I never beheld such deep consternation. All Paris was stupefied. What! Was it possible? We were conquered! The defeat seemed to us unjust and monstrous. It not only struck a blow at our patriotism; it destroyed a religion in us. We could not yet measure all the disastrous consequences of this reverse, we still hoped that our soldiers might avenge it; and yet we remained as it were annihilated. The despairing silence of the town was full of a great shame.

That day and that evening were frightful. The public gaiety of victorious days was not. Women no longer wore that tender smile, nor did people pass from group to group making friends. Night fell black on this despairing populace. Not a firework in the street; not a lamp at a window. Early on the morrow I saw a regiment going down the boulevard. People were pausing with sad faces, and the soldiers passed, hanging their heads, as if they had had their share in the defeat. Nothing saddened me so much as that regiment, applauded by no one, passing over the same ground where I had seen the army from Italy marching past amid rejoicings that shook the houses.

Then began the days cursed with suspense. Every two or three hours I used to go to the door of the Mairie in the ninth arrondissement, which is in the Rue Drouot, where the telegrams were put up. There were always people gathered there, waiting, to the number of a hundred or so. Often the crowd would extend right to the boulevard. There was nothing noisy about these crowds. People spoke in low tones, as if they were in a sick-room. Directly a clerk appeared to put a telegram on the board, there was a rush. Soon the news ran from mouth to mouth. But the news had long been persistently bad, and public consternation grew. Even to-day I cannot pass along the Rue Drouot without thinking of those days of mourning. There, on that pavement, the people of Paris had to undergo the most awful of torments. From hour to hour we could hear the gallop of the German armies drawing nearer to Paris.

I saw Julien very often. He did not boast to me of having foreseen the defeat. He only seemed to think what had happened was natural and in the order of things. Many Parisians shrugged their shoulders when they heard talk of a siege of Paris. Could there be a siege of Paris? And others would demonstrate mathematically that Paris could not be invested. Julien, by a sort of foreknowledge, which struck me later, declared that we should be surrounded on September 15th. He was still the schoolboy to whom physical exercises were strangely repulsive. All this war, upsetting all his customary ways, put him beside himself. Why, in the name of God, did people want to fight? And he would lift up his hands with a gesture of supreme protestation. Yet he read the telegrams greedily.

“If Louis were not out there,” he would repeat, “I might make verses while we are waiting for the end of the commotion.”

At long intervals letters came to him from Louis. The news was terrible, the army was getting discouraged. On the day when we heard of the battle of Borny I met Julien at the corner of the Rue Drouot. Paris had a gleam of hope that day. There was talk of a success. He, on the other hand, seemed to me gloomier than usual. He had read, somewhere, that his brother’s regiment had done heroically, and that its losses had been severe.

Three days later a common friend came to tell me the terrible news. A letter had brought word to Julien the night before of his brother’s death. He had been killed at Borny by the bursting of a shell. I immediately hurried to go to the poor fellow, but I found no one at his lodging. The next morning, while I was still in bed, a young man came in dressed as a franc-tireur. It was Julien. At first I hardly knew him. Then I folded him in my arms and embraced him heartily, while my eyes were full of tears. He did not weep. He sat down for a moment and made a sign to stop my condolences.

“There,” said he, quietly, “I wanted to say ‘good-bye’ to you. Now that I am alone I could not endure to do nothing.... So as I found that a company of franc-tireurs was going, I joined yesterday. That will give me something to do.”

“When do you leave Paris?” I asked him.

“Why, in a couple of hours. Good-bye.”

He embraced me in his turn. I did not dare to ask him any more questions. He went, and the thought of him was always with me.

After the catastrophe of Sedan, some days before the surrounding of Paris, I had news of him. One of his comrades came to tell me that this young fellow, so pale and slender, fought like a wolf. He kept up a savage warfare against the Prussians, watching them from behind a hedge, using a knife rather than his gun. Whole nights long he would be on the hunt, watching for men as for his prey, and cutting the throat of anyone who came within his reach. I was stupefied. I could not think that this was Julien; I asked myself whether it was possible that the nervous poet could have become a butcher.

Then Paris was isolated from the rest of the world, and the siege began with all its fits of sleepiness and of fever. I could not go out without remembering Aix on a winter evening. The streets were dark and empty, the houses were shut up early. There were, indeed, distant sounds of cannon and of shots, but the sounds seemed to get lost in the dull silence of the vast town. Some days, breaths of hope would come over, and then the whole population would awake, forgetful of the long standing at the baker’s door, the rations, the cold chimneys, the shells showering upon some districts of the left side of the river. Then the crowd would be struck dumb by some disaster, and the silence began again—the silence of a capital in the death agony. Yet, in the course of this long siege, I saw little glimpses of quiet happiness; people who had a little to live on, who kept up their daily “constitutional” in the pale wintry sunshine, lovers smiling at each other in some out of the way nook and never hearing the cannonade. We lived from day to day. All our illusions had fallen; we counted on some miracle, help from the provincial armies, or a sortie of the whole populace, or some prodigious intervention to arise in its due time.

I was at one of the outposts, one day, when a man was brought in, who had been found in a trench. I recognised Julien. He insisted on being taken to a general, and gave him sundry pieces of information. I stayed with him, and we spent the night together. Since September he had never slept in a bed, but had given himself up obstinately to his vocation as a cut-throat. He seemed chary of details, shrugged his shoulders, and told me that all expeditions were alike; he killed as many Prussians as he could, and killed them how he could: with a gun or with a knife. According to him it was after all a very monotonous life, and much less dangerous than people thought. He had run no real danger, except once when the French took him for a spy and wanted to shoot him.

The next day he talked of going off again, across fields and woods. I entreated him to stay in Paris. He was sitting beside me, but did not seem to listen to me. Then he said, all at once:

“You are right, it is enough—I have killed my share.”

Two days later he announced that he had enlisted in the Chasseurs-à-pied. I was stupefied. Had he not avenged his brother enough? Had the idea of his country awakened in him? And, as I smiled in looking at him, he said quietly:

“I take Louis’ place. I cannot be anything but a soldier. Oh, powder intoxicates! And one’s country, you see, is the earth where they lie, whom we loved.”

Printed by Ballantyne Hanson & Co.
London and Edinburgh

A Selection
FROM
MR. WM. HEINEMANN’S LIST

June 1892.