The Man of Iron

by Richard Dehan

LXVIII

From Tours, chief town of the Department of the Indre et Loire, 120 miles southwest of Paris as the crow flies, where Cremieux, Minister of Justice, and rather too doddery to be of efficiency at this crisis, had established the Administrative of the Provisional Government of the new French Republic;—whither M. Leon Gambetta, Minister of the Interior, Member of the Board of National Defense, had recently betaken himself, escaping from the besieged capital to Montdidier as a passenger in the car of a balloon—whither the veteran Garibaldi had now arrived to offer his services in the cause of Liberty—from Tours had come the famous diplomat and man of letters, contemptuously dubbed "Professor" by Count Bismarck, with the object of carrying out the peace negotiations in whose conduct the tragic patriarch Favre had broken down.

You saw the famous Minister and author of the Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire, as a little, stocky, black-clad old gentleman with a square gray head, round, clean-shaven face, and bright, round eyes, looking through gold-rimmed spectacles.... Above all, a patriot, heart and soul devoted to France, the position of this famous French statesman of seventy-five, newly returned, empty of all but fair words and vain courtesies, from a pilgrimage to the Courts of various neutral Powers, was horrible and painful beyond words.

Sad, distracted, anxious little gentleman, charged with the mission of obtaining those needed terms of peace, or at least an armistice from the conqueror upon the threshold, can you see him, in the shadow of the magnificent Temple erected by the Sun King, toiling and moiling with his secretary, the younger M. Remusat, in preparation for those anguish-fraught interviews with the German Chancellor.

The tables of his sitting-room at the Hôtel des Réservoirs were piled with books and papers—papers covered with abstruse calculations dealing with the most urgent need—the provisioning of Paris—papers dealing with the question of the Elections—papers dealing with the General Census—papers of every imaginable kind. And with these, from dawn till midnight, the little, grief-worn man wrestled while the Tinsel Rabble and their staffs of German officers reveled in the dining-saloons, and trampled and shouted and clanked and jingled up and down the corridors, and in and out of the bedrooms; and the roar of the guns from the forts of the beleaguered city shook the windows from time to time.

Now and then he would lie back exhausted in his chair, or lie down and sleep, if sleep ever visited him. He took his frugal meals in a private cabinet opening out of the great dining-hall of the restaurant. Since the thirtieth of October he had been engaged in this wise, save when, having been first compelled to apply to Count Bismarck for a pass and a military safe-conduct, he would meet and confer with Favre, or one of his other colleagues, at some chosen spot without the walls of the beleaguered capital.

Only the previous day he had trundled down in a little, shaky, hired brougham to the half-ruined and wholly deserted suburb of Sèvres, preceded by an officer of Uhlans with a White Flag on a pole.

Day after day the little brougham had drawn up before the modest house in the Rue de Provence, and the little gentleman, whose head seemed to whiten perceptibly, had stepped out with his portfolio under his arm, as now. Day after day the Chancery footmen would open the door to him, and Madame Charles Tessier, hovering in the background, would drop the representative of suffering France her lowest curtsey, and sometimes gain a brief word with his unfailing bow and smile. To-day, as Major von Keudell appeared in the doorway of the drawing-room—the Chancellor being closeted in his private interviewing-room upstairs with the Republican Mayor of Versailles—the little gentleman said simply, offering his hand to the eccentric-looking person in the cap with lappets and the white shawl:

"The sympathy that is expressed in looks and by silence can be very eloquent and very touching. From my heart I thank you for yours, Madame!"

And as she had burst out sobbing and kissed the hand, he had drawn it away with a murmured protest, and had passed on into the drawing-room where Von Keudell was to hold him in conversation until the Mayor had been polished off.

But M. Thiers had endured the ordeal with a courteous kind of resignation, only looking at his watch from time to time, or glancing at the clock over which presided the horned, bat-winged, cloven-hoofed and tailed figure that tickled the fancy of his oppressor so much.

"His Excellency expected me," he said. "There has been no mistake about the time of the appointment—named by himself at our previous interview. The greatness of the interests concerned are apprehensible by His Excellency!"

The mild sarcasm rebounded pointless from Von Keudell's bluff rejoinder:

"No, no mistake at all. His Excellency has merely shifted the hour. From half-past twelve to a quarter to one—His Excellency found it more convenient."

"What boors are these Germans!" thought the angered diplomat, writhing, as some medieval victim, condemned to undergo torture by rack and fire, might have writhed at the delay of the hideous ordeal.

And then the door opened. The Chief Torturer looked in with the salutation:

"A pleasant day! I am quite at your service now, if you will come up to me.... You know the way, I think?..."

And the great figure vanished, and the heavy footsteps thundered up the drugget-covered stairs.

Did the sorrowful visitor know the way to the torture-chamber? Surely malice must have prompted the query addressed to the unfortunate plenipotentiary of France.

The room he had so loathed had one window looking out on the Rue de Provence, and another at the south side of the house, where stood the pine-tree and the turtle-backed green glass conservatory with the wrought-iron bridge above it. It had a figured gray carpet, a green hearthrug with red edges, dark green stuff curtains, and various oil-paintings and steel engravings hung upon the walls, which were painted coffee-tinted cream. It was furnished with a writing-table, on which were a terrestrial globe, a celestial one, and a tellurion, a large gray marble-topped chiffonier, a sofa covered with chintz, pattern red-and-gray birds-of-paradise on a background with palm-leaves; two cane chairs and a round center-table, upon which lay a platter of wood containing the colored glass marbles with which one plays the game of solitaire.

It was a game of solitaire which was played in that stiff, primly-furnished apartment, in one corner of which stood a mahogany bedstead of Empire pattern, with an obsolete drapery of green-figured brocade. Such a game as may be played by a grim, greedy, gray-mustached Grimalkin with a plump, bright-eyed, feebly-palpitating mouse.

M. Thiers had been gravely imperiled by the shell-fire of the French guns in the act of returning from Sèvres on the previous day, a mischance which had increased the palpitations which were caused by his heart disease, and wounded his feelings cruelly. Commented the Chancellor, to whom he unwisely related the episode:

"Fortunately the cab-horse was too ill-fed to bolt, but the window was broken, and you were mud-splashed all over.... Not exactly the first time that your countrymen have treated you in that way!..."

And this first scratch of the claw that never failed to draw blood was followed by the query whether M. Thiers were provided with full powers for carrying on the negotiations?

The Minister added, enjoying his victim's start and look of horrified astonishment:

"My people in Paris tell me that there has been practically a Revolution, and that a new Government is coming into power. On the Place before the Hôtel de Ville there were yesterday 15,000 persons assembled, most of them National Guards from the Faubourgs, disarmed and crying: 'Vive la Commune! ... Point d'Armistice!'"

He went on, unheeding the writhing of the sufferer, whose dignity had been so cruelly wounded:

"It appears that the Mayors of Paris had been summoned by Arago, and were in one room conferring, while in the other was the Government. Mobiles guarded the doors, but were thrust back by the insurgents. General Trochu came out and confronted them. He could only mouth and gesticulate in a sort of dumb Crambo. Cries of 'A bas Trochu!' drowned his voice. There was a rush.... One does not know how, but Trochu finally escaped out of their clutches—got out by a back door and cut his lucky to the Louvre.... Here is one of the slips of paper that were thrown from the windows of the Hôtel.... They have 'Commune décretée. Dorian Président!' upon them. There was a scene of confusion peculiar to your nation, in the midst of which M. Félix Pyat and other virtuous citizens proclaimed the Commune, and constituted themselves into a Government embracing Blanqui, Ledru-Rollin, Délescluze, Louis Blanc, and Flourens.... Flourens got upon a table—made himself heard, it seems, finally calling upon the Members of the Government of National Defense to resign. M. Jules Favre refused ... was arrested with the old Government—the new Government reigned until two o'clock in the morning, when some battalions of Mobiles—the 106th and 90th, under Picard—closed in upon the Hôtel and ejected them. Trochu was there with his staff.... Since, a general sort of agreement appears to have been arrived at. A decree signed by Favre was placarded yesterday, announcing that on Thursday next a vote is to be taken whether there is to be a Commune or not.... What I relate happened the day before yesterday. Now, if Your Excellency saw M. Jules Favre at Sèvres yesterday afternoon, he must have told you of the turn things were taking. Oblige me with a plain answer to a plain question.... Did he tell you, or did he not?"

The humiliated gentleman bowed his head assentingly. The hot sweat of a mortal agony stood upon his broad forehead, and flushed and working features. His glasses were dimmed with the reek of his torment and his shame. The Enemy knew all. There was no concealing anything from one so well served by spies and informers. Probably the cruel interview with his fellow-Minister had been listened to, from its beginning to its end.

Thiers and Favre had sat on two iron chairs at a gayly painted little iron table, before one of the wrecked cafés that boasted the sign of La Belle Bouquetière. No one had been near except a haggard, absinthe-sodden wretch, who lay in a drunken stupor upon the pavement, close under the broken window of the deserted restaurant. Perhaps that drunken man had been his spy.... What was he saying in the harsh, bullying tones that grated so?...

"The mob who rode roughshod over General Trochu, and his Council of lawyers and orators, appear to be actuated by the desire of fighting things out with us. They burn for a chance, it appears, to pit their undisciplined courage against the Army of United Germany. They are hardly to be blamed for accepting literally the theatrical bombast with which they have been fed by Favre!"

He laughed, and said, with a galling imitation of the rhetorical manner of the Democratic barrister of Lyons:

"'Not a stone of our fortresses'—do you remember? 'Not an inch of our territory!'—have you forgotten?... When it was in the power of the person to whom he boasted to have said to him: Every inch. Every stone!..."

He rose up, towering over the unhappy personage who sat opposite to him, in a little wicker easy-chair that would have suited a child. His greedy vitality physically sucked energy from his victim. The stare of his great eyes oppressed, the roughness of his speech had a wounding brutality.

"Which Party governs France? The Blue Republicans or the Reds, answer me? Can one treat with a State that has no responsible heads?"

"Monsieur le Comte!" screamed the personage thus cruelly prodded. "Do you not know that you are insulting me?"

He had grown deadly pale, and now flushed red, making a passionate gesture as though to strike himself on the forehead, as the other asked him with bitter irony:

"Is the truth so offensive to you as all that?... If you did not wish to hear it, you have come to the wrong shop. The day for compliments and flatteries has passed with the tinsel Empire of your Napoleon, unless you compel us to bring him back and set him up again at the Tuileries. Believe me, he has contemplated this eventuality!—has his carpet-bags ready packed, and his eagle in a traveling-cage.... And certainly we could discuss the military questions at issue better with him than with you civilian gentlemen, who do not understand the language of War."

It was not possible to get a word in edgeways.... The rasping voice tore the nerve-fibers as with a saw-edge, the towering figure overwhelmed, the powerful stare fascinated and terrified as the pitiless gaze of the snake when fixed upon a frog or a bird.

And Bismarck went on, deliberately lashing himself into a passion:

"Are you and your colleagues aware that I suffer in my reputation for these procrastinations? It is said at home in Germany that I am over-lenient toward the French, our treacherous enemies ... that I delay to reap for United Germany the glory and profit for which she has paid so terrible a price in blood. Yourself with MM. Ducrot and Favre have considered my terms for an armistice inadmissible.... In return I tell you you have forfeited the right to criticize any terms that I may propose.... You would hold the elections—even in those provinces of France which we hold as conquerors! You would reprovision Paris and her fortresses! We should be hellish unpractical if we listened to you!... What the big devil!... Are we to permit the levies, and the recruiting by which the French Republic may hurl against us a new army to shoot down? Himmelkreuzbombenelement!... Do you take us for sheep's heads?"

The unhappy Minister protested in a faint voice:

"Monsieur le Comte, I do not even comprehend the meaning of the term!"

"Ah, by God!" thundered the terrible voice, "you are ignorant indeed of German words and German meanings, and the word that you understand least of all when applied to yourselves is WAR! Silk gloves are not our wear in War, and therefore the iron gloves with which we have handled you have pinched your soft flesh and made you squeal. We might complain of your Francs-tireurs, who hide in woods and houses, and shoot our soldiers unawares; and of the inhumanity of your mitrailleuses which cut red lanes through whole regiments. But no! You are the sufferers—you are to be pitied—even for the injuries you wreak upon yourselves...."

He struck with his clenched fist the top of the chiffonier near which he stood, and the dull shock of the contact of that sledge-hammer of muscle and bone with the solid marble, made the pictures shake upon the wall, the windows rattle in their frames, and the bewildered listener leap as if he had been shot.

"I rode over to St. Cloud yesterday," he went on, "to look at the palace you have set on fire with your shells from Mont Valérien. It is burning still, as I don't doubt you know. A well-dressed French gentleman stood looking at the smoldering ashes of the conflagration. Near him was a French workman in a dirty blue blouse—'C'est l'œuvre de Bismarck!' said the gentleman to the plebeian, little dreaming who was near.... But the cad in the blouse only said to him: 'Why, our —— gunners did that themselves!' That workman had more sense in his pumpkin than the whole lot of you!"

M. Thiers revived under the fresh insult sufficiently to plant a sting:

"It is said, Monsieur, and on excellent authority, that the Imperial Palace was sacked by German troops before it was set on fire."

The Chancellor lowered his heavy brows and demanded almost menacingly:

"Do you assert that His Majesty the King or the Crown Prince of Prussia were parties to a crime of this kind?"

"No, Monsieur, not for an instant!"

The Chancellor said with a short laugh that had no mirth in it:

"That is fortunate, otherwise I should have been compelled to break off, and finally, our negotiations with regard to this question of an Armistice, and deal only with the question of the territory to be added—in addition to the fortresses on the right bank of the Rhine—and those six thousand millions of francs that we shall certainly take from you!"

The thrust caused M. Thiers to leap to his feet, galvanized into a feverish energy. He screamed, raising his clenched hands and sweeping them downward and outward:

"It cannot be, Monsieur!—it is outrage—robbery—ruin! Europe will intervene if you persist in such a demand!"

"Ha, ha, ha!" The great jovial giant's laugh set the crystal drops upon the mantelshelf-vases and the wall-mirror girandoles tinkling, and reached the hearing of Hatzfeldt and von Keudell in the drawing-room, and the decipherers in the Bureau below. It vibrated through the joists and planks and spaces above the plastered ceiling, and made Madame Charles start where she lay upon the floor of her bedroom listening, with her ear pressed to the uncarpeted boards.

"My good sir, you are making game of me.... You have visited the Courts of the Powers—we know to what profit.... You have solicited intervention—to be told what both of us knew very well before! ... The British Lion may lash and roar, but will not do more, that is certain. England has not sufficiently recovered from the war of the Crimea—from the further drain of men and gold caused by the Indian Mutiny.... Austria, in spite of creeds and bias—with her German-speaking population and her Germanized institutions—may be regarded as a powerful German State. Italy lies under the heel of Austria. If the Russian Bear elect to hug, the hugging will be done upon our side. For it is inconceivable that Germany should ever be at war with Russia. Our interests are and have always been one...." He laughed again, and said, laughing:

"And, knowing this, you threaten me with the intervention of European Powers.... You will hear nothing with respect to forfeiture of territory!... You refuse to contemplate the question of the Gold Indemnity!... Wait!" he said—"wait until the bombardment is a month old and the bread-basket is empty.... Then we shall hear you sing to a different tune!"

"Monsieur le Comte!..."

The old man tottered to his feet. He was ashen in hue, and trembling. His blue lips hung breathlessly apart, his eyes had a lack-luster stare behind their gold-rimmed glasses; he pressed a hand over his left breast as though to repress a pang of pain.

"M. le Comte ... I have suffered too much.... I find myself unable to continue our interview.... With your permission ... to-morrow?..." He bowed and took his hat and cane, and repeated weakly: "To-morrow?"

"With pleasure!" said the Man of Iron, escorting him to the door.

And the old, humiliated, fallen King-maker, the great literary genius, the polished orator—tottered away out of the presence of the conqueror.

He was to return upon the morrow, and for many days thenceafter, to be played with and tortured, to be tantalized and mocked.

He was to return flushed with futile hope, only to be crushed and retire discomfited. He was to furnish an inexhaustible source of amusement for the delectation of his implacable enemy.

He was to return after a prolonged absence within the walls of the beleaguered capital, he and others, faint with famine, broken by anxiety, shattered by suspense and sleeplessness, forced by sheer hunger to sit and partake at the groaning board of their merciless foe, compelled by his arrogance to listen to his jestings, moistening the food they placed between their livid lips, with the stinging salt of tears.