Jean had never yet embraced Henriette. Before getting into the gig again with the doctor, he wished to thank her for all her care and kindness, for having nursed and loved him like a brother. But he could not find the words he sought, and suddenly opening his arms he kissed her, sobbing. Quite distracted, she returned his kiss. And when the horse started off the corporal turned round and they waved their hands to one another whilst repeating in faltering accents, 'Good-bye, good-bye!'
That night, Henriette, who had returned to Remilly, was on duty at the ambulance. During her long vigil she was again seized with a bitter access of tears, and she wept—wept exceedingly, stifling her sorrow between her clasped hands.
[CHAPTER VII]
INSIDE PARIS: SIEGE AND COMMUNE—THE BARRICADES
Having overthrown the Empire at Sedan, the two German armies again began rolling their waves of men towards Paris, the army of the Meuse approaching the capital on its northern side by the valley of the Marne, whilst the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia, after crossing the Seine at Villeneuve-St. Georges, directed its course towards Versailles, skirting the city upon the south. And on that warm September morning, when General Ducrot, to whom the barely formed Fourteenth Army Corps had been confided, resolved to attack the second of the hostile armies on its flank march, Maurice, who was camping with his new regiment, the 115th of the Line, in the woods on the left of Meudon, only received orders to march when the disaster was already a certainty. A few shells had sufficed; a frightful panic had broken out among a battalion of newly recruited Zouaves, and the rest of the troops had been carried off in such helter-skelter fashion that the gallop of retreat did not cease till the men were behind the ramparts of Paris, where the alarm was intense. All the positions in advance of the southern forts were lost; and that evening the last link connecting the city with France, the telegraph wire of the Western Railway line, was severed. Paris was cut off from the world.
It was a frightfully sad evening for Maurice. Had the Prussians been more enterprising they might have camped that night on the Place du Carrousel. But they were extremely prudent folks, and had resolved to conduct the siege in the classical manner. The exact lines of the investment had already been settled—the cordon of the army of the Meuse on the north, from Croissy to the Marne, by way of Epinay; and the cordon of the Crown Prince of Prussia's army on the south, from Chennevières to Châtillon and Bougival; whilst general headquarters with King William, Count von Bismarck, and General von Moltke, exercised authority from Versailles. The gigantic blockade, which folks had refused to believe in, was already an accomplished fact. The city, with its bastioned enceinte upwards of twenty miles in circumference, its fifteen forts and six detached redoubts, found itself, as it were, imprisoned. And the army of the defence was only composed of the Thirteenth Corps, which General Vinoy had saved and brought back to the capital, and the Fourteenth, still in progress of formation, and confided to General Ducrot—the pair of them comprising some eighty thousand soldiers, besides whom there were fourteen thousand sailors, naval gunners, and marines, fifteen thousand men belonging to various volunteer corps, and one hundred and fifteen thousand Mobile Guards, in addition to three hundred thousand National Guards apportioned among the nine sections of the ramparts. But although there was thus almost a nation of defenders, the disciplined, tried soldiers were few in number. Men were being equipped and drilled; Paris had become one immense entrenched camp. The defensive preparations were being feverishly pushed forward, roads were intercepted, the houses in the military zone were razed to the ground, the two hundred guns of heavy calibre, and the two thousand five hundred others were utilised; other cannon were cast, quite an arsenal springing into existence, thanks to the great patriotic efforts of Dorian, the Minister of Public Works. After the rupture of the negotiations of Ferrières, when Jules Favre had acquainted the inhabitants with Count von Bismarck's demands—the cession of Alsace, the surrender of the garrison of Strasburg, and the payment of a war indemnity of five milliards of francs,[49]—a cry of rage resounded, and everyone acclaimed the continuation of the war, the prolongation of resistance as a condition indispensable to the very existence of France. Even should there be no hope of victory, it was the duty of Paris to defend herself so that the country might live.
One Sunday, at the close of September, Maurice was sent with a fatigue party to the other end of the city, and a fresh hope buoyed him up as he threaded the streets and crossed the squares. It seemed to him that since the rout of Châtillon all hearts had been rising for the mighty task that had to be accomplished. Ah! that Paris, which he had known so intent upon enjoyment, so near to the most grievous faults, how simple he found it now—cheerfully brave, and ready for every sacrifice! Everybody was in uniform; those who, as a rule, took the least interest in national affairs, now wore the képi of the National Guard. Like some gigantic clock whose works have broken, social life, industry, trade, business, had suddenly come to a standstill, and there remained but one passion—the resolution to conquer. It was the only subject that men talked of, that inflamed both their hearts and their heads, at the public meetings, during the guard-room vigils, and amid the crowds that incessantly gathered in the streets, barring both foot and roadways. Men's minds were carried away by the illusions thus diffused; excessive tension was exposing them to the dangers of generous folly. Quite a crisis of sickly neurosis was already declaring itself, an epidemic fever of exaggerated fears as well as of exaggerated confidence, amid which a mere nothing sufficed to set the human animal loose. In the Rue des Martyrs, Maurice witnessed a scene which passionately excited him—a furious mob rushing to the assault of a lofty house, one of whose upmost windows had remained throughout the night brightly illumined by a lamp, which had evidently been intended as a signal to the Prussians stationed at Bellevue. Haunted by this belief in signals, some citizens virtually lived upon the housetops, watching all that went on around them. On the previous day, too, an unfortunate man had narrowly escaped being drowned in the ornamental water in the Tuileries Garden, because he had spread a map of the city on a seat and consulted it.
All Maurice's confidence in the things in which he had formerly believed was shattered, and he, once so open-minded, was also succumbing to the mania of suspicion. Certainly he no longer despaired as he had done on the night of the panic of Châtillon, when he had anxiously wondered whether the French army would ever regain sufficient virility to fight; no, the sortie of September 30 in the direction of L'Hay and Chevilly, that of October 13 when the Mobiles had carried Bagneux, and that of October 21 when his regiment momentarily secured possession of the park of La Malmaison, had restored all his confidence, that flame of hope which a spark sufficed to rekindle and which consumed him. Although the Prussians had hitherto checked it upon every point, the army had none the less fought valiantly, and it might yet conquer. Maurice's sufferings, however, were caused by Paris itself, which darted from extreme illusion to the deepest discouragement, ever haunted as it was, amid its thirst for victory, by an all-absorbing fear of treachery. After the Emperor and Marshal MacMahon, would not General Trochu and General Ducrot prove commanders of scant ability, unconscious artisans of defeat? The same movement which had swept the Empire away—all the impatience of violent-minded men eager to assume power and save France—was now threatening the Government of National Defence. Jules Favre and its other members were indeed already more unpopular than the fallen ministers of Napoleon III. Since they would not conquer the Prussians, it was their duty to make way for others, for the revolutionaries, who were certain of conquering by decreeing the levée en masse, and by employing the inventors who offered to undermine the suburbs of the city or to annihilate the enemy with a torrent of Greek fire.
On the eve of the rising of October 31 Maurice was thus consumed by that malady of the siege days compounded of distrust and illusion. He now lent a willing ear to fancies at which he would formerly have smiled. Why should they not be realisable? Were not imbecility and crime limitless? Was there not a possibility of a miracle amid all the catastrophes overturning the world? There was a flood of rancour within him which had been gathering since that night when, in front of Mulhausen, he had heard of the disaster of Frœschweiler; and his heart bled at the thought of Sedan—Sedan, that raw wound, still sore, which opened and bled afresh at the tidings of the slightest reverse. Cast into a scaring, nightmare-like existence, no longer knowing if he were yet alive, he still suffered from the shock of each defeat; his physical strength had been impoverished, his head weakened by that long period of hungry days and sleepless nights; and the idea that so much suffering would but lead to another and an irremediable disaster fairly maddened him, transformed him, a man of culture, into a being governed merely by instinct, fallen into childhood once more, and ever swayed and carried away by the impulse of the moment. Anything, everything, destruction, extermination rather than surrender a copper of the fortune or an inch of the territory of France! The evolution at work within him, which, under the blow of the first reverses, had swept away his faith in the Napoleonic legend—that sentimental Bonapartism which he had imbibed from his grandfather's epic narratives—was now reaching completion. He no longer even believed in the theoretical, orderly Republic, he was already inclining to revolutionary violence and to the necessity of terror as the only means of sweeping away the imbeciles and traitors who were butchering their own country. And so he was heart and soul with the insurrectionists on October 31, when such disastrous tidings came pouring upon Paris in fast succession—the loss of Le Bourget, so gallantly carried by the Volunteers of the Press on the night of the 27th; the arrival of M. Thiers at Versailles on his return from his journey to the European capitals, whence he had come, so it was reported, to treat for peace in the name of Napoleon III.; and finally the surrender of Metz, which, after the vague rumours which had been current, now became a frightful certainty, a supreme sledge-hammer blow, another but infinitely more shameful Sedan. And, on the morrow, when Maurice learnt of the occurrences at the Hôtel-de-Ville—the insurrectionists momentarily victorious, the members of the Government detained captive until the small hours of the morning and then only saved by a veering of the population, which, at first exasperated with them, had ultimately become anxious at thought of the triumph of the rising—he regretted the failure of the attempt, the failure to establish that Commune which might possibly have brought them salvation, with its call to arms, and its proclamation of the country in danger arousing all the classical memories of a free people determined not to perish. Thiers, for his part, did not even dare to enter the city, and on the rupture of the negotiations the Parisians all but illuminated.