The Downfall (La Débâcle): A Story of the Horrors of War

by Émile Zola

'There's no lack of candles,' growled Jean, worried by this broad light.

In fact, it was only when he had helped Maurice down the steps leading to the shore, just below the Pont-Royal, that he felt tolerably safe. Here, at the water's edge, there was a clump of big trees which screened them from view, and during nearly a quarter of an hour they remained on this spot anxiously watching some black, shadowy forms which were flitting hither and thither on the quay across the river. Shots were being fired; all at once a loud shriek resounded, and then they heard a plunge, followed by a sudden spurt of foam. Plainly enough the bridge was guarded.

'Suppose we spend the night in that shanty,' suggested Maurice, pointing to a wooden hut used as an office of the navigation service.

'Pooh! we should be caught to-morrow morning,' said Jean, who clung to his idea. He had found there quite a flotilla of little boats, but they were moored to the quay by means of padlocked chains; and how would he be able to detach one of them and also procure some oars? At last he luckily found an old pair of sculls, and was even able to force open a padlock, which had no doubt been imperfectly secured. Thereupon, after helping Maurice to lie down in the bow of the boat, he cautiously shoved off, hugging the shore, in the shadow of the swimming baths and the pinnaces. Neither of them spoke, terrified as they were by the awful spectacle which now unfolded itself. The horror seemed to increase as they slowly floated down the stream and their horizon widened. By the time they had reached the Solferino bridge they could at one glance behold both flaming quays.

On the left, the Tuileries was burning. The Communists had fired both ends of the palace, the Pavillon de Flore and the Pavillon de Marsan, at nightfall; and the flames were now rapidly gaining the central Pavillon de l'Horloge, where a formidable mine had been prepared, barrels upon barrels of gunpowder being piled up in the Hall of the Marshals. At this moment the intervening buildings were belching from their shattered windows great whirling coils of ruddy smoke, through which darted blue flakes of fire. The roofs were kindling, riddled with fiery crevices, and opening like volcanic soil as the brazier within assailed them. No other portion of the palace, however, burnt like the Pavillon de Flore,[58] where the torch had been first applied, and which was flaring away, with a formidable roar, from its ground floor to its lofty roof. The petroleum with which the floorings and the hangings had been soaked imparted such intensity to the flames that the iron work of the massive balconies could be seen writhing and twisting, whilst the monumental chimneys, with their great sculptured suns, became red hot and burst asunder.

Then, on the right bank, came first of all the palace of the Legion of Honour, set on fire at five o'clock in the evening. It had now been alight for nearly seven hours, and was being consumed by a great blaze, like some huge pile of wood, every log of which is kindled, and fast burning to ashes. Next came the palace of the Council of State, the most enormous, the most frightful of those immense conflagrations, the whole gigantic parallelogram of stone, with its two colonnaded storeys, vomiting flame upon flame of lurid fire. The four blocks of building encompassing the spacious interior courtyard had been ignited at one and the same moment, and the petroleum poured by the cask-full upon the four staircases at the four corners had streamed down them, rolling perfect torrents of hell-fire from the highest to the lowest step. On the façade overlooking the river, the sharp line of the attic storey stood out blackly above the red tongues of flame which were licking its base; whilst the colonnades, the entablatures, the friezes, all the sculptured ornaments acquired startling vividness amid the blinding furnace-like glow beneath. Here especially there was such a rage, such a strength of fire, that the colossal monument was as though upheaved, and quaked and rumbled on its foundations; only the carcase of its massive walls being able to withstand this eruptive violence, which hurled the zinc of the roofs towards the sky. Then, near at hand, was the Orsay barracks, a whole side of which was burning in a lofty white column like a tower of light. And in the rear there were yet other conflagrations, seven houses in the Rue du Bac, two-and-twenty houses in the Rue de Lille, all setting the horizon aglow, with flames rising up in relief against other flames, in a sanguinary, endless sea of fire.

'Good Lord, can it be possible!' muttered Jean, with a grip at his throat; 'the river itself will soon catch alight!'

It already seemed, indeed, as though the boat were floating down a burning stream. With the reflections of those huge braziers dancing in the water, it might have been thought that the Seine was rolling live coals. Red flashes darted fitfully over its surface, amid a great rippling of yellow brands. And they were still slowly going down stream between the flaming palaces, carried on by the current of that fiery water, as though journeying through some accursed city, burning upon either side of a highway of molten lava.

'Ah!' said Maurice in his turn, struck with madness again, at sight of the havoc he had longed for. 'May everything blaze and everything blow up!'

But Jean silenced him with a gesture of terror as though he feared that such blasphemy might bring them misfortune. Was it possible that this young fellow whom he was so fond of, who was so highly educated, who had formerly displayed such delicate susceptibility, could have come to entertain such ideas as these? And he rowed on faster, for by this time he had passed the Solferino bridge, and found himself in a broad open space of water. The light had now become so intense that it seemed as though the river were illumined by the midday sunrays streaming down from overhead without casting a shadow. The pettiest details could be distinguished with wonderful precision—the ripples of the water, the heaps of gravel on the banks, the little trees planted along the quays. And the bridges shone out with a dazzling whiteness, so distinct that you might have counted their very stones. They looked like narrow gangways as yet undamaged, thrown across the fiery water from one conflagration to the other. Every now and then a loud crash would resound amid the continuous, roaring clamour. Squalls of soot were sweeping down; the wind was laden with pestiferous stenches. And the terror of it all was that Paris—the distant districts yonder along the Seine—had disappeared. The conflagrations on either hand blazed with such fierce, dazzling resplendency that beyond them, upstream and downstream alike, all was a black abyss. Only an enormous darkness, nihility, could be seen, as though the fire had already reached and devoured all the rest of Paris, as though the city had already vanished into eternal night. And the sky too was obliterated, destroyed; the flames climbed so high that they extinguished the stars.