Fragments of an Autobiography

by Felix Moscheles

Well, one fine old building is gone, I thought, as I turned away from the ruins, but at least the Louvre is saved. That marvel of architecture was intact. The principal works of art it contained had been taken to places of supposed safety, and the whereabouts of the Venus of Milo were said to be known only to some few persons, who had dug a hole and therein buried her. Much else had been providentially saved; there were large gaps in the Rue de Rivoli, but the unique old Tour St. Jacques had escaped unscathed. At the Palais de Justice the fire had stopped short on the threshold of the exquisite Sainte Chapelle, one of the most perfect works of the thirteenth century. I had with some difficulty obtained permission to roam over the ruins of that Palais de Justice and the Préfecture de Police, and whilst the firemen were working to subdue the flames wherever they broke out afresh, I used my brush to make a sketch of the huge maze before me. There were bundles of official papers at my feet; Actes de Naissance and Actes de Décès, charred only, and quite easy to decipher, but as I touched them, they crumbled to ashes. Some seemingly well-preserved parchments I consigned to my pocket, but a few hours later I found little more than dust in their place. The Hôtel de Ville, too, which had fallen a prey to the flames, had many an association for me. Henri Lehmann, during the time I was studying under him, had been commissioned to decorate the great hall with a series of pictures. I had lent an apprentice's hand, and had seen them grow under his brush, as, in an incredibly short space of time, he produced what was thought to be the best work of his life—work destined to hand down his name to posterity as one of the most fertile and distinguished painters of the second empire. Ingres, too, who in those days was considered the greatest draughtsman since the time of Raphael, had contributed a masterpiece to the decoration of the hall, a plafond, "The Apotheosis of Napoleon I." This work I had also seen in progress. On the occasion of a visit to his studio I recollect a lady asking him, in effusive language, where he had found the models for the ideally classical horses attached to the triumphant car of the great conqueror. Ingres led her straight to the window. "There are my models, madam," he said bluntly, pointing to the cab-stand.

I wandered through Paris day after day, and everywhere the ghastly traces of war, as it really is, confronted me; blood-stained flagstones, broken-down gun-carriages, barricades that had been stormed, and homes that had been wrecked. Everywhere the iron shutters of the shops were riddled with shot or broken open. One climbed as best one could over a heterogeneous mass of impedimenta, collected for attack or defence, or thrown away in precipitate flight. Every effort had been made to prevent petroleum being poured into the basement of the houses. The gratings in the streets had been boarded over and otherwise secured against those female fiends the Pétroleuses. Some of the wealthiest quarters of Paris were known to be undermined, and it was only in the nick of time that the Versailles troops arrived to prevent the execution of such written orders as, "Faites sauter le quartier de la Bourse."

The fashionable quarters and the suburbs of Paris had suffered terribly from the bombardment. I wandered for days over fragments of every mortal thing that had once been whole, past dismantled batteries, along the barren wastes of the Bois de Boulogne, and through avenues of wrecked villas. Costly furniture and works of art had been shattered to atoms by the enemy's bombs. In one place I came across a Louis Quinze sofa and chairs that had evidently been carried out for removal, and stood waiting so placidly, that they seemed to invite you to sit down and rest; and in one of the gardens there was a cottage piano, which appeared none the worse for its adventures; two coffee-cups stood unharmed upon it, showing that some two persons had taken their demie-tasse by the side of that piano.

The most striking effects of shot and shell showed themselves on the ornamental ironwork which had once enclosed those suburban villas. It seemed as if they had vented their fiercest passions on those beautifully designed gates and railings French art excels in producing. One could not suppress a feeling of pity as one saw them writhing in anguish and stretching out their weird iron arms as if in supplication. Here they were unhinged and started from their sockets; there their limbs, once so perfectly poised, were twisted into unsightly shapes, and stood out amongst the wreckage in fantastic and uncanny figures.

I had wended my way one afternoon to the revolutionary quarter of Belleville, and had got into conversation with a workman of more than average intelligence. Not feeling at our ease within earshot of the "Mouchards," as the growling, spying, myrmidons of the police are termed, and not liking the looks of the gensdarmes à cheval with their revolvers at half-cock, we had adjourned to one of the numerous establishments kept by the Marchand de Vins, Traiteur, which take the place of our public-houses. There my workman became confidential and declared himself a Communist to the backbone. He scorned the idea that the German was his enemy.

"If I'm to fight at all," he said, "let me find an enemy for myself. Let me shoot the richard en face, the capitalist who has been exploiting me and mine. We'll make him and the like of him disgorge his plunder, and then we'll start a fresh deal. As for the Germans, my dear sir, I dare say there are a lot of jolly good fellows amongst them, and plenty who would take a bumper, a canon de vin, with us, if they were here now, and drink to the perdition of the bourgeois."

"That is all very well," I answered, "but I'm pretty sure you were just like the rest, and went tearing along the boulevards and shouting 'A Berlin!' And you would have been only too jolly glad to get the Rhine, if you had had a——"

"The Rhine, monsieur!" he interrupted me, "the Rhine! Do you think I know what the blessed thing is; and, supposing we had got it, do you think they'd have given me any of it?"

That was twenty-eight years ago, and since then many a workman has learnt that he does not get his share of the "blessed thing" he has to fight for. I wonder whether he will give up fighting, or whether he will see to it that he gets his share.

It was an impressive sight that met the eye in the Place Vendôme. There was the famous column lying prostrate in huge fragments like so many mill-stones, with the bronze legends commemorating the conqueror's march, battered and crushed out of all seeming in their fall. Those gigantic vertebræ of the mighty pillar made one ponder on the vicissitudes of greatness, and on the ups and downs of heroic symbols. One could not help marvelling at the audacity of the men who had ruptured that spinal cord of patriotic self-glorification.