A week later Louise Michel expired suddenly, from exhaustion, at Marseilles.[8] Sallow-faced, white-headed, red-eyed old Rochefort was the chief mourner at the funeral. As he walked, bent, trembling, behind the hearse of the “Red Virgin”—crack, crack went the lozenges.
The month of June, 1912. Rochefort’s daily article in the Patrie missing; and again missing the next day, and the day after that—the first time octogenarian Rochefort had “missed” his daily lurid article for fifty-two years!
On the fourth day there appears in the Patrie the following intimation:—“I shall soon reach my eighty-second year, and it is now half-a-century since I have worked without a rest even in prison or in exile, at the hard trade of a journalist, which is the first and the most noble of all professions—when it is not the lowest. I think I have earned the right to a rest. But it will only be a short one. My old teeth can still bite.”
However, the “rest” in the country is prolonged: and the teeth don’t “bite” again. Eyesight becomes misty. Hearing next fails. Behold Rochefort in a dressing-gown, stretched on an invalid’s chair in a drowsy country garden, whence he is transported, as a last hope, to Aix-les-Bains,—where he dies.
The 30th June 1913. Day of Rochefort’s funeral. All Paris lining the boulevards and streets as the cortège, half-a-mile long, passes by. A crowd of all kinds and conditions of Parisians. Here is M. Jaurès, “the decayed turnip.” There is M. Clemenceau, “the loathsome leper.” Over there, M. Briand, “the moulting vulture.” And their heads are uncovered; there is not the faintest resentment in their minds as the remains of lurid, yet not always unkind, old Rochefort are borne away round the corner under a magnificent purple pall.
Round the corner and up the steep hill to the vast, rambling Montmartre Cemetery. Tombs, shadows, silence, mystery within the cemetery walls; but, beyond them, the hectic arms of the Moulin Rouge, and the lurid lights of night restaurants. In this mixed atmosphere Henri Rochefort has an appropriate resting-place.
[6] He died on 27th June 1913.
[8] 19th January 1905.