[67] Félix Pyat was born in 1810 at Vierzon. He came to Paris for the purpose of studying law, but soon abandoned his intention for the more genial profession of journalist. He contributed to the Figaro, the Charivari, the Revue de Paris, and the National. In 1848 he was named Commissary-General, and subsequently deputy of the department of the Cher. Having signed Ledru-Rollin’s call to arms, he was obliged after the events of June to take refuge in England. Profiting by the amnesty of the fifteenth of August, 1869, he returned to France, but made himself so obnoxious to the Government by his virulent abuse of the Empire, that he was again expelled. The revolution of the fourth of September allowed him to re-enter France. He commenced an immediate and violent attack on the new government, which he continued until his journal, Le Combat, was suppressed. Needless to say that he was one of the chief actors in the insurrections of the thirty-first of October and the twenty-second of January. He was elected deputy, but soon resigned, for the purpose of connecting himself with the cause of the Commune. He edited the Vengeur and the Commune newspapers, and obtained a decree suppressing nearly all rival or antagonistic publications. At the fall of the Commune he fled no one knows where.
LXIV.
No! no! Monsieur Félix Pyat, you must remain, if you please. You have been of it, you are of it, and you shall be of it. It is well that you should go through all the tenses of the verb, I am not astonished that a man as clever as you, finding that things were taking a bad turn, should have thought fit to give in your resignation. When the house is burning, one jumps out of window. But your cleverness has been so much pure loss, for your amiable confederates are waiting in the street to thrust you back into the midst of the flames again. It is in vain that you have written the following letter, a chef-d’oeuvre in its way, to the president of
“CITIZEN PRESIDENT,—If I had not been detained at the Ministry of War on the day when the election took place, I should have voted with the minority of the Commune. I think that the majority, for this once, is in the wrong.”
“For this once” is polite.
“I doubt if she will ever retrieve her error.”
If the Commune were to retrace its steps at each error it made, it would advance slowly.
“I think that the elected have not the right of replacing the electors. I think that the representatives have not the right of taking the place of the sovereign power. I think that the Commune cannot create a single one of its own members, neither make them nor unmake them; and, therefore, that it cannot of itself furnish that which is wanted to legalise their nominations’.”
Oh! Monsieur Félix Pyat, legality is strangely out of fashion, and it is well for Versailles that it is so.
“I think also, seeing that the war has changed the population....”
Yes; the war has changed the population, if not in the way you understand it, at least in this sense, that a great many reasonable people have gone mad, and that many—ah! how many?—are now dead.
“I think that it was more just to change the law than to violate it. The ballot gave birth to the Commune, and in completing itself without it, the Commune commits suicide. I will not be an accomplice in the fault.”
We understand that; it is quite enough to be an accomplice in the crime.