When I came to Neuchâtel, he told me that unfortunately he could not spare even as much as a couple of hours for a friendly chat. The printing office was just issuing that afternoon the first number of a local paper, and in addition to his usual duties of proof-reader and co-editor, he had to write on the wrappers a thousand addresses of persons to whom the first three numbers would be sent, and to fasten himself the wrappers.
I offered to aid him in writing the addresses, but that was not practicable, because they were either kept in memory or written on scraps of paper in an unreadable hand.... ‘Well, then,’ said I, ‘I will come in the afternoon to the office and fasten the wrappers, and you will give me the time which you may thus save.’
We understood each other. Guillaume warmly shook my hand, and that was the beginning of our friendship. We spent all the afternoon in the office, he writing the addresses, I fastening the wrappers, and a French Communard, who was a compositor, chatting with us all the while as he rapidly composed a novel, intermingling his conversation with the sentences which he had to put in type and which he read aloud.
‘The fight in the streets,’ he would say, ‘became very sharp.’... ‘Dear Mary, I love you.’... ‘The workers were furious and fought like lions at Montmartre,’ ... ‘and he fell on his knees before her,’ ... ‘and that lasted for four days. We knew that Galliffet was shooting all prisoners—the more terrible still was the fight,’ and so on he went, rapidly lifting the type from the case.
It was late in the evening that Guillaume took off his working blouse, and we went out for a friendly chat for a couple of hours, when he had to resume his work as editor of the ‘Bulletin’ of the Jura Federation.
At Neuchâtel I also made the acquaintance of Malon. He was born in a village, and in his childhood he was a shepherd. Later on he came to Paris, learned there a trade—basket-making—and, like the book-binder Varlin and the carpenter Pindy, with whom he was associated in the International, had come to be widely known as one of the leading spirits of the Association when it was prosecuted in 1869 by Napoleon III. All three had entirely won the hearts of the Paris workers, and when the Commune insurrection broke out they were elected members of the Council of the Commune, all three receiving formidable numbers of votes. Malon was also mayor of one of the Paris arrondissements. Now, in Switzerland, he was earning his living as a basket-maker. He had rented for a few coppers a month a small open shed out of the town, on the slope of a hill, from which he enjoyed while at work an extensive view of the Lake of Neuchâtel. At night he wrote letters, a book on the Commune, short articles for the labour papers—and thus he became a writer. Every day I went to see him and to hear what this broad-faced, laborious, slightly poetical, quiet, and most good-hearted Communard had to tell me about the insurrection in which he took a prominent part, and which he had just described in a book, ‘The Third Defeat of the French Proletariate.’
One morning when I had climbed the hill and reached his shed, he met me quite radiant with the words: ‘You know, Pindy is alive! Here is a letter from him; he is in Switzerland.’ Nothing had been heard of Pindy since he was seen last on May 25 or May 26 at the Tuileries, and he was supposed to be dead, while in reality he remained in concealment at Paris. And while Malon’s fingers continued to ply the wickers and to shape them into an elegant basket, he told me in his quiet voice, which only slightly trembled at times, how many men had been shot by the Versailles troops on the supposition that they were Pindy, Varlin, himself, or some other leader. He told me what he knew of the death of Varlin, the book-binder whom the Paris workers worshipped, or old Delécluze, who did not want to survive the defeat, and many others; and he related the horrors which he had witnessed during that carnival of blood with which the wealthy classes of Paris celebrated their return to the capital, and then—the spirit of retaliation which took hold of a crowd, led by Raoul Rigault, which executed the hostages of the Commune.
His lips quivered when he spoke of the heroism of the children; and he quite broke down when he told me the story of that boy whom the Versailles troops were going to shoot, and who asked the officer’s permission to hand first a silver watch, which he had on, to his mother, who lived close by. The officer, yielding to a moment of pity, let the boy go, probably hoping that he would never return. But a quarter of an hour later the boy was back and, taking his place amidst the corpses at the wall, said: ‘I am ready.’ Twelve bullets put an end to his young life.
I think I never suffered so much as when I read that terrible book, ‘Le Livre Rouge de la Justice Rurale,’ which contained nothing but extracts from the letters of the Standard, Daily Telegraph, and Times correspondents, written from Paris during the last days of May 1871, relating the horrors committed by the Versailles army under Galliffet, together with a few quotations from the Paris Figaro, imbued with a bloodthirsty spirit towards the insurgents. In reading these pages I was filled with despair concerning mankind, and should have continued to despair, had I not afterwards seen in those of the defeated party who had lived through all these horrors, that absence of hatred, that confidence in the final triumph of their ideas, that calm though sad gaze of their eyes directed towards the future, that readiness to forget the nightmare of the past, which struck me in Malon; in fact, in nearly all the refugees of the Commune whom I met at Geneva, and which I still see in Louise Michel, Lefrançais, Elisée Reclus, and other friends.
From Neuchâtel I went to Sonvilliers. In a little valley in the Jura hills there is a succession of small towns and villages of which the French-speaking population was at that time entirely employed in the various branches of watchmaking; whole families used to work in small workshops. In one of them I found another leader, Adhémar Schwitzguébel, with whom, also, I afterward became very closely connected. He sat among a dozen young men who were engraving lids of gold and silver watches. I was asked to take a seat on a bench or table, and soon we were all engaged in a lively conversation upon socialism, government or no government, and the coming congresses.