CHAPTER XXV.
PARIS ON THE EVE OF DEATH.
The Paris of the Commune has but three days more to live; let us engrave upon our memory her luminous physiognomy.
He who has breathed in thy life that fiery fever of contemporaneous history, who has panted on thy boulevards and wept in thy faubourgs, who has sung to the morns of thy revolutions and a few weeks after bathed his hands in powder behind thy barricades, he who can hear from beneath thy stones the voices of the martyrs of sublime ideas and read in every one of thy streets a date of human progress, even he does less justice to thy original grandeur than the stranger, though a Philistine, who came to glance at thee during the days of the Commune. The attraction of rebellious Paris was so strong that men hurried thither from America to behold this spectacle unprecedented in the world's history—the greatest town of the European continent in the hands of the proletarians. Even the pusillanimous were drawn towards her.
In the first days of May one of our friends arrived—one of the most timid men of the timid provinces. His kith and kin had escorted him on his departure, tears in their eyes, as though he were descending into the infernal regions. He said to us, "What is true in all the rumours bruited about?" "Well, come and search all the recesses of the den."
We set out from the Bastille. Street-arabs cry Rochefort's Mot d'Ordre, the Père Duchêne, Jules Vallès' Cri du Peuple, Félix Pyat's Vengeur, La Commune, L'Affranchi, Le Pilori des Mouchards. The Officiel is little asked for; the journalists of the Council stifle it by their competition. The Cri du Peuple has a circulation of 100,000. It is the earliest out; it rises with chanticleer. If we have an article by Vallès this morning, we are in luck; but in his stead, Pierre Denis, with his autonomy à outrance, makes himself too often heard. Only buy the Père Duchêne once, though its circulation is more than 60,000. Take Félix Pyat's article in the Vengeur as a fine example of literary intoxication. The bourgeoisie has no better helpmates than these vain and ignorant claptrap-mongers. Here is the doctrinaire journal La Commune, in which Millière sometimes writes, and in which Georges Duchêne takes the young men and the old of the Hôtel-de-Ville to task with a severity which would better fit another character than his. Do not forget the Mot d'Ordre, whatever the romanticists may say. It was one of the first to support the Revolution of the 18th March, and darted terrible arrows at the Versaillese.
In the kiosques are the caricatures. Thiers, Picard, and Jules Favre figure as the Three Graces, clasping each other's paunches. This fine fish, the maquereau, with the blue-green scales, who is making up a bed with an imperial crown, is the Marquis de Gallifet. L'Avenir, the mouthpiece of the Ligue. Le Siècle, become very hostile since the arrest of Gustave Chaudey; and La Vérité, the Yankee Portalis's paper, are piled up, melancholy and intact. Many reactionist papers have been suppressed by the prefecture, but for all that are not dead; for a lad, without any mystery about him, offers them to us.
Read, search, find one appeal to murder, to pillage, a single cruel line in all these Communard journals excited by the battle, and then compare them with the Versaillese papers, demanding fusillades en masse as soon as the troops shall have vanquished Paris.
Let us follow those catafalques that are being taken up the Rue de la Roquette, and enter with them into the Père Lachaise cemetery. All those who die for Paris are entombed with obsequies in the great resting-place. The Commune has claimed the honour of paying for their funerals; its red flag blazes from the four corners of the hearse, followed by some comrades of the battalion, while a few passers-by always join the procession. This is a wife accompanying her dead husband. A member of the Council follows the coffin; at the grave he speaks not of regrets, but of hope, of vengeance. The widow presses her children in her arms, and says to them, "Remember and cry with me, 'Vive la République! Vive la Commune!'"[176]