Thenceforth divergences degenerated into hostilities. The council-room was small, badly ventilated; the soon overheated atmosphere ruffled the temper. The discussions grew bitter, and Félix Pyat turned them into attacks. Delescluze never spoke but for union, concord. The other would have preferred the Commune dead rather than saved by one of those he bore a grudge to, and he hated whoever smiled at his craziness. He did not mind discrediting the Council, aspersing its most devoted members, so that he resented a trespass on his vanity. He could lie with perfect effrontery, carve out some infamous calumny, slaver a colleague, then suddenly, in emotional attitude, open his arms, exclaiming, "Let us embrace." He now accused Vermorel of having sold his journal to the Empire after having offered it to the Orléanists. He glided about in the lobbies, the Commissions, a Barrère of the boards, now insinuating, now foaming, now patriarchal. "The Commune! why it is my child! I have watched over it for twenty years. I have nursed, I have rocked it." To hear him, the 18th March was owing to him. He thus enlisted the naïve, the light-headed sent to the Council by the public meetings, and, despite his blank incapacity, shown by the man while a member of the first executive, despite his attempts at fight, he picked up twenty-four voices at the election of the Committee of Public Safety. The aspic profited by it to hiss forth discord.
Disunion within the Council was fatal, the mother of defeat. It ceased—let the people know this as well as their faults—when they thought of the people, when they rose above these miserable personal quarrels. They followed the funeral of Pierre Leroux, who had defended the insurgents of June, 1848; ordered the demolition of the Bréa church, built in memory of a justly punished traitor; of the expiatory monument, an affront to the Revolution; were not forgetful of the political prisoners still at the Bagnio, and ennobled the Place d'Italie with the name of Duval. All Socialist decrees passed unanimously; for though they differed they were all Socialists. There was but one voice in the Council to expel two of its members guilty of some former offence,[146] and no one even in the thick of the peril dared to utter the word capitulation.
FOOTNOTES:
[143] Before the Commission of Inquiry at the Assembly he has assumed the attitude of a Daniel in the lions' den. The meeting, however, contented with hissing him, for Paris let these impotent drones buzz as much as they liked without taking any notice of them.
[144] Appendix IX.
[145] The minority formed a nucleus of twenty-two members: Andrieu, Arnold, A. Arnould, Avrial, Beslay, Clémence, V. Clément, Courbet, Frankel, E. Gérardin, Jourde, Lefrançais, Longuet, Malon, Ostyn, Pindy, Serraillier, Theisz, Tridon, Vallès, Varlin, Vermorel.
[146] Blanchet, an ex-Capucin and bankrupt, and E. Clément, who under the Empire had offered his services to the police.