I
Bertie Morris was a very fair type of the American journalist, whose body goes to Paris while he lives, whatever may happen to his soul at a later period.
Thirty-one years of age, he knew the world backwards; was as much at home in Port Said as in Philadelphia; wrote as though kings were his boon companions and had settled the hash of more than one intrepid lady with polyandric tendencies. The product is purely twentieth century, and frequently has flaxen hair. Bertie was becoming bald in the services of the New York Mitre. He was blessed with a proprietor who would have drawn blood out of a stone and then complained of its quality.
When John Faber left London, he went straight through to Paris, and there chose Bertie Morris for his guide. This young man had specialised in the Franco-German war, and knew the whole story of the Paris Commune intimately. Fired by the splendid opportunity of hob-nobbing with one of the richest men in the world (and of eating his dinners), Bertie set out gaily upon his fortunate pilgrimage. He had hired an old soldier, by name Picard, who had served under General d'Arny when that worthy shot down the revolutionaries as though they had been French partridges; and with this fellow for a guide, he and John Faber set off for Belleville and Vincennes.
Bertie's vocabulary, it should be said, was chiefly exclamatory when he was not translating. He was a fluent Frenchman, and had an uncommonly sound knowledge of his subject. Listening to him in more restrained moods, Faber lived again those bloody days which had cost his father his life, and indirectly had established his own fortune. All the ferocity, the savage brutality, the hopeless idealism of the Commune came to be understood by him. Here had the trade by which he lived prospered greatly. It had dyed those stones with blood some forty years ago.
"Say, shall we begin with Belleville or the Bois?" Morris had asked him. He thought that it would be best to work round the city to his father's old house near the Jardin du Luxembourg. But first he had a question to put.
"What I want to know is this," he asked: "How did it all begin? What set a handful of red republicans trying to fight a country? It's a big thing to have done, anyway. What put it into their heads?"
Bertie Morris liked the subject, and entered upon it with true American zest.
"Why," he said, "war was at the back of it. You've seen the same thing in Russia. Peace keeps the lid on the pot of revolution; war spills the stew. There were just two or three hundred thousand descendants of the old Jacobins in Paris, and when Napoleon III. was sent into Germany, they made up their minds to keep him there. Directly peace with Germany was signed, all the wild men came out. You had every kind of crank and others. There were big men and little, dreamers and red devils; they meant to govern Paris on the 'help yourself' plan, and they didn't begin so badly. But for Thiers and a few million sane folk behind him, I don't doubt they would have enjoyed themselves finely. As it was, what they divided were bayonets, and there were plenty to go round."
He rattled on, appealing often to the old soldier Picard and proud of his staccato knowledge. Faber listened with interest but said very little. He was trying, while they drove through the narrow streets to Père la Chaise, to realise what this Paris had been when his father lived and worked in it during the fateful years before the war of 1870. The first John Faber also had been something of a republican; had dreamed dreams of the millennium and of the rights of the proletariat. And the French had dragged him out and shot him for his pains. He had died protesting that he was an American citizen.