A big Mercédès car carried the pilgrims upon this journey, and its welcome in the black streets of Belleville was not blandly enthusiastic. Blue blouses at the doors of the wine shops spat upon the pavement and cursed the bourgeoisie; coarse women with skirts hanging about them like rags laughed brutalities and flung indecencies after them. There were pale-faced Apaches and white and callous children. It was inevitable that these should suggest their forbears of 1870, and even the old soldier remarked the fact:
"They would burn Paris again to-morrow, messieurs—as I have seen it burned already. Ah! the terrible days!"
He tried to give them a picture of the fateful week—the last of the month of May and of the Commune. The Communards had been driven into the eastern labyrinth of the city then, he said, and in the anger of defeat had sent their women forth to burn this Paris which could not defend them. Since Nero fiddled, no such spectacle had been seen in Europe. The old man told them the story with eyes uplifted and hands clenched. He had become as a child, and these were the scenes of his youth.
"It was on the Tuesday night that they burned the palace of the Tuileries," he said. "The women went out with naphtha; I saw them running like devils through the streets and crying to one another to fire the houses. The day before that, the Hôtel de Ville flamed up. They say it was an accident, but—God knows. The 'Council of State,' the Bank, the Bourse, the Church of St. Eustache, all were burned those terrible days. There was one bank of the river a wall of fire on the Wednesday night; a man could have read his paper at Passy. It was as light as day, they told me, in the park at Versailles. All the streets were full of wild, screaming people; but if you went a little way toward the Bois you heard the cannon, you stumbled over the dead. What a butchery was that, messieurs! God help those who went out of their houses to see what the soldiers were doing! Ladmirault, Galifet, Vinot, Cissey—those were the names of the generals. They held their courts under the trees, in the cafés, at the street corners. It was sufficient to have worn a blouse, to be sorry for the dead, to express displeasure at what was being done—away went such a man or woman to the nearest wall. We are now coming to the Rue Lafayette. I was in this very street when my company seized the Communard, Varlin, and dragged him up to the Buttes Montmartre. They tied his hands behind his back and cut his face with their sabres while he walked. It was a horrible thing to see, messieurs! When he could no longer walk, they carried him until someone thought it time to kill him with the butt end of a musket. They say he was the cleverest member of the Commune—I do not know; I was only of the infantry of the line, and their politics did not concern me."
Faber listened to all this with the interest of a man who is obsessed by one dominating idea. This Commune had been the first attempt in modern times to set up the socialism of Marx—and in what had it ended? In a deluge of blood, and the derision of all sane people. He wondered what would have been the modern story of Paris if Félix Pyat and his fellows had been stronger than Thiers and the Versaillese. A consummate knowledge of modern politics reminded him that the blue blouses of France were still socialistic to the core, and that individualism sat upon a throne of straw. He had often thought that such fortunes as his own would never be made by generations to come; but that concerned him little, for he had no children. The reflection brought an image of Gabrielle Silvester to his mind. It was odd that he should think of her while the old soldier related these bloody scenes.
Bertie Morris, on the other hand, enjoyed himself immensely. He drove his tame millionaire as far up the Butte as he could, and even took him to the Rue Lepic and the Moulin de la Galette. He was a prize to be shown to artists and authors, poor devils who would dine that night for fifty sous and sell their masterpieces for as many to-morrow. This pilgrimage of the ateliers was not unwelcome to Faber, and was made at his own request.
"I want to hear of a man," he said, "Louis de Paleologue is his name."
"Where do you think he hides up?" Bertie asked.
Faber said that he had no idea.
"He was drawing for Gavarnie some forty years ago. I've never heard of him since, and I wasn't born then."