The Jugglers: A Story

by Molly Elliot Seawell

“Whom do you think I have seen? François! And François decorated on the field, too! But the next day, he was found dead drunk—he had sold his boots for liquor—so he disappeared. We had some talk, however. He asked about you, and said he always knew Skinny would come into her own. I inquired what he had been doing for a living in the last five years, and he said he had been picking flowers off century plants for his living. You see, he is the same François, but as brave as if he were honest.”

One morning in January, every door and window in Paris was closed and barred. The Prussians were marching in through the Arc de Triomphe, and the gayest city in the world lay as if dead in her grave-clothes on that winter morning. Not a wheel turned in Paris that day; even the dead remained unburied. No theatre or music-hall opened that evening, nor was there a note of music heard in the whole city. Paris was indeed the city of Dreadful Night. Then, after a little breathing spell like that given a man when shackles are put on his feet and handcuffs on his wrists, Paris, the conquered city, sat in her sackcloth bewailing herself for her lost glory. And presently, in her wretchedness and despair, some of her children were turned to devils and fought and mocked her and lacerated her and dragged her shrieking and blood-covered in the mire of disgrace. The frightful orgie of the Commune was an episode in hell for the great, beautiful, miserable, burning, starving, shrieking city.

Through it all Diane sang, not with the rich, full voice of a well-fed, well-sleeping woman, but with diminished volume and a little off the key; for in those days it was remarked that all voices were raised a semitone higher.

How the months passed when the Commune, that concentration of wickedness, that collection of fiends who sought to murder their country in her hour of misery, few who lived through it could describe; certainly Diane could not. Food and money were scarce enough, though there was not actual starvation as during the siege, but the guns from Montmartre thundered incessantly, and those who were to rescue Paris had to surround her and fight their way inch by inch.

It was in the springtime, and the horse chestnuts in the Champs-Elysées were pushing out their green leaves through their pale pink sheaths, and the insensate sky was blue and gold by day and black and silver by night. From the beginning it was bad enough, but as the sun grew warmer and the days more halcyon in their beauty, the hell made by men grew worse, the roaring of the guns more constant. The frightful disorders in the streets, murders and horrible orgies, were more frequent. The Commune died hard, as wild boars do. The great city had no defenders within her lines, and lay at the mercy of fiends. The few men who had crept back from the battle-fields could do nothing, and when the Communards in their dirty National Guard uniforms began to be pressed hard and caught in their traps like rats, they began to throw barricades across the streets and fight behind them, wildly and foolishly.

Diane still lived in her small house, although the neighborhood was daily growing more dangerous; the tide of fighting was pouring that way, and the quiet street resounded with the rattle of ammunition wagons and the yells and shouts of drunken National Guards, who were yet not too drunk to fight. The small house remained closed, and the two women within it—Diane and old Marie, a faithful creature whom Diane had picked up some years before—lived in two cellar rooms. There, they were reasonably safe. They dwelt in darkness, because they had few candles, and would have been afraid to show lights if they could. When the one dim candle was lighted, all windows, doors, cracks, and crannies were tightly closed to give the idea of an uninhabited house. The upstairs had long been dismantled, and there was little there to steal.

In those terrible spring days, neither Diane nor the old woman ever so much as showed themselves in the garden, and only stole forth by night to buy such meagre supplies as they could afford. For Diane was no longer well off. She had given freely of her store to her country, and unless she could once more sing to crowded audiences, she would die as poor as when she first set foot in Paris with her hundred and fifty-two francs in her pocket.

One afternoon in the last of May when the fighting had grown fiercer, the incessant booming of the guns nearer, and the sharp crack of the mitrailleuse louder and more frequent, a great crash resounded in the street before Diane’s house. The mob of National Guards had upset a cart-load of stones, and were beginning to tear up the pavement to make one of those simple but effective barricades that were sometimes better than a good many fortifications. It only took a couple of hours to build this fort in the street, and it was one of the best barricades so built in Paris, because it was directed by a man trained as a soldier, who had once been called the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel. Diane’s first view of him after she had slapped his face was as he stood or walked about the narrow street, now crowded and noisy with disorderly National Guards.

The Marquis had changed considerably for the worse in his appearance. Six years before he had been of superb figure and handsome face, and dressed with military elegance. Now, he was red and bloated and slouchy and dirty. His voice had once been sweet and persuasive. Now, it was a bellow of rage and drink, but enough sense was left amid his degradation yet to do some harm to his fellow-men, and the barricade would have been a credit to an engineer.

Many persons had warned Diane to leave her house and seek refuge somewhere else, but this she refused. Now it was too late. For any woman to show herself was to court death and horrors unspeakable.