They have the philosophic taste for angling; the banks were lined, yet the waters lost nothing by their sport. It was live and let live, with man and fish. We had left the black coats behind us; they were blouses now; and everywhere the white and blue and green, the brightness, and the leisured groups. A worthy pair of retired rentiers, male and female, seemed to have devoted the whole afternoon to washing their poodle in the Seine. Monsieur lathered him, and drove him into the water for the rinsing with innocent oaths and ejaculations, ‘cré nom! bigre! saperlipopette!’ or whistled him back with a properly certificated dog-call, when he seemed to be going out of his depth. Madame stood by with towel, comb, and brush. For this they had kept the little grocer’s shop at the corner of the Rue St. Jacques de la Boucherie for seven-and-twenty years, and toiled late and early, Sabbath and fête, and put savings in the Paris Loans! ‘And why not?’ I ask, with ever increasing emphasis, while anyone shall say, ‘And why?’ All classes seem so happy, I thought, so innocently gay—it is the stock reflection of the tourist in the Paris streets.
I was standing on the bridge; and just then there was a rush past me of the avant-garde of a crowd, followed by the main body. They were fierce-looking and sorrowful. Those who were not in blouses wore grease-polished coats and hats—always a bad sign—and the few who were not frowning had the grease in their smile, always a worse. There was a woman at the head of them, in black, and carrying a black flag, an angular creature, as lantern-jawed as a saint from a missal, with eyes like live coals.
‘What is it? Who is it?’
‘The Red Virgin. We want bread, citoyen.’
It was not literally true, I think—most of them looked fat enough—prospectively true, perhaps. They hurried off towards the outer boulevards, I following, and, on their way, they pillaged a baker’s shop, the Black or Red one standing by, and waving her corpse-flag with approval, but touching no morsel of the food. Then they poured into a dirty little hall, garnished in the vestibule with a collection of pamphlets inciting to murder and arson, and began to ‘meet.’
They had a clear issue before them, and they knew their own minds. They were met to see how they could burn down civilisation. Nothing more, nothing less. Government was to go, property, laws, classes, the whole framework, with all the pretty things I had lately seen—the drag that took me to La Marche, the salons, the Opera, the coaches in the Wood, myself too, I suppose, by implication, though none took notice of me. They spoke with beautiful volubility, precision, logic, each man perfect in the spouter’s gift.
Presently the Virgin in black rose, and I began to understand why she was called the Red. She spoke in sing-song the chaunted dirge of the thing they wanted to burn. It was very grotesque, and very serious. ‘Citizens, it must all go, only the fire can purge it. Nothing will better it; it has been bettering for eighteen centuries, and it is worse to-day. I believed once, like them, and wrote hymns to the other Virgin, and I know she never hears. She is made of stone, like their hearts. O citizens, the infamy of it!—their fine houses and fine feasts, fine adulteries and fine lies, with labour for their everlasting bond-slave and thrall. Voyons! it is all a mockery. How many of you, before we broke the bread shop open, had eaten to-day?’ ‘Moi!’ shouted perhaps twenty voices, and about as many hands were held up, while about five times as many were held down. ‘If there were only one,’ said the Red Virgin, ‘we would burn it for that one. What! with ships in every port, and the finest climate and soil in the universe, and all the labour and all the martyrdom of the past behind us to start us fair, we cannot give every man his crust and his cup of wine! Voyons: on se moque de nous! Stand out of the way, with your governments and your religions, and leave us to ourselves, to be good. We should be so good without you. It would be so easy; love comes naturally to man, and justice; only the laws of loving and the laws of justice bar the way. The codes are between us and the Sun. Burn them, and start afresh. Vive l’Anarchie!’
‘Vive l’Anarchie!’ cried most of us, but it was not nem. con. ‘Down with the Virgin,’ shouted a big, black-muzzled fellow near the door; and he meant the Red one too!
‘A la porte l’espion!’ roared fifty others back at him. It was a fight.
He was not alone—‘à bas la Vierge!’ repeated his body-guard, closing round him. The chairs were broken into fragments in an instant, and I was luckily able to interpose my walking-stick between one of the fragments and the head of a prostrate man.