But when the generals of the Commune made an audacious effort to seize Versailles and open communication with their numerous agents in the populous centres of the provinces, they were overwhelmed by the army they thought disorganized or won over to their cause, and all their plans were overthrown. The attempts to excite an insurrection in the large cities failed. The Commune could expect nothing more from the intervention of the departments: its rule was restricted to Paris, and the days of its power were numbered. Then projects of hatred and vengeance succeeded those of social renovation. The monkeys of the Hôtel de Ville gave place to tigers. The prophets and apostles of the Commune lost their sang-froid. The foul Felix Pyat exhausted himself in atrocious invectives, and the fiendish Delescluze evidently preferred to blow up Paris rather than give it up to France.
While the emissaries of the radical
republicans knowingly deceived France and all Europe respecting the condition of Paris, and were circulating their deceitful and imprudent sophisms, dictated by their admiration for the Commune and their hatred of the national assembly, what was the language of foreign journals that cared for nothing about these internal struggles but exactness and impartiality? The correspondent of the Times was not satisfied with comparing Paris to an infernal caldron, in which seethed all human passions, but thus depicted the armed forces of the Commune: “Besides the old and the young, excited by the phraseology of the first revolution, still novel to them, all the villains in Paris are under arms. I have never seen, even in London, so sinister a collection of faces. These men always seem more or less intoxicated. They have not, perhaps, ceased to be so since the eighteenth of March.” Such is the spectacle in the streets and public places: that of the forts and ramparts is of a still more expressive character: “Man is there only a ferocious animal, everywhere scenting blood. We hardly recognize him, and no longer comprehend him.”
The parish service I directed at the Madeleine after the arrest of M. Deguerry encountered but few difficulties. The Commune only made some insignificant requisitions in a civil manner. The qualification of “citizen director of the church of the Madeleine,” given me in the most solemn manner, enlivened me for an instant in the midst of my cares and griefs.
The success of the Versailles army, in giving joy to the respectable people still remaining at Paris, was a source of danger to them. The Commune concentrated, or rather gave up, its civil and military power
into the hands of the committee of public safety and the central committee. On Wednesday, the seventeenth of May, in going to administer the last sacraments to the daughter of a concierge in the Rue de la Victoire, I found the ninth arrondissement hemmed in by the insurgents, who were making frequent arrests. Thanks to one of the most ultra journals of the Commune that I pretended to be reading very attentively, I passed through their inquisitorial ranks unimpeded.
On the eighteenth, which was Ascension day, the church of St. Augustine was closed, and one of the vicars and the organist were imprisoned. All the offices of the day were celebrated at the Madeleine, attended by a numerous and very devout congregation; but, so far from yielding to any illusion about the fate that awaited me, I begged Dr. B. de L——, a parishioner of the Madeleine, to enable me after vespers to see M. Jacquemin, one of the physicians of the prison of Mazas. There was every reason to believe I should soon require his kind services. I was already acquainted with M. de Beauvais, the second physician at Mazas, whose courageous devotedness I was subsequently to experience, and who had already been so thoughtful as to give me news of the curé of the Madeleine and of the Archbishop of Paris. After my interview with Dr. Jacquemin, I felt some embarrassment about returning to my residence. The Rue de la Ville-l’Evêque was filled with an armed band of the national guards. The house of the Sisters of Charity, opposite the Presbytère, was guarded by two sentinels. The sisters had been expelled, and the girls’ school confided to some citoyennes, who, according to the unruly tongues of the quarter, had been replaced at the
prison of St. Lazare by the Sisters of Picpus, who were accused of a series of crimes, each one more extraordinary than the rest. I bought, as on the previous day, one of the ultra journals of the Commune, and, armed with this new kind of a safe-conduct, I took a roundabout way to the Rue la Ville-l’Evêque, in order to avoid the national guards as much as possible. Once their protection would have been eagerly sought against a robber or assassin, but since the reign of the Commune respectable people feared and fled from them as the worst of evil-doers. And the new military organization will doubtless have to undergo a radical transformation, for it will be difficult for it to rise above the moral discredit into which it has fallen.
Some moments after, a Polish priest, who had given himself up with indefatigable zeal to the service of the ambulances, notified me that an order had been signed to close the churches and arrest the priests still in Paris. I went to see one of my devoted confrères, M. de Bretagne, and consult with him about the means of preserving the holy eucharist from profanation. The insurgents had already thrown away or carried off in their cartridge-boxes the sacred elements in some of the churches. At this very time the church of St. Philippe-du-Roule was entered by the insurgents, and for want of priests they arrested two employees who were guarding the church. The Madeleine of the eighth arrondissement was the only church that was still open.
Although, after the arrest of M. Deguerry, a part of the valuables of the church had been carried to a safe place, I employed the first moments of Friday, the nineteenth, in confiding the remainder to some women of the working-classes. I only