At the sight of M. Perny and M. Houillon, apostolic missionaries in China, whom the Commune had stupidly arrested on their way through Paris, M. Deguerry said to Mgr. Darboy: “Only think of those two Orientals coming to seek martyrdom in Paris! Is it not curious?” On the way, they had to encounter the threats and outrages of a rabid mob. Men en blouse, ragged children, and women, or rather furies, wished to stop and enter the vehicles: “A bas les chouans et les calotins!”—“Stop, we wish to cut them in pieces!”
It was revolting, monstrous, and yet something still more hideous was reserved for us. We were insulted in our turn, not by the multitude, but by the national guards who had charge of us. I could understand the threatening attitude of an over-excited mob, led away by its bad instincts and the speeches of demagogues, but I had never seen, or thought it possible, that an armed force could basely insult and threaten those whom they were officially deputed to escort to a place of punishment. I had not suspected such a degree of vileness in human nature,
and felt rather humiliated than indignant. “Ah! citizen,” said one of these tigers armed with a képi and a chassepot, “you reckon on the arrival of the Versailles assassins! Well, this morning we cut them off at the Porte d’Auteuil with our mitrailleuses: twenty thousand prisoners are in our hands. The chouans and their accomplices will have the fate they merit.” An ecclesiastic of the Faubourg St. Antoine, who had been embittered by his trials, wished to take up for the Versailles army. I tried to make him comprehend that reserve and silence were the safest and most suitable course for us.
I asked the national guardsman at my right the quarter he was from. He replied that he belonged to the battalion of Charonne. It was more and more manifest that the old suburbs of Paris ruled and kept Paris in terror. The quarters St. Martin, St. Antoine, and St. Marceau were no longer rulers of this great city, but the citoyens of Belleville, Montmartre, La Villette, Ménilmontant, Charonne, and Montrouge, that is to say, the districts that a few years ago were not a part of Paris, that had municipalities and material interests distinct from Paris, and had made a most vigorous resistance to their annexation to the city. But the head of the second empire conceived a pride in reigning over a capital containing two millions of inhabitants, and the thickly settled suburbs were violently annexed to Paris. He wished to eclipse Babylon and ancient Rome. To make his way through his capital, innumerable boulevards must be opened, bordered by sumptuous edifices. To seek the fresh air of the Bois de Boulogne, he must traverse immense avenues peopled with all the
wealthy idlers in the world, and consequently new legions of workmen were summoned from every point of the compass, who concentrated themselves like an army ranged in battle in the annexed zone.
A humble journalist, I had pointed out, as a great social danger, the tendency of the empire to separate Paris into two parts, one peopled by the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and the other by workmen, outcasts, and the dissatisfied from the entire world. My criticisms and sad forebodings were recompensed by officious remonstrances, domiciliary visits, and the seizure of my papers. The course of the empire had, then, been fatal to France in a political point of view, since compression had only served to debase its inhabitants and organize all kinds of social conspirations; fatal in a religious point of view, for the affairs of Rome alarmed the consciences of Catholics, and the clergy, so respected in 1848, became the objects of prejudice and hatred, the bitter fruits of which we were reaping; and fatal in a military sense, for France was humbled and crushed by a foreign power.
I will declare, for the political honor of the eminent men whose opposition to the empire I shared, that at the time I thought I was about to be put to death in prison and render the Supreme Judge a strict account of my actions, far from regretting a stand that some of my friends and ecclesiastical superiors had blamed and treated as “passion politique,” everything at Mazas and La Roquette, everything in Paris and the whole of France, assured me I had not taken a wrong course; that, on the contrary, I had served the cause of religion and of my country.
TO BE CONTINUED.