After the massacre on Wednesday, the hostages could entertain no further illusion as to their fate. This was only the commencement of a bloody drama. Everything convinced me it would only end with the last of the hostages. Then we entered upon a long agony of four days, the sad changes in which no human tongue could describe. I will confine myself to enumerating without comment the most remarkable incidents.
On Thursday noon, we were allowed recreation together in the same court as the day before. Our faces were sadder, but our hearts were as courageous. The laymen manifested a cordial sympathy for the clergy and a like serenity. It was evident that all put their confidence in God—a confidence that is not vain. I conversed twenty minutes with Père Olivaint. Smitten in his dearest affections, he still had a gracious
smile on his lips. I will not attempt to depict the expression of his face or repeat his conversation. His face had something about it truly supernatural, and his words were those of an angel. At the proposition of Mgr. Surat, M. Bayle, and Père Olivaint, the priests made a vow, if God would deign to snatch them from the jaws of death, to celebrate a Mass of thanksgiving in honor of the Blessed Virgin on the first Saturday of every month for the space of three years. I noticed among the laymen a face familiar to me. I inquired his name. It was that of one of the most intelligent and most courageous commissaires de police. It was he whom the government appointed in January, 1864, to make me a domiciliary visit and seize my papers, by way of expiating my support of M. Thiers as a candidate, and my opposition to the measures that had brought destruction on the empire and threatened at this very moment to cover Paris with blood and ruins. By a strange freak of fortune, our struggles in opposite directions had brought us to the same fate, which neither of us had hardly anticipated. If I had not been afraid of recalling a delicate remembrance, I would have assured him of my absolute forgiveness and of my devoted regards. Towards the end of our recreation, one of the shells from the battery of Père-la-Chaise broke, with a loud explosion, a stone in the wall under which we were walking. In ordinary times we should have shuddered and taken flight, but now it scarcely excited attention. In separating, we bade one another farewell till we met again—below, or in heaven: we did not know which.
In the evening we noticed fresh fires in Paris, and learned that the insurgents were setting fire to all the
monuments of those quarters where they had been repulsed by the army of Versailles. These fires distressed and exasperated me. Forgetting the danger I was in, I broke out in bitter complaints before my companions, who could not succeed in calming me. I was indebted to the heroes of petroleum, picrate, and glycerine for the only moments of irritation and despondency I felt during my captivity.
That morning they shot M. Jecker, the celebrated Mexican banker, in the court of La Roquette, and in the evening a refactory national guardsman against the outer wall. I comprehended the execution of the latter, but that of M. Jecker would have seemed to me an atrocious logogriph, if we had been on earth and not in the realm of demons. At eight o’clock, a warden notified M. Amodru and myself to descend to be shot. “Finitum est,” “All is finished,” said my kind neighbor to me. We knelt down by the window common to both cells, and gave each other absolution. The prisoners who understood the warden’s order regarded us from their cells with curiosity. The most cynical laughed at the prayers we were making in view of immediate death. I put on my sacerdotal garments, wrote my relatives, friends, and confrères a few farewell lines, and read in my breviary the prayers of the dying. After half an hour, I learned they had made a mistake, and instead of exposing M. Amodru and myself to the range of loaded chassepots, two laymen were to be taken before a court-martial, which amounted to the same thing, if I except a pretence of trial. I learned later, from an under-officer and some sergents de ville, that the agents of the Commune announced, more than once, that prisoners were about to be shot, adding some time after
with a malicious smile that they would lose nothing by waiting, and the ceremony was merely deferred till the next day.
I passed a part of the night in regarding the fires. The whole horizon was aflame toward Bercy. The battery at Père-la-Chaise, encouraged by the progress of the flames, redoubled its violence. The firing of arms and the booming of the cannon at the same time resounded in the direction of Montmartre and the Hôtel de Ville. I wondered if I was awake or under the influence of a horrible nightmare. A complete exhaustion of physical strength prevented me from fully deciding. I only mention this strange sensation because my companions in captivity also experienced it.
On Friday morning, at an early hour, my neighbor and myself received a visit from one of the subaltern employees of the prison. At first we felt some confidence in him, and we gave him two or three francs a day, as much from a wish to do a kind act, as a reward for his services, which were in a state of project. It did not require profound sagacity to discover that he was at the bottom only a spy and an accomplice of the Commune. The equivocal manner in which he pretended to console us in relating the progress of the Versailles army, showed he had the highest ideas of our simplicity and candor. Finding us more depressed and reserved after the catastrophe of Wednesday, he said to us in that tone, at once bantering and polite, which the Parisian voyou has at command: “Is it possible you give credit to the stories in circulation respecting the death of the Archbishop of Paris and the Curé of the Madeleine? They are simply absurd. Some of the national guards, who had been drinking too much,
were amusing themselves in discharging their guns against the prison walls: I assure you, no one was shot.”