The incidents of the Commune—a period so much more terrible and shameful than that of the war—have been so often and fully described that we will not add much to this sketch by going over the fearfully familiar subject. Every one knows the phase of rabid feeling which came uppermost among the Communists: the hatred of God, religion, and priests—even a more rabid feeling than that entertained towards owners of property. The clergy were thus forced to be prominent in that national delirium: the chief victims were ecclesiastics. In Paris and other places it has been noticed that a certain class of lazy, good-for-nothing men live from hand to mouth around the barracks and the churches, living on the alms of soldiers and priests, inventing excuses to account for their indolence, cheating and lying and taking ravenously all they can get. When a revolution comes, these men become denunciators, assassins, and leaders. It is they who cry the loudest against the army and the priesthood—the “butchers” of Versailles and the “hypocrites” in cassocks. Raoul Rigault spoke their sentiments when he said to the porter of M. Duguerry’s house (the famous parish priest of La Madeleine, shot with Archbishop Darboy at La Roquette): “God! you fool!” (the man had exclaimed, as is the custom, innocently meant, in France, 'O mon Dieu!') “Hold your tongue; how dare you speak of God! Our revolution is against your God, your religion, and your priests. We will sweep all that rubbish away!” And, by way of contrast to this plain confession of faith, here are the words of M. Duguerry in prison to his biographer, the Baron de Saint-Amand: “My dear friend, if I knew that my death would be of any use to the cause of religion, I should kneel down and beg them to shoot me.” But it is not necessary to multiply quotations to show the intense hatred of the Commune towards religion and its ministers. Holy Week in 1871 was indeed the Passion Week of many of the latter. The devilish conduct of many women recalled the worst excesses of the Reign of Terror. A woman with a military cap on rode at the head of the escort of the hostages, three of them Jesuit Fathers, who were taken from La Roquette to Belleville to be shot. She swore and yelled and gave orders, insulting the priests especially. On the Boulevards, as the condemned passed, riots took place, and disorderly crowds nearly killed the prisoners in their impatience. Women again were prominent, brandishing guns, knives, and pistols, throwing bloody mud on the priests, and blaspheming as badly as any man; it would have been safer to run the gauntlet of a crowd of maniacs let loose from the asylum. Mgr. Surat was killed in the streets on another occasion by a young girl of sixteen, who deliberately put a pistol to his forehead. “Mercy, mademoiselle!” cried the priest quickly; but with an untranslatable slang play on his words[[39]]—equivalent, say, to “You shall have it hot and peppery,” or some such phrase—she drew the trigger and stretched him dead at her feet. The Abbé Perny, in his evidence before the council of war, says: “I have lived among the savages for twenty-five years, but I never saw among them anything to equal the hatred on those faces of men and women as we passed them on our way from Mazas to La Roquette.”[[40]] Father Anatole de Bengy, a Jesuit, was a remarkable man who had been military chaplain in the Crimea, and was volunteer chaplain of the troops during the last war till the siege, when he attached himself to the Eighth Ambulance. He had a singular power of commanding the love, obedience, and confidence of others; he was brave and good-tempered, and such a thorough soldier that Marshal Bosquet said of him: “Upon my word, if there are many Jesuits of that kind, I say hurrah for the Jesuits!” His letters are full of pleasantry and life. He tells his friends how he helps “our poor soldiers,” and jokes about his tramps with “his bundle on his back,” which phrase, he says, “always rouses a certain pity in the listener; but indeed, my dear Aymard, the bundle (le sac) does not deserve its bad name: it urges the body forward, and its inconveniences are fully made up for by the advantages it gives rise to. Some thinker should undertake the Praise of the Bundle, and rehabilitate it in the eyes of pilgrims.” The words of this manly and brave priest at the funeral of Commander de Dampierre would serve as his own eulogy: “The fountain-head of duty is in the three world-famous words, God wills it.” When his name was called at La Roquette, on the list of condemned, the Communist official stumbled over it, and Père de Bengy stepped briskly forward, saying: “I know my name is on the list—Bengy; here I am.” M. Crépin, a shoe-maker, who was condemned, but saved by the entrance of the troops, saw the butchery of Belleville, and in his evidence said: “Let no one speak ill of the clergy before me again! I have seen them at home now; I know them by experience; I have witnessed their courage and been comforted by their words.”

The Dominicans of Arcueil transformed their school into an ambulance during the siege, and Père Bengy happened to be chosen chaplain. But the Commune was to elicit greater sacrifices. The monks might have left, but did not, and reopened their hospital for the wounded wild beasts, whose curses sounded upon their watchers even from their sick-beds. The Geneva flag was hoisted, and the Sisters of St. Martha acted as domestic servants, besides many other women and girls. There were twenty wounded in the hospital on the 19th of May, 1871, when the Commune arrested the inmates of the house, thirty-eight persons—priests, lay brothers, tradesmen and servants in their employment, some of them foreigners, nuns, married women and widows, two young girls, and a child of eight years old, daughter of the tailor, who was afterwards shot with the priests. The latter were, with a devilish show of mercy, offered their liberty if they would take arms against the Versailles troops, and, when they refused, they were condemned. Their death took place a few days later, and the shooting was not done with military precision, but bunglingly, so that the victims were rather butchered than shot. After the bodies had ceased to breathe they were savagely mutilated, the heads and larger bones hacked with axes, and the flesh pierced with bayonets. Some of the priests managed to escape in the crowd and smoke, all of them wounded, however; and one was saved by a woman who hurriedly threw her husband’s clothes to him. According to the saying of a National Guard who escorted the Belleville victims to their death, and who, on being asked by a passer-by, “Where are they taking those men to?” answered gravely, “To heaven,” the road these priests walked was truly the “narrow road that leadeth to salvation.”

Surely, if any class of French citizens did their duty in troublous times and deserve well of their country, it is the clergy.

DE VERE’S “MARY TUDOR.”
PART II.

We said, in our last article,[[41]] that the Catholic reader would find this second play much more painful than the first. We are sure, too, that the non-Catholic reader will deem it inferior in point of interest. Yet we do not agree with the London Spectator that there is an “artistic chasm” between the two plays. At any rate, whatever constructive defects are to be found in the present performance, there is no falling off in dramatic power.

The play is preluded by an “Introductory Scene,” in which Mary is discovered prostrate on the tomb of Jane Grey. This does not at all surprise us after the remorse we have witnessed in the last scene of the preceding play. Holding herself criminally responsible for the execution of her cousin, it was natural for her to perform “penances severer than the Church prescribes.” The gentle Fakenham—now Abbot of Westminster—may well express anxiety for his penitent.

“Pray God

Her mind give way not: sorely is it shaken.

These tearful macerations of the spirit,

These fasts that chain all natural appetites,