“You come from above, sir?” asked Mme. Adam. “What is going on there?”
“Everything is for the best, my little lady,” he replied. “Blanqui is proclaimed Dictator of the Commune.”
Juliette longed to ask about her husband. But she was afraid. She only dared to inquire—
“How about Dorian?”
“What would you have, madame? He himself replied to us, saying, ‘I refuse to preside over the Commune. I am no politician. I found cannon, and, in my opinion, this is a time when the country stands more in need of cannons than of insurrections!’”
“Fine words,” exclaimed Juliette.
“Yes, madame; take them away with you,” was the rejoinder.
Hoping that Adam had returned to the Préfecture, Juliette made her way home, but only to find her husband still absent. He returned, however, at half-past six. Only a few minutes before, his wife had heard from the lips of a friendly National Guard the news of her husband’s arrest and of his escape, which he owed to the good offices of the news-bearer. The Prefect had only a few minutes to stay. His wife spoke of dinner. He would not hear of it. He had come to take measures for the defence of the Préfecture. Those measures the events of that black, starless night proved to be only too necessary.[199]
But they must be read in Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs; for the limits of this volume require us to pass over them and to hasten on to record briefly the agreement which, by the intervention of Adam and his friend Dorian, was arrived at in the small hours of the morning. Standing in a narrow staircase of the Hôtel de Ville, with the angry riflemen of the Commune above him, and the treacherous National Guards below, the Prefect conducted a parley. This intervention, seconded by the negotiations which Dorian in an upper room was carrying on between the Government and the Revolutionists, resulted in the signing of a convention.
By this agreement[200] the Government promised three things: first, to hold municipal elections on the following day; second, political elections on the day after; third, not to prosecute the leaders of the insurrection.