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MY DAYS OF ADVENTURE
THE FALL OF FRANCE, 1870-71
By Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
Le Petit Homme Rouge
Author of "The Court of the Tuileries 1852-70" etc.
With A Frontispiece
London, 1914
THE PEOPLE'S WAR
O husbandmen of hill and dale,
O dressers of the vines,
O sea-tossed fighters of the gale,
O hewers of the mines,
O wealthy ones who need not strive,
O sons of learning, art,
O craftsmen of the city's hive,
O traders of the man,
Hark to the cannon's thunder-call
Appealing to the brave!
Your France is wounded, and may fall
Beneath the foreign grave!
Then gird your loins! Let none delay
Her glory to maintain;
Drive out the foe, throw off his sway,
Win back your land again!
1870. E.A.V.
PREFACE
While this volume is largely of an autobiographical character, it will be found to contain also a variety of general information concerning the Franco-German War of 1870-71, more particularly with respect to the second part of that great struggle—the so-called "People's War" which followed the crash of Sedan and the downfall of the Second French Empire. If I have incorporated this historical matter in my book, it is because I have repeatedly noticed in these later years that, whilst English people are conversant with the main facts of the Sedan disaster and such subsequent outstanding events as the siege of Paris and the capitulation of Metz, they usually know very little about the manner in which the war generally was carried on by the French under the virtual dictatorship of Gambetta. Should England ever be invaded by a large hostile force, we, with our very limited regular army, should probably be obliged to rely largely on elements similar to those which were called to the field by the French National Defence Government of 1870 after the regular armies of the Empire had been either crushed at Sedan or closely invested at Metz. For that reason I have always taken a keen interest in our Territorial Force, well realizing what heavy responsibilities would fall upon it if a powerful enemy should obtain a footing in this country. Some indication of those responsibilities will be found in the present book.
Generally speaking, however, I have given only a sketch of the latter part of the Franco-German War. To have entered into details on an infinity of matters would have necessitated the writing of a very much longer work. However, I have supplied, I think, a good deal of precise information respecting the events which I actually witnessed, and in this connexion, perhaps, I may have thrown some useful sidelights on the war generally; for many things akin to those which I saw, occurred under more or less similar circumstances in other parts of France.
People who are aware that I am acquainted with the shortcomings of the French in those already distant days, and that I have watched, as closely as most foreigners can watch, the evolution of the French army in these later times, have often asked me what, to my thinking, would be the outcome of another Franco-German War. For many years I fully anticipated another struggle between the two Powers, and held myself in readiness to do duty as a war-correspondent. I long thought, also, that the signal for that struggle would be given by France. But I am no longer of that opinion. I fully believe that all French statesmen worthy of the name realize that it would be suicidal for France to provoke a war with her formidable neighbour. And at the same time I candidly confess that I do not know what some journalists mean by what they call the "New France." To my thinking there is no "New France" at all. There was as much spirit, as much patriotism, in the days of MacMahon, in the days of Boulanger, and at other periods, as there is now. The only real novelty that I notice in the France of to-day is the cultivation of many branches of sport and athletic exercise. Of that kind of thing there was very little indeed when I was a stripling. But granting that young Frenchmen of to-day are more athletic, more "fit" than were those of my generation, granting, moreover, that the present organization and the equipment of the French army are vastly superior to what they were in 1870, and also that the conditions of warfare have greatly changed, I feel that if France were to engage, unaided, in a contest with Germany, she would again be worsted, and worsted by her own fault.
She fully knows that she cannot bring into the field anything like as many men as Germany; and it is in a vain hope of supplying the deficiency that she has lately reverted from a two to a three years' system of military service. The latter certainly gives her a larger effective for the first contingencies of a campaign, but in all other respects it is merely a piece of jugglery, for it does not add a single unit to the total number of Frenchmen capable of bearing arms. The truth is, that during forty years of prosperity France has been intent on racial suicide. In the whole of that period only some 3,500,000 inhabitants have been added to her population, which is now still under 40 millions; whereas that of Germany has increased by leaps and bounds, and stands at about 66 millions. At the present time the German birth-rate is certainly falling, but the numerical superiority which Germany has acquired over France since the war of 1870 is so great that I feel it would be impossible for the latter to triumph in an encounter unless she should be assisted by powerful allies. Bismarck said in 1870 that God was on the side of the big battalions; and those big battalions Germany can again supply. I hold, then, that no such Franco-German war as the last one can again occur. Europe is now virtually divided into two camps, each composed of three Powers, all of which would be more or less involved in a Franco-German struggle. The allies and friends on either side are well aware of it, and in their own interests are bound to exert a restraining influence which makes for the maintenance of peace. We have had evidence of this in the limitations imposed on the recent Balkan War.
On the other hand, it is, of course, the unexpected which usually happens; and whilst Europe generally remains armed to the teeth, and so many jealousies are still rife, no one Power can in prudence desist from her armaments. We who are the wealthiest nation in Europe spend on our armaments, in proportion to our wealth and our population, less than any other great Power. Yet some among us would have us curtail our expenditure, and thereby incur the vulnerability which would tempt a foe. Undoubtedly the armaments of the present day are great and grievous burdens on the nations, terrible impediments to social progress, but they constitute, unfortunately, our only real insurance against war, justifying yet to-day, after so many long centuries, the truth of the ancient Latin adage—Si vis pacem, para bellum.
It is, I think, unnecessary for me to comment here on the autobiographical part of my book. It will, I feel, speak for itself. It treats of days long past, and on a few points, perhaps, my memory may be slightly defective. In preparing my narrative, however, I have constantly referred to my old diaries, note-books and early newspaper articles, and have done my best to abstain from all exaggeration. Whether this story of some of my youthful experiences and impressions of men and things was worth telling or not is a point which I must leave my readers to decide.
E.A.V.
London, January 1914.
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTORY—SOME EARLY RECOLLECTIONS
II. THE OUTBREAK OF THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR
III. ON THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION
IV. FROM REVOLUTION TO SIEGE
V. BESIEGED
VI. MORE ABOUT THE SIEGE DAYS
VII. FROM PARIS TO VERSAILLES
VIII. FROM VERSAILLES TO BRITTANY
IX. THE WAR IN THE PROVINCES
X. WITH THE "ARMY OF BRITTANY"
XI. BEFORE LE MANS
XII. LE MANS AND AFTER
XIII. THE BITTER END
INDEX
MY DAYS OF ADVENTURE
I
INTRODUCTORY—SOME EARLY RECOLLECTIONS
The Vizetelly Family—My Mother and her Kinsfolk—The Illustrated Times and its Staff—My Unpleasant Disposition—Thackeray and my First Half-Crown—School days at Eastbourne—Queen Alexandra—Garibaldi—A few old Plays and Songs—Nadar and the "Giant" Balloon—My Arrival in France— My Tutor Brossard—Berezowski's Attempt on Alexander II—My Apprenticeship to Journalism—My first Article—I see some French Celebrities—Visits to the Tuileries—At Compiègne—A few Words with Napoleon III—A "Revolutionary" Beard.
This is an age of "Reminiscences," and although I have never played any part in the world's affairs, I have witnessed so many notable things and met so many notable people during the three-score years which I have lately completed, that it is perhaps allowable for me to add yet another volume of personal recollections to the many which have already poured from the press. On starting on an undertaking of this kind it is usual, I perceive by the many examples around me, to say something about one's family and upbringing. There is less reason for me to depart from this practice, as in the course of the present volume it will often be necessary for me to refer to some of my near relations. A few years ago a distinguished Italian philosopher and author, Angelo de Gubernatis, was good enough to include me in a dictionary of writers belonging to the Latin races, and stated, in doing so, that the Vizetellys were of French origin. That was a rather curious mistake on the part of an Italian writer, the truth being that the family originated at Ravenna, where some members of it held various offices in the Middle Ages. Subsequently, after dabbling in a conspiracy, some of the Vizzetelli fled to Venice and took to glass-making there, until at last Jacopo, from whom I am descended, came to England in the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth. From that time until my own the men of my family invariably married English women, so that very little Italian blood can flow in my veins.
Matrimonial alliances are sometimes of more than personal interest. One point has particularly struck me in regard to those contracted by members of my own family, this being the diversity of English counties from which the men have derived their wives and the women their husbands. References to Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Berkshire, Bucks, Suffolk, Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Devonshire, in addition to Middlesex, otherwise London, appear in my family papers. We have become connected with Johnstons, Burslems, Bartletts, Pitts, Smiths, Wards, Covells, Randalls, Finemores, Radfords, Hindes, Pollards, Lemprières, Wakes, Godbolds, Ansells, Fennells, Vaughans, Edens, Scotts, and Pearces, and I was the very first member of the family (subsequent to its arrival in England) to take a foreigner as wife, she being the daughter of a landowner of Savoy who proceeded from the Tissots of Switzerland. My elder brother Edward subsequently married a Burgundian girl named Clerget, and my stepbrother Frank chose an American one, née Krehbiel, as his wife, these marriages occurring because circumstances led us to live for many years abroad.
Among the first London parishes with which the family was connected was St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate, where my forerunner, the first Henry Vizetelly, was buried in 1691, he then being fifty years of age, and where my father, the second Henry of the name, was baptised soon after his birth in 1820. St. Bride's, Fleet Street, was, however, our parish for many years, as its registers testify, though in 1781 my great-grandfather was resident in the parish of St. Ann's, Blackfriars, and was elected constable thereof. At that date the family name, which figures in old English registers under a variety of forms—Vissitaler, Vissitaly, Visataly, Visitelly, Vizetely, etc.—was by him spelt Vizzetelly, as is shown by documents now in the Guildhall Library; but a few years later he dropped the second z, with the idea, perhaps, of giving the name a more English appearance.
This great-grandfather of mine was, like his father before him, a printer and a member of the Stationers' Company. He was twice married, having by his first wife two sons, George and William, neither of whom left posterity. The former, I believe, died in the service of the Honourable East India Company. In June, 1775, however, my great-grandfather married Elizabeth, daughter of James Hinde, stationer, of Little Moorfields, and had by her, first, a daughter Elizabeth, from whom some of the Burslems and Godbolds are descended; and, secondly, twins, a boy and a girl, who were respectively christened James Henry and Mary Mehetabel. The former became my grandfather. In August, 1816, he married, at St. Bride's, Martha Jane Vaughan, daughter of a stage-coach proprietor of Chester, and had by her a daughter, who died unmarried, and four sons—my father, Henry Richard, and my uncles James, Frank, and Frederick Whitehead Vizetelly.
Some account of my grandfather is given in my father's "Glances Back through Seventy Years," and I need not add to it here. I will only say that, like his immediate forerunners, James Henry Vizetelly was a printer and freeman of the city. A clever versifier, and so able as an amateur actor that on certain occasions he replaced Edmund Kean on the boards when the latter was hopelessly drunk, he died in 1840, leaving his two elder sons, James and Henry, to carry on the printing business, which was then established in premises occupying the site of the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street.
In 1844 my father married Ellen Elizabeth, only child of John Pollard, M.D., a member of the ancient Yorkshire family of the Pollards of Bierley and Brunton, now chiefly represented, I believe, by the Pollards of Scarr Hall. John Pollard's wife, Charlotte Maria Fennell, belonged to a family which gave officers to the British Navy—one of them serving directly under Nelson—and clergy to the Church of England. The Fennells were related to the Brontë sisters through the latter's mother; and one was closely connected with the Shackle who founded the original John Bull newspaper. Those, then, were my kinsfolk on the maternal side. My mother presented my father with seven children, of whom I was the sixth, being also the fourth son. I was born on November 29, 1853, at a house called Chalfont Lodge in Campden House Road, Kensington, and well do I remember the great conflagration which destroyed the fine old historical mansion built by Baptist Hicks, sometime a mercer in Cheapside and ultimately Viscount Campden. But another scene which has more particularly haunted me all through my life was that of my mother's sudden death in a saloon carriage of an express train on the London and Brighton line. Though she was in failing health, nobody thought her end so near; but in the very midst of a journey to London, whilst the train was rushing on at full speed, and no help could be procured, a sudden weakness came over her, and in a few minutes she passed away. I was very young at the time, barely five years old, yet everything still rises before me with all the vividness of an imperishable memory. Again, too, I see that beautiful intellectual brow and those lustrous eyes, and hear that musical voice, and feel the gentle touch of that loving motherly hand. She was a woman of attainments, fond of setting words to music, speaking perfect French, for she had been partly educated at Evreux in Normandy, and having no little knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, as was shown by her annotations to a copy of Lemprière's "Classical Dictionary" which is now in my possession.
About eighteen months after I was born, that is in the midst of the Crimean War, my father founded, in conjunction with David Bogue, a well-known publisher of the time, a journal called the Illustrated Times, which for several years competed successfully with the Illustrated London News. It was issued at threepence per copy, and an old memorandum of the printers now lying before me shows that in the paper's earlier years the average printings were 130,000 copies weekly—a notable figure for that period, and one which was considerably exceeded when any really important event occurred. My father was the chief editor and manager, his leading coadjutor being Frederick Greenwood, who afterwards founded the Pall Mall Gazette. I do not think that Greenwood's connection with the Illustrated Times and with my father's other journal, the Welcome Guest, is mentioned in any of the accounts of his career. The literary staff included four of the Brothers Mayhew— Henry, Jules, Horace, and Augustus, two of whom, Jules and Horace, became godfathers to my father's first children by his second wife. Then there were also William and Robert Brough, Edmund Yates, George Augustus Sala, Hain Friswell, W.B. Rands, Tom Robertson, Sutherland Edwards, James Hannay, Edward Draper, and Hale White (father of "Mark Rutherford"), and several artists and engravers, such as Birket Foster, "Phiz." Portch, Andrews, Duncan, Skelton, Bennett, McConnell, Linton, London, and Horace Harrall. I saw all those men in my early years, for my father was very hospitably inclined, and they were often guests at Chalfont Lodge.
After my mother's death, my grandmother, née Vaughan, took charge of the establishment, and I soon became the terror of the house, developing a most violent temper and acquiring the vocabulary of the roughest market porter. My wilfulness was probably innate (nearly all the Vizetellys having had impulsive wills of their own), and my flowery language was picked up by perversely loitering to listen whenever there happened to be a street row in Church Lane, which I had to cross on my way to or from Kensington Gardens, my daily place of resort. At an early age I started bullying my younger brother, I defied my grandmother, insulted the family doctor because he was too fond of prescribing grey powders for my particular benefit, and behaved abominably to the excellent Miss Lindup of Sheffield Terrace, who endeavoured to instruct me in the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. I frequently astonished or appalled the literary men and artists who were my father's guests. I hated being continually asked what I should like to be when I grew up, and the slightest chaff threw me into a perfect paroxysm of passion. Whilst, however, I was resentful of the authority of others, I was greatly inclined to exercise authority myself—to such a degree, indeed, that my father's servants generally spoke of me as "the young master," regardless of the existence of my elder brothers.
Having already a retentive memory, I was set to learn sundry "recitations," and every now and then was called upon to emerge from behind the dining-room curtains and repeat "My Name is Norval" or "The Spanish Armada," for the delectation of my father's friends whilst they lingered over their wine. Disaster generally ensued, provoked either by some genial chaff or well-meant criticism from such men as Sala and Augustus Mayhew, and I was ultimately carried off—whilst venting incoherent protests—to be soundly castigated and put to bed.
Among the real celebrities who occasionally called at Chalfont Lodge was Thackeray, whom I can still picture sitting on one side of the fireplace, whilst my father sat on the other, I being installed on the hearthrug between them. Provided that I was left to myself, I could behave decently enough, discreetly preserving silence, and, indeed, listening intently to the conversation of my father's friends, and thereby picking up a very odd mixture of knowledge. I was, I believe, a pale little chap with lank fair hair and a wistful face, and no casual observer would have imagined that my nature was largely compounded of such elements as enter into the composition of Italian brigands, Scandinavian pirates, and wild Welshmen. Thackeray, at all events, did not appear to think badly of the little boy who sat so quietly at his feet. One day, indeed, when he came upon me and my younger brother Arthur, with our devoted attendant Selina Horrocks, in Kensington Gardens, he put into practice his own dictum that one could never see a schoolboy without feeling an impulse to dip one's hand in one's pocket. Accordingly he presented me with the first half-crown I ever possessed, for though my father's gifts were frequent they were small. It was understood, I believe, that I was to share the aforesaid half-crown with my brother Arthur, but in spite of the many remonstrances of the faithful Selina—a worthy West-country woman, who had largely taken my mother's place—I appropriated the gift in its entirety, and became extremely ill by reason of my many indiscreet purchases at a tuck-stall which stood, if I remember rightly, at a corner of the then renowned Kensington Flower Walk. This incident must have occurred late in Thackeray's life. My childish recollection of him is that of a very big gentleman with beaming eyes.
My grandmother's reign in my father's house was not of great duration, as in February, 1861, he contracted a second marriage, taking on this occasion as his wife a "fair maid of Kent," [Elizabeth Anne Ansell, of Broadstairs; mother of my step-brother, Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly, editor of the "Standard Dictionary," New York.] to whose entry into our home I was at first violently opposed, but who promptly won me over by her unremitting affection and kindness, eventually becoming the best and truest friend of my youth and early manhood. My circumstances changed, however, soon after that marriage, for as I was now nearly eight years old it was deemed appropriate that I should be sent to a boarding-school, both by way of improving my mind and of having some nonsense knocked out of me, which, indeed, was promptly accomplished by the pugnacious kindness of my schoolfellows. Among the latter was one, my senior by a few years, who became a very distinguished journalist. I refer to the late Horace Voules, so long associated with Labouchere's journal, Truth. My brother Edward was also at the same school, and my brother Arthur came there a little later.
It was situated at Eastbourne, and a good deal has been written about it in recent works on the history of that well-known watering-place, which, when I was first sent there, counted less than 6000 inhabitants. Located in the old town or village, at a distance of a mile or more from the sea, the school occupied a building called "The Gables," and was an offshoot of a former ancient school connected with the famous parish church. In my time this "academy" was carried on as a private venture by a certain James Anthony Bown, a portly old gentleman of considerable attainments.
I was unusually precocious in some respects, and though I frequently got into scrapes by playing impish tricks—as, for instance, when I combined with others to secure an obnoxious French master to his chair by means of some cobbler's wax, thereby ruining a beautiful pair of peg-top trousers which he had just purchased—I did not neglect my lessons, but secured a number of "prizes" with considerable facility. When I was barely twelve years old, not one of my schoolfellows—and some were sixteen and seventeen years old—could compete with me in Latin, in which language Bown ended by taking me separately. I also won three or four prizes for "excelling" my successive classes in English grammar as prescribed by the celebrated Lindley Murray.
In spite of my misdeeds (some of which, fortunately, were never brought home to me), I became, I think, somewhat of a favourite with the worthy James Anthony, for he lent me interesting books to read, occasionally had me to supper in his own quarters, and was now and then good enough to overlook the swollen state of my nose or the blackness of one of my eyes when I had been having a bout with a schoolfellow or a young clodhopper of the village. We usually fought with the village lads in Love Lane on Sunday evenings, after getting over the playground wall. I received firstly the nickname of Moses, through falling among some rushes whilst fielding a ball at cricket; and secondly, that of Noses, because my nasal organ, like that of Cyrano de Bergerac, suddenly grew to huge proportions, in such wise that it embodied sufficient material for two noses of ordinary dimensions. Its size was largely responsible for my defeats when fighting, for I found it difficult to keep guard over such a prominent organ and prevent my claret from being tapped.
Having generations of printers' ink mingled with my blood, I could not escape the unkind fate which made me a writer of articles and books. In conjunction with a chum named Clement Ireland I ran a manuscript school journal, which included stories of pirates and highwaymen, illustrated with lurid designs in which red ink was plentifully employed in order to picture the gore which flowed so freely through the various tales. My grandmother Vaughan was an inveterate reader of the London Journal and the Family Herald, and whenever I went home for my holidays I used to pounce upon those journals and devour some of the stories of the author of "Minnegrey," as well as Miss Braddon's "Aurora Floyd" and "Henry Dunbar." The perusal of books by Ainsworth, Scott, Lever, Marryat, James Grant, G. P. R. James, Dumas, and Whyte Melville gave me additional material for storytelling; and so, concocting wonderful blends of all sorts of fiction, I spun many a yarn to my schoolfellows in the dormitory in which I slept—yarns which were sometimes supplied in instalments, being kept up for a week or longer.
My summer holidays were usually spent in the country, but at other times I went to London, and was treated to interesting sights. At Kensington, in my earlier years, I often saw Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort with their children, notably the Princess Royal (Empress Frederick) and the Prince of Wales (Edward VII). When the last-named married the "Sea-King's daughter from over the sea"—since then our admired and gracious Queen Alexandra—and they drove together through the crowded streets of London on their way to Windsor, I came specially from Eastbourne to witness that triumphal progress, and even now I can picture the young prince with his round chubby face and little side-whiskers, and the vision of almost tearfully-smiling beauty, in blue and white, which swept past my eager boyish eyes.
During the Easter holidays of 1864 Garibaldi came to England. My uncle, Frank Vizetelly, was the chief war-artist of that period, the predecessor, in fact, of the late Melton Prior. He knew Garibaldi well, having first met him during the war of 1859, and having subsequently accompanied him during his campaign through Sicily and then on to Naples—afterwards, moreover, staying with him at Caprera. And so my uncle carried me and his son, my cousin Albert, to Stafford House (where he had the entrée), and the grave-looking Liberator patted us on the head, called us his children, and at Frank Vizetelly's request gave us photographs of himself. I then little imagined that I should next see him in France, at the close of the war with Germany, during a part of which my brother Edward acted as one of his orderly officers.
My father, being at the head of a prominent London newspaper, often received tickets for one and another theatre. Thus, during my winter holidays, I saw many of the old pantomimes at Drury Lane and elsewhere. I also well remember Sothern's "Lord Dundreary," and a play called "The Duke's Motto," which was based on Paul Féval's novel, "Le Bossu." I frequently witnessed the entertainments given by the German Reeds, Corney Grain, and Woodin, the clever quick-change artist. I likewise remember Leotard the acrobat at the Alhambra, and sundry performances at the old Pantheon, where I heard such popular songs as "The Captain with the Whiskers" and "The Charming Young Widow I met in the Train." Nigger ditties were often the "rage" during my boyhood, and some of them, like "Dixie-land" and "So Early in the Morning," still linger in my memory. Then, too, there were such songs as "Billy Taylor," "I'm Afloat," "I'll hang my Harp on a Willow Tree," and an inane composition which contained the lines—
"When a lady elopes
Down a ladder of ropes,
She may go, she may go,
She may go to—Hongkong—for me!"
In those schoolboy days of mine, however, the song of songs, to my thinking, was one which we invariably sang on breaking up for the holidays. Whether it was peculiar to Eastbourne or had been derived from some other school I cannot say. I only know that the last verse ran, approximately, as follows:
"Magistrorum is a borum,
Hic-haec-hoc has made his bow.
Let us cry: 'O cockalorum!'
That's the Latin for us now.
Alpha, beta, gamma, delta,
Off to Greece, for we are free!
Helter, skelter, melter, pelter,
We're the lads for mirth and spree!"
For "cockalorum," be it noted, we frequently substituted the name of some particularly obnoxious master.
To return to the interesting sights of my boyhood, I have some recollection of the Exhibition of 1862, but can recall more vividly a visit to the Crystal Palace towards the end of the following year, when I there saw the strange house-like oar of the "Giant" balloon in which Nadar, the photographer and aeronaut, had lately made, with his wife and others, a memorable and disastrous aerial voyage. Readers of Jules Verne will remember that Nadar figures conspicuously in his "Journey to the Moon." Quite a party of us went to the Palace to see the "Giant's" car, and Nadar, standing over six feet high, with a great tangled mane of frizzy flaxen hair, a ruddy moustache, and a red shirt à la Garibaldi, took us inside it and showed us all the accommodation it contained for eating, sleeping and photographic purposes. I could not follow what he said, for I then knew only a few French words, and I certainly had no idea that I should one day ascend into the air with him in a car of a very different type, that of the captive balloon which, for purposes of military observation, he installed on the Place Saint Pierre at Montmartre, during the German siege of Paris.
A time came when my father disposed of his interest in the Illustrated Times and repaired to Paris to take up the position of Continental representative of the Illustrated London News. My brother Edward, at that time a student at the École des Beaux Arts, then became his assistant, and a little later I was taken across the Channel with my brother Arthur to join the rest of the family. We lived, first, at Auteuil, and then at Passy, where I was placed in a day-school called the Institution Nouissel, where lads were prepared for admission to the State or municipal colleges. There had been some attempt to teach me French at Eastbourne, but it had met with little success, partly, I think, because I was prejudiced against the French generally, regarding them as a mere race of frog-eaters whom we had deservedly whacked at Waterloo. Eventually my prejudices were in a measure overcome by what I heard from our drill-master, a retired non-commissioned officer, who had served in the Crimea, and who told us some rousing anecdotes about the gallantry of "our allies" at the Alma and elsewhere. In the result, the old sergeant's converse gave me "furiously to think" that there might be some good in the French after all.
At Nouissel's I acquired some knowledge of the language rapidly enough, and I was afterwards placed in the charge of a tutor, a clever scamp named Brossard, who prepared me for the Lycée Bonaparte (now Condorcet), where I eventually became a pupil, Brossard still continuing to coach me with a view to my passing various examinations, and ultimately securing the usual baccalauréat, without which nobody could then be anything at all in France. In the same way he coached Evelyn Jerrold, son of Blanchard and grandson of Douglas Jerrold, both of whom were on terms of close friendship with the Vizetellys. But while Brossard was a clever man, he was also an unprincipled one, and although I was afterwards indebted to him for an introduction to old General Changarnier, to whom he was related, it would doubtless have been all the better if he had not introduced me to some other people with whom he was connected. He lived for a while with a woman who was not his wife, and deserted her for a girl of eighteen, whom he also abandoned, in order to devote himself to a creature in fleshings who rode a bare-backed steed at the Cirque de l'Impératrice. When I was first introduced to her "behind the scenes," she was bestriding a chair, and smoking a pink cigarette, and she addressed me as mon petit. Briefly, the moral atmosphere of Brossard's life was not such as befitted him to be a mentor of youth.
Let me now go back a little. At the time of the great Paris Exhibition of 1867 I was in my fourteenth year. The city was then crowded with royalties, many of whom I saw on one or another occasion. I was in the Bois de Boulogne with my father when, after a great review, a shot was fired at the carriage in which Napoleon III and his guest, Alexander II of Russia, were seated side by side. I saw equerry Raimbeaux gallop forward to screen the two monarchs, and I saw the culprit seized by a sergeant of our Royal Engineers, attached to the British section of the Exhibition. Both sovereigns stood up in the carriage to show that they were uninjured, and it was afterwards reported that the Emperor Napoleon said to the Emperor Alexander: "If that shot was fired by an Italian it was meant for me; if by a Pole, it was meant for your Majesty." Whether those words were really spoken, or were afterwards invented, as such things often are, by some clever journalist, I cannot say; but the man proved to be a Pole named Berezowski, who was subsequently sentenced to transportation for life.
It was in connection with this attempt on the Czar that I did my first little bit of journalistic work. By my father's directions, I took a few notes and made a hasty little sketch of the surroundings. This and my explanations enabled M. Jules Pelcoq, an artist of Belgian birth, whom my father largely employed on behalf of the Illustrated London News, to make a drawing which appeared on the first page of that journal's next issue. I do not think that any other paper in the world was able to supply a pictorial representation of Berezowski's attempt.
I have said enough, I think, to show that I was a precocious lad, perhaps, indeed, a great deal too precocious. However, I worked very hard in those days. My hours at Bonaparte were from ten to twelve and from two to four. I had also to prepare home-lessons for the Lycée, take special lessons from Brossard, and again lessons in German from a tutor named With. Then, too, my brother Edward ceasing to act as my father's assistant in order to devote himself to journalism on his own account, I had to take over a part of his duties. One of my cousins, Montague Vizetelly (son of my uncle James, who was the head of our family), came from England, however, to assist my father in the more serious work, such as I, by reason of my youth, could not yet perform. My spare time was spent largely in taking instructions to artists or fetching drawings from them. At one moment I might be at Mont-martre, and at another in the Quartier Latin, calling on Pelcoq, Anastasi, Janet Lange, Gustave Janet, Pauquet, Thorigny, Gaildrau, Deroy, Bocourt, Darjou, Lix, Moulin, Fichot, Blanchard, or other artists who worked for the Illustrated London News. Occasionally a sketch was posted to England, but more frequently I had to despatch some drawing on wood by rail. Though I have never been anything but an amateurish draughtsman myself, I certainly developed a critical faculty, and acquired a knowledge of different artistic methods, during my intercourse with so many of the dessinateurs of the last years of the Second Empire.
By-and-by more serious duties were allotted to me. The "Paris Fashions" design then appearing every month in the Illustrated London News was for a time prepared according to certain dresses which Worth and other famous costumiers made for empresses, queens, princesses, great ladies, and theatrical celebrities; and, accompanying Pelcoq or Janet when they went to sketch those gowns (nowadays one would simply obtain photographs), I took down from la première, or sometimes from Worth himself, full particulars respecting materials and styles, in order that the descriptive letterpress, which was to accompany the illustration, might be correct.
In this wise I served my apprenticeship to journalism. My father naturally revised my work. The first article, all my own, which appeared in print was one on that notorious theatrical institution, the Claque. I sent it to Once a Week, which E. S. Dallas then edited, and knowing that he was well acquainted with my father, and feeling very diffident respecting the merits of what I had written, I assumed a nom de plume ("Charles Ludhurst") for the occasion, Needless to say that I was delighted when I saw the article in print, and yet more so when I received for it a couple of guineas, which I speedily expended on gloves, neckties, and a walking-stick. Here let me say that we were rather swagger young fellows at Bonaparte. We did not have to wear hideous ill-fitting uniforms like other Lycéens, but endeavoured to present a very smart appearance. Thus we made it a practice to wear gloves and to carry walking-sticks or canes on our way to or from the Lycée. I even improved on that by buying "button-holes" at the flower-market beside the Madeleine, and this idea "catching on," as the phrase goes, quite a commotion occurred one morning when virtually half my classmates were found wearing flowers—for it happened to be La Saint Henri, the fête-day of the Count de Chambord, and both our Proviseur and our professor imagined that this was, on our part, a seditious Legitimist demonstration. There were, however, very few Legitimists among us, though Orleanists and Republicans were numerous.
I have mentioned that my first article was on the Claque, that organisation established to encourage applause in theatres, it being held that the Parisian spectator required to be roused by some such method. Brossard having introduced me to the sous-chef of the Claque at the Opéra Comique, I often obtained admission to that house as a claqueur. I even went to a few other theatres in the same capacity. Further, Brossard knew sundry authors and journalists, and took me to the Café de Suède and the Café de Madrid, where I saw and heard some of the celebrities of the day. I can still picture the great Dumas, loud of voice and exuberant in gesture whilst holding forth to a band of young "spongers," on whom he was spending his last napoleons. I can also see Gambetta—young, slim, black-haired and bearded, with a full sensual underlip—seated at the same table as Delescluze, whose hair and beard, once red, had become a dingy white, whose figure was emaciated and angular, and whose yellowish, wrinkled face seemed to betoken that he was possessed by some fixed idea. What that idea was, the Commune subsequently showed. Again, I can see Henri Rochefort and Gustave Flourens together: the former straight and sinewy, with a great tuft of very dark curly hair, flashing eyes and high and prominent cheekbones; while the latter, tall and bald, with long moustaches and a flowing beard, gazed at you in an eager imperious way, as if he were about to issue some command.
Other men who helped to overthrow the Empire also became known to me. My father, whilst engaged in some costly litigation respecting a large castellated house which he had leased at Le Vésinet, secured Jules Favre as his advocate, and on various occasions I went with him to Favre's residence. Here let me say that my father, in spite of all his interest in French literature, did not know the language. He could scarcely express himself in it, and thus he always made it a practice to have one of his sons with him, we having inherited our mother's linguistic gifts. Favre's command of language was great, but his eloquence was by no means rousing, and I well remember that when he pleaded for my father, the three judges of the Appeal Court composed themselves to sleep, and did not awaken until the counsel opposed to us started banging his fist and shouting in thunderous tones. Naturally enough, as the judges never heard our side of the case, but only our adversary's, they decided against us.
Some retrenchment then became necessary on my father's part, and he sent my step-mother, her children and my brother Arthur, to Saint Servan in Brittany, where he rented a house which was called "La petite Amélia," after George III's daughter of that name, who, during some interval of peace between France and Great Britain, went to stay at Saint Servan for the benefit of her health. The majority of our family having repaired there and my cousin Monty returning to England some time in 1869, I remained alone with my father in Paris. We resided in what I may call a bachelor's flat at No. 16, Rue de Miromesnil, near the Elysée Palace. The principal part of the house was occupied by the Count and Countess de Chateaubriand and their daughters. The Countess was good enough to take some notice of me, and subsequently, when she departed for Combourg at the approach of the German siege, she gave me full permission to make use, if necessary, of the coals and wood left in the Chateaubriand cellars.
In 1869, the date I have now reached, I was in my sixteenth year, still studying, and at the same time giving more and more assistance to my father in connection with his journalistic work. He has included in his "Glances Back" some account of the facilities which enabled him to secure adequate pictorial delineation of the Court life of the Empire. He has told the story of Moulin, the police-agent, who frequently watched over the Emperor's personal safety, and who also supplied sketches of Court functions for the use of the Illustrated London News. Napoleon III resembled his great-uncle in at least one respect. He fully understood the art of advertisement; and, in his desire to be thought well of in England, he was always ready to favour English journalists. Whilst a certain part of the London Press preserved throughout the reign a very critical attitude towards the Imperial policy, it is certain that some of the Paris correspondents were in close touch with the Emperor's Government, and that some of them were actually subsidized by it.
The best-informed man with respect to Court and social events was undoubtedly Mr. Felix Whiteburst of The Daily Telegraph, whom I well remember. He had the entrée at the Tuileries and elsewhere, and there were occasions when very important information was imparted to him with a view to its early publication in London. For the most part, however, Whitehurst confined himself to chronicling events or incidents occurring at Court or in Bonapartist high society. Anxious to avoid giving offence, he usually glossed over any scandal that occurred, or dismissed it airily, with the désinvolture of a roué of the Regency. Withal, he was an extremely amiable man, very condescending towards me when we met, as sometimes happened at the Tuileries itself.
I had to go there on several occasions to meet Moulin, the detective-artist, by appointment, and a few years ago this helped me to write a book which has been more than once reprinted. [Note] I utilized in it many notes made by me in 1869-70, notably with respect to the Emperor and Empress's private apartments, the kitchens, and the arrangements made for balls and banquets. I am not aware at what age a young fellow is usually provided with his first dress-suit, but I know that mine was made about the time I speak of. I was then, I suppose, about five feet five inches in height, and my face led people to suppose that I was eighteen or nineteen years of age.
[Note: The work in question was entitled "The Court of the Tuileries, 1852-1870," by "Le Petit Homme Rouge"—a pseudonym which I have since used when producing other books. "The Court of the Tuileries" was founded in part on previously published works, on a quantity of notes and memoranda made by my father, other relatives, and myself, and on some of the private papers of one of my wife's kinsmen, General Mollard, who after greatly distinguishing himself at the Tchernaya and Magenta, became for a time an aide-de-camp to Napoleon III.]
In the autumn of 1869, I fell rather ill from over-study—I had already begun to read up Roman law—and, on securing a holiday, I accompanied my father to Compiègne, where the Imperial Court was then staying. We were not among the invited guests, but it had been arranged that every facility should be given to the Illustrated London News representatives in order that the Court villegiatura might be fully depicted in that journal. I need not recapitulate my experiences on this occasion. There is an account of our visit in my father's "Glances Back," and I inserted many additional particulars in my "Court of the Tuileries." I may mention, however, that it was at Compiègne that I first exchanged a few words with Napoleon III.
One day, my father being unwell (the weather was intensely cold), I proceeded to the château [We slept at the Hôtel de la Cloche, but had the entrée to the château at virtually any time.] accompanied only by our artist, young M. Montbard, who was currently known as "Apollo" in the Quartier Latin, where he delighted the habitués of the Bal Bullier by a style of choregraphy in comparison with which the achievements subsequently witnessed at the notorious Moulin Rouge would have sunk into insignificance. Montbard had to make a couple of drawings on the day I have mentioned, and it so happened that, whilst we were going about with M. de la Ferrière, the chamberlain on duty, Napoleon III suddenly appeared before us. Directly I was presented to him he spoke to me in English, telling me that he often saw the Illustrated London News, and that the illustrations of French life and Paris improvements (in which he took so keen an interest) were very ably executed. He asked me also how long I had been in France, and where I had learnt the language. Then, remarking that it was near the déjeuner hour, he told M. de la Ferrière to see that Montbard and myself were suitably entertained.
I do not think that I had any particular political opinions at that time. Montbard, however, was a Republican—in fact, a future Communard—and I know that he did not appreciate his virtually enforced introduction to the so-called "Badinguet." Still, he contrived to be fairly polite, and allowed the Emperor to inspect the sketch he was making. There was to be a theatrical performance at the château that evening, and it had already been arranged that Montbard should witness it. On hearing, however, that it had been impossible to provide my father and myself with seats, on account of the great demand for admission on the part of local magnates and the officers of the garrison, the Emperor was good enough to say, after I had explained that my father's indisposition would prevent him from attending: "Voyons, vous pourrez bien trouver une petite place pour ce jeune homme. Il n'est pas si grand, et je suis sûr que cela lui fera plaisir." M. de la Ferrière bowed, and thus it came to pass that I witnessed the performance after all, being seated on a stool behind some extremely beautiful women whose white shoulders repeatedly distracted my attention from the stage. In regard to Montbard there was some little trouble, as M. de la Ferrière did not like the appearance of his "revolutionary-looking beard," the sight of which, said he, might greatly alarm the Empress. Montbard, however, indignantly refused to shave it off, and ten months later the "revolutionary beards" were predominant, the power and the pomp of the Empire having been swept away amidst all the disasters of invasion.
II
THE OUTBREAK OF THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR
Napoleon's Plans for a War with Prussia—The Garde Mobile and the French
Army generally—Its Armament—The "White Blouses" and the Paris Riots—The
Emperor and the Elections of 1869—The Troppmann and Pierre Bonaparte
Affairs—Captain the Hon. Dennis Bingham—The Ollivier Ministry—French
Campaigning Plans—Frossard and Bazaine—The Negotiations with Archduke
Albert and Count Vimeroati—The War forced on by Bismarck—I shout "A
Berlin!"—The Imperial Guard and General Bourbaki—My Dream of seeing a
War—My uncle Frank Vizetelly and his Campaigns—"The Siege of Pekin"—
Organization of the French Forces—The Information Service—I witness the
departure of Napoleon III and the Imperial Prince from Saint Cloud.
There was no little agitation in France during the years 1868 and 1869. The outcome first of the Schleswig-Holstein war, and secondly of the war between Prussia and Austria in 1866, had alarmed many French politicians. Napoleon III had expected some territorial compensation in return for his neutrality at those periods, and it is certain that Bismarck, as chief Prussian minister, had allowed him to suppose that he would be able to indemnify himself for his non-intervention in the afore-mentioned contests. After attaining her ends, however, Prussia turned an unwilling ear to the French Emperor's suggestions, and from that moment a Franco-German war became inevitable. Although, as I well remember, there was a perfect "rage" for Bismarck "this" and Bismarck "that" in Paris—particularly for the Bismarck colour, a shade of Havana brown—the Prussian statesman, who had so successfully "jockeyed" the Man of Destiny, was undoubtedly a well hated and dreaded individual among the Parisians, at least among all those who thought of the future of Europe. Prussian policy, however, was not the only cause of anxiety in France, for at the same period the Republican opposition to the Imperial authority was steadily gaining strength in the great cities, and the political concessions by which Napoleon III sought to disarm it only emboldened it to make fresh demands.
In planning a war on Prussia, the Emperor was influenced both by national and by dynastic considerations. The rise of Prussia—which had become head of the North German Confederation—was without doubt a menace not only to French ascendency on the Continent, but also to France's general interests. On the other hand, the prestige of the Empire having been seriously impaired, in France itself, by the diplomatic defeats which Bismarck had inflicted on Napoleon, it seemed that only a successful war, waged on the Power from which France had received those successive rebuffs, could restore the aforesaid prestige and ensure the duration of the Bonaparte dynasty.
Even nowadays, in spite of innumerable revelations, many writers continue to cast all the responsibility of the Franco-German War on Germany, or, to be more precise, on Prussia as represented by Bismarck. That, however, is a great error. A trial of strength was regarded on both sides as inevitable, and both sides contributed to bring it about. Bismarck's share in the conflict was to precipitate hostilities, selecting for them what he judged to be an opportune moment for his country, and thereby preventing the Emperor Napoleon from maturing his designs. The latter did not intend to declare war until early in 1871; the Prussian statesman brought it about in July, 1870.
The Emperor really took to the war-path soon after 1866. A great military council was assembled, and various measures were devised to strengthen the army. The principal step was the creation of a territorial force called the Garde Mobile, which was expected to yield more than half a million men. Marshal Niel, who was then Minister of War, attempted to carry out this scheme, but was hampered by an insufficiency of money. Nowadays, I often think of Niel and the Garde Mobile when I read of Lord Haldane, Colonel Seely, and our own "terriers." It seems to me, at times, as if the clock had gone back more than forty years.
Niel died in August, 1869, leaving his task in an extremely unfinished state, and Marshal Le Boeuf, who succeeded him, persevered with it in a very faint-hearted way. The regular army, however, was kept in fair condition, though it was never so strong as it appeared to be on paper. There was a system in vogue by which a conscript of means could avoid service by supplying a remplaçant. Originally, he was expected to provide his remplaçant himself; but, ultimately, he only had to pay a sum of money to the military authorities, who undertook to find a man to take his place. Unfortunately, in thousands of instances, over a term of some years, the remplaçants were never provided at all. I do not suggest that the money was absolutely misappropriated, but it was diverted to other military purposes, and, in the result, there was always a considerable shortage in the annual contingent.
The creature comforts of the men were certainly well looked after. My particular chum at Bonaparte was the son of a general-officer, and I visited more than one barracks or encampment. Without doubt, there was always an abundance of good sound food. Further, the men were well-armed. All military authorities are agreed, I believe, that the Chassepot rifle—invented in or about 1866—was superior to the Dreyse needle-gun, which was in use in the Prussian army. Then, too, there was Colonel de Reffye's machine-gun or mitrailleuse, in a sense the forerunner of the Gatling and the Maxim. It was first devised, I think, in 1863, and, according to official statements, some three or four years later there were more than a score of mitrailleuse batteries. With regard to other ordnance, however, that of the French was inferior to that of the Germans, as was conclusively proved at Sedan and elsewhere. In many respects the work of army reform, publicly advised by General Trochu in a famous pamphlet, and by other officers in reports to the Emperor and the Ministry of War, proceeded at a very slow pace, being impeded by a variety of considerations. The young men of the large towns did not take kindly to the idea of serving in the new Garde Mobile. Having escaped service in the regular army, by drawing exempting "numbers" or by paying for remplaçants, they regarded it as very unfair that they should be called upon to serve at all, and there were serious riots in various parts of France at the time of their first enrolment in 1868. Many of them failed to realize the necessities of the case. There was no great wave of patriotism sweeping through the country. The German danger was not yet generally apparent. Further, many upholders of the Imperial authority shook their heads in deprecation of this scheme of enrolling and arming so many young men, who might suddenly blossom into revolutionaries and turn their weapons against the powers of the day.
There was great unrest in Paris in 1868, the year of Henri Rochefort's famous journal La Lanterne. Issue after issue of that bitterly-penned effusion was seized and confiscated, and more than once did I see vigilant detectives snatch copies from people in the streets. In June, 1869, we had general elections, accompanied by rioting on the Boulevards. It was then that the "White Blouse" legend arose, it being alleged that many of the rioters were agents provocateurs in the pay of the Prefecture of Police, and wore white blouses expressly in order that they might be known to the sergents-de-ville and the Gardes de Paris who were called upon to quell the disturbances. At first thought, it might seem ridiculous that any Government should stir up rioting for the mere sake of putting it down, but it was generally held that the authorities wished some disturbances to occur in order, first, that the middle-classes might be frightened by the prospect of a violent revolution, and thereby induced to vote for Government candidates at the elections; and, secondly, that some of the many real Revolutionaries might be led to participate in the rioting in such wise as to supply a pretext for arresting them.
I was with my mentor Brossard and my brother Edward one night in June when a "Madeleine-Bastille" omnibus was overturned on the Boulevard Montmartre and two or three newspaper kiosks were added to it by way of forming a barricade, the purpose of which was by no means clear. The great crowd of promenaders seemed to regard the affair as capital fun until the police suddenly came up, followed by some mounted men of the Garde de Paris, whereupon the laughing spectators became terrified and suddenly fled for their lives. With my companions I gazed on the scene from the entresol of the Café Mazarin. It was the first affair of the kind I had ever witnessed, and for that reason impressed itself more vividly on my mind than several subsequent and more serious ones. In the twinkling of an eye all the little tables set out in front of the cafés were deserted, and tragi-comical was the sight of the many women with golden chignons scurrying away with their alarmed companions, and tripping now and again over some fallen chair whilst the pursuing cavalry clattered noisily along the foot-pavements. A Londoner might form some idea of the scene by picturing a charge from Leicester Square to Piccadilly Circus at the hour when Coventry Street is most thronged with undesirables of both sexes.
The majority of the White Blouses and their friends escaped unhurt, and the police and the guards chiefly expended their vigour on the spectators of the original disturbance. Whether this had been secretly engineered by the authorities for one of the purposes I previously indicated, must always remain a moot point. In any case it did not incline the Parisians to vote for the Government candidates. Every deputy returned for the city on that occasion was an opponent of the Empire, and in later years I was told by an ex-Court official that when Napoleon became acquainted with the result of the pollings he said, in reference to the nominees whom he had favoured, "Not one! not a single one!" The ingratitude of the Parisians, as the Emperor styled it, was always a thorn in his side; yet he should have remembered that in the past the bulk of the Parisians had seldom, if ever, been on the side of constituted authority.
Later that year came the famous affair of the Pantin crimes, and I was present with my father when Troppmann, the brutish murderer of the Kinck family, stood his trial at the Assizes. But, quite properly, my father would not let me accompany him when he attended the miscreant's execution outside the prison of La Roquette. Some years later, however, I witnessed the execution of Prévost on the same spot; and at a subsequent date I attended both the trial and the execution of Caserio—the assassin of President Carnot—at Lyons. Following Troppmann's case, in the early days of 1870 came the crime of the so-called Wild Boar of Corsica, Prince Pierre Bonaparte (grandfather of the present Princess George of Greece), who shot the young journalist Victor Noir, when the latter went with Ulrich de Fonvielle, aeronaut as well as journalist, to call him out on behalf of the irrepressible Henri Rochefort. I remember accompanying one of our artists, Gaildrau, when a sketch was made of the scene of the crime, the Prince's drawing-room at Auteuil, a peculiar semi-circular, panelled and white-painted apartment furnished in what we should call in England a tawdry mid-Victorian style. On the occasion of Noir's funeral my father and myself were in the Champs Elysées when the tumultuous revolutionary procession, in which Rochefort figured conspicuously, swept down the famous avenue along which the victorious Germans were to march little more than a year afterwards. Near the Rond-point the cortège was broken up and scattered by the police, whose violence was extreme. Rochefort, brave enough on the duelling-ground, fainted away, and was carried off in a vehicle, his position as a member of the Legislative Body momentarily rendering him immune from arrest. Within a month, however, he was under lock and key, and some fierce rioting ensued in the north of Paris.
During the spring, my father went to Ireland as special commissioner of the Illustrated London News and the Pall Mall Gazette, in order to investigate the condition of the tenantry and the agrarian crimes which were then so prevalent there. Meantime, I was left in Paris, virtually "on my own," though I was often with my elder brother Edward. About this time, moreover, a friend of my father's began to take a good deal of interest in me. This was Captain the Hon. Dennis Bingham, a member of the Clanmorris family, and the regular correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette in Paris. He subsequently became known as the author of various works on the Bonapartes and the Bourbons, and of a volume of recollections of Paris life, in which I am once or twice mentioned. Bingham was married to a very charming lady of the Laoretelle family, which gave a couple of historians to France, and I was always received most kindly at their home near the Arc de Triomphe. Moreover, Bingham often took me about with him in my spare time, and introduced me to several prominent people. Later, during the street fighting at the close of the Commune in 1871, we had some dramatic adventures together, and on one occasion Bingham saved my life.
The earlier months of 1870 went by very swiftly amidst a multiplicity of interesting events. Emile Ollivier had now become chief Minister, and an era of liberal reforms appeared to have begun. It seemed, moreover, as if the Minister's charming wife were for her part intent on reforming the practices of her sex in regard to dress, for she resolutely set her face against the extravagant toilettes of the ladies of the Court, repeatedly appearing at the Tuileries in the most unassuming attire, which, however, by sheer force of contrast, rendered her very conspicuous there. The patronesses of the great couturiers were quite irate at receiving such a lesson from a petite bourgeoise; but all who shared the views expressed by President Dupin a few years previously respecting the "unbridled luxury of women," were naturally delighted.
Her husband's attempts at political reform were certainly well meant, but the Republicans regarded him as a renegade and the older Imperialists as an intruder, and nothing that he did gave satisfaction. The concession of the right of public meeting led to frequent disorders at Belleville and Montmartre, and the increased freedom of the Press only acted as an incentive to violence of language. Nevertheless, when there came a Plebiscitum—the last of the reign—to ascertain the country's opinion respecting the reforms devised by the Emperor and Ollivier, a huge majority signified approval of them, and thus the "liberal Empire" seemed to be firmly established. If, however, the nation at large had known what was going on behind the scenes, both in diplomatic and in military spheres, the result of the Plebiscitum would probably have been very different.
Already on the morrow of the war between Prussia and Austria (1866) the Emperor, as I previously indicated, had begun to devise a plan of campaign in regard to the former Power, taking as his particular confidants in the matter General Lebrun, his aide-de-camp, and General Frossard, the governor of the young Imperial Prince. Marshal Niel, as War Minister, was cognizant of the Emperor's conferences with Lebrun and Frossard, but does not appear to have taken any direct part in the plans which were devised. They were originally purely defensive plans, intended to provide for any invasion of French territory from across the Rhine. Colonel Baron Stoffel, the French military attaché at Berlin, had frequently warned the War Office in Paris respecting the possibility of a Prussian attack and the strength of the Prussian armaments, which, he wrote, would enable King William (with the assistance of the other German rulers) to throw a force of nearly a million men into Alsace-Lorraine. Further, General Ducrot, who commanded the garrison at Strasburg, became acquainted with many things which he communicated to his relative, Baron de Bourgoing, one of the Emperor's equerries.
There is no doubt that these various communications reached Napoleon III; and though he may have regarded both the statements of Stoffel and those of Ducrot as exaggerated, he was certainly sufficiently impressed by them to order the preparation of certain plans. Frossard, basing himself on the operations of the Austrians in December, 1793, and keeping in mind the methods by which Hoche, with the Moselle army, and Pichegru, with the Rhine army, forced them back from the French frontier, drafted a scheme of defence in which he foresaw the battle of Wörth, but, through following erroneous information, greatly miscalculated the probable number of combatants. He set forth in his scheme that the Imperial Government could not possibly allow Alsace-Lorraine and Champagne to be invaded without a trial of strength at the very outset; and Marshal Bazaine, who, at some period or other, annotated a copy of Frossard's scheme, signified his approval of that dictum, but added significantly that good tactical measures should be adopted. He himself demurred to Frossard's plans, saying that he was no partisan of a frontal defence, but believed in falling on the enemy's flanks and rear. Yet, as we know, MacMahon fought the battle of Wörth under conditions in many respects similar to those which Frossard had foreseen.
However, the purely defensive plans on which Napoleon III at first worked, were replaced in 1868 by offensive ones, in which General Lebrun took a prominent part, both from the military and from the diplomatic standpoints. It was not, however, until March, 1870, that the Archduke Albert of Austria came to Paris to confer with the French Emperor. Lebrun's plan of campaign was discussed by them, and Marshal Le Boeuf and Generals Frossard and Jarras were privy to the negotiations. It was proposed that France, Austria, and Italy should invade Germany conjointly; and, according to Le Boeuf, the first-named Power could place 400,000 men on the frontier in a fortnight's time. Both Austria and Italy, however, required forty-two days to mobilize their forces, though the former offered to provide two army corps during the interval. When Lebrun subsequently went to Vienna to come to a positive decision and arrange details, the Archduke Albert pointed out that the war ought to begin in the spring season, for, said he, the North Germans would be able to support the cold and dampness of a winter campaign far better than the allies. That was an absolutely correct forecast, fully confirmed by all that took place in France during the winter of 1870-1871.
But Prussia heard of what was brewing. Austria was betrayed to her by Hungary; and Italy and France could not come to an understanding on the question of Rome. At the outset Prince Napoleon (Jérome) was concerned in the latter negotiations, which were eventually conducted by Count Vimercati, the Italian military attaché in Paris. Napoleon, however, steadily refused to withdraw his forces from the States of the Church and to allow Victor Emmanuel to occupy Rome. Had he yielded on those points Italy would certainly have joined him, and Austria—however much Hungarian statesmen might have disliked it—would, in all probability, have followed suit. By the policy he pursued in this matter, the French Emperor lost everything, and prevented nothing. On the one hand, France was defeated and the Empire of the Bonapartes collapsed; whilst, on the other, Rome became Italy's true capital.
Bismarck was in no way inclined to allow the negotiations for an anti-Prussian alliance to mature. They dragged on for a considerable time, but the Government of Napoleon III was not particularly disturbed thereat, as it felt certain that victory would attend the French arms at the outset, and that Italy and Austria would eventually give support. Bismarck, however, precipitated events. Already in the previous year Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen had been a candidate for the throne of Spain. That candidature had been withdrawn in order to avert a conflict between France and Germany; but now it was revived at Bismarck's instigation in order to bring about one.
I have said, I think, enough to show—in fairness to Germany—that the war of 1870 was not an unprovoked attack on France. The incidents—such as the Ems affair—which directly led up to it were after all only of secondary importance, although they bulked so largely at the time of their occurrence. I well remember the great excitement which prevailed in Paris during the few anxious days when to the man in the street the question of peace or war seemed to be trembling in the balance, though in reality that question was already virtually decided upon both sides. Judging by all that has been revealed to us during the last forty years, I do not think that M. Emile Ollivier, the Prime Minister, would have been able to modify the decision of the fateful council held at Saint Cloud even if he had attended it. Possessed by many delusions, the bulk of the imperial councillors were too confident of success to draw back, and, besides, Bismarck and Moltke were not disposed to let France draw back. They were ready, and they knew right well that opportunity is a fine thing.
It was on July 15 that the Duc de Gramont, the Imperial Minister of Foreign Affairs, read his memorable statement to the Legislative Body, and two days later a formal declaration of war was signed. Paris at once became delirious with enthusiasm, though, as we know by all the telegrams from the Prefects of the departments, the provinces generally desired that peace might be preserved.
Resident in Paris, and knowing at that time very little about the rest of France—for I had merely stayed during my summer holidays at such seaside resorts as Trouville, Deauville, Beuzeval, St. Malo, and St. Servan—I undoubtedly caught the Parisian fever, and I dare say that I sometimes joined in the universal chorus of "À Berlin!" Mere lad as I was, in spite of my precocity, I shared also the universal confidence in the French army. In that confidence many English military men participated. Only those who, like Captain Hozier of The Times, had closely watched Prussian methods during the Seven Weeks' War in 1866, clearly realized that the North German kingdom possessed a thoroughly well organized fighting machine, led by officers of the greatest ability, and capable of effecting something like a revolution in the art of war.
France was currently thought stronger than she really was. Of the good physique of her men there could be no doubt. Everybody who witnessed the great military pageants of those times was impressed by the bearing of the troops and their efficiency under arms. And nobody anticipated that they would be so inferior to the Germans in numbers as proved to be the case, and that the generals would show themselves so inferior in mental calibre to the commanders of the opposing forces. The Paris garrison, it is true, was no real criterion of the French army generally, though foreigners were apt to judge the latter by what they saw of it in the capital. The troops stationed there were mostly picked men, the garrison being very largely composed of the Imperial Guard. The latter always made a brilliant display, not merely by reason of its somewhat showy uniforms, recalling at times those of the First Empire, but also by the men's fine physique and their general military proficiency. They certainly fought well in some of the earlier battles of the war. Their commander was General Bourbaki, a fine soldierly looking man, the grandson of a Greek pilot who acted as intermediary between Napoleon I and his brother Joseph, at the time of the former's expedition to Egypt. It was this original Bourbaki who carried to Napoleon Joseph's secret letters reporting Josephine's misconduct in her husband's absence, misconduct which Napoleon condoned at the time, though it would have entitled him to a divorce nine years before he decided on one.
With the spectacle of the Imperial Guard constantly before their eyes, the Parisians of July, 1870, could not believe in the possibility of defeat, and, moreover, at the first moment it was not believed that the Southern German States would join North Germany against France. Napoleon III and his confidential advisers well knew, however, what to think on that point, and the delusions of the man in the street departed when, on July 20, Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden, and Hesse-Darmstadt announced their intention of supporting Prussia and the North German Confederation. Still, this did not dismay the Parisians, and the shouts of "To Berlin! To Berlin!" were as frequent as ever.
It had long been one of my dreams to see and participate in the great drama of war. All boys, I suppose, come into the world with pugnacious instincts. There must be few, too, who never "play at soldiers." My own interest in warfare and soldiering had been steadily fanned from my earliest childhood. In the first place, I had been incessantly confronted by all the scenes of war depicted in the Illustrated Times and the Illustrated London News, those journals being posted to me regularly every week whilst I was still only a little chap at Eastbourne. Further, the career of my uncle, Frank Vizetelly, exercised a strange fascination over me. Born in Fleet Street in September, 1830, he was the youngest of my father's three brothers. Educated with Gustave Doré, he became an artist for the illustrated Press, and, in 1850, represented the Illustrated Times as war-artist in Italy, being a part of the time with the French and at other moments with the Sardinian forces. That was the first of his many campaigns. His services being afterwards secured by the Illustrated London News, he next accompanied Garibaldi from Palermo to Naples. Then, at the outbreak of the Civil War in the United States, he repaired thither with Howard Russell, and, on finding obstacles placed in his way on the Federal side, travelled "underground" to Richmond and joined the Confederates. The late Duke of Devonshire, the late Lord Wolseley, and Francis Lawley were among his successive companions. At one time he and the first-named shared the same tent and lent socks and shirts to one another.
Now and again, however, Frank Vizetelly came to England after running the blockade, stayed a few weeks in London, and then departed for America once more, yet again running the blockade on his way. This he did on at least three occasions. His next campaign was the war of 1866, when he was with the Austrian commander Benedek. For a few years afterwards he remained in London assisting his eldest brother James to run what was probably the first of the society journals, Echoes of the Clubs, to which Mortimer Collins and the late Sir Edmund Monson largely contributed. However, Frank Vizetelly went back to America once again, this time with Wolseley on the Red River Expedition. Later, he was with Don Carlos in Spain and with the French in Tunis, whence he proceeded to Egypt. He died on the field of duty, meeting his death when Hicks Pasha's little army was annihilated in the denies of Kashgil, in the Soudan.
Now, in the earlier years, when Frank Vizetelly returned from Italy or America, he was often at my father's house at Kensington, and I heard him talk of Napoleon III, MacMahon, Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel, Cialdini, Robert Lee, Longstreet, Stonewall Jackson, and Captain Semmes. Between-times I saw all the engravings prepared after his sketches, and I regarded him and them with a kind of childish reverence. I can picture him still, a hale, bluff, tall, and burly-looking man, with short dark hair, blue eyes and a big ruddy moustache. He was far away the best known member of our family in my younger days, when anonymity in journalism was an almost universal rule. In the same way, however, as everybody had heard of Howard Russell, the war correspondent of the Times, so most people had heard of Frank Vizetelly, the war-artist of the Illustrated. He was, by-the-by, in the service of the Graphic when he was killed.
I well remember being alternately amused and disgusted by a French theatrical delineation of an English war correspondent, given in a spectacular military piece which I witnessed a short time after my first arrival in Paris. It was called "The Siege of Pekin," and had been concocted by Mocquard, the Emperor Napoleon's secretary. All the "comic business" in the affair was supplied by a so-called war correspondent of the Times, who strutted about in a tropical helmet embellished with a green Derby veil, and was provided with a portable desk and a huge umbrella. This red-nosed and red-whiskered individual was for ever talking of having to do this and that for "the first paper of the first country in the world," and, in order to obtain a better view of an engagement, he deliberately planted himself between the French and Chinese combatants. I should doubtless have derived more amusement from his tomfoolery had I not already known that English war correspondents did not behave in any such idiotic manner, and I came away from the performance with strong feelings of resentment respecting so outrageous a caricature of a profession counting among its members the uncle whom I so much admired.
Whatever my dreams may have been, I hardly anticipated that I should join that profession myself during the Franco-German war. The Lycées "broke up" in confusion, and my father decided to send me to join my stepmother and the younger members of the family at Saint Servan, it being his intention to go to the front with my elder brother Edward. But Simpson, the veteran Crimean War artist, came over to join the so-called Army of the Rhine, and my brother, securing an engagement from the New York Times, set out on his own account. Thus I was promptly recalled to Paris, where my father had decided to remain. In those days the journey from Brittany to the capital took many long and wearisome hours, and I made it in a third-class carriage of a train crowded with soldiers of all arms, cavalry, infantry, and artillery. Most of them were intoxicated, and the grossness of their language and manners was almost beyond belief. That dreadful night spent on the boards of a slowly-moving and jolting train, [There were then no cushioned seats in French third-class carriages.] amidst drunken and foul-mouthed companions, gave me, as it were, a glimpse of the other side of the picture—that is, of several things which lie behind the glamour of war.
It must have been about July 25 when I returned to Paris. A decree had just been issued appointing the Empress as Regent in the absence of the Emperor, who was to take command of the Army of the Rhine. It had originally been intended that there should be three French armies, but during the conferences with Archduke Albert in the spring, that plan was abandoned in favour of one sole army under the command of Napoleon III. The idea underlying the change was to avoid a superfluity of staff-officers, and to augment the number of actual combatants. Both Le Boeuf and Lebrun approved of the alteration, and this would seem to indicate that there were already misgivings on the French side in regard to the inferior strength of their effectives. The army was divided into eight sections, that is, seven army corps, and the Imperial Guard. Bourbaki, as already mentioned, commanded the Guard, and at the head of the army corps were (1) MacMahon, (2) Frossard, (3) Bazaine, (4) Ladmerault, (5) Failly, (6) Canrobert, and (7) Félix Douay. Both Frossard and Failly, however, were at first made subordinate to Bazaine. The head of the information service was Colonel Lewal, who rose to be a general and Minister of War under the Republic, and who wrote some commendable works on tactics; and immediately under him were Lieut.-Colonel Fay, also subsequently a well-known general, and Captain Jung, who is best remembered perhaps by his inquiries into the mystery of the Man with the Iron Mask. I give those names because, however distinguished those three men may have become in later years, the French intelligence service at the outset of the war was without doubt extremely faulty, and responsible for some of the disasters which occurred.
On returning to Paris one of my first duties was to go in search of Moulin, the detective-artist whom I mentioned in my first chapter. I found him in his somewhat squalid home in the Quartier Mouffetard, surrounded by a tribe of children, and he immediately informed me that he was one of the "agents" appointed to attend the Emperor on the campaign. The somewhat lavish Imperial équipage, on which Zola so frequently dilated in "The Downfall," had, I think, already been despatched to Metz, where the Emperor proposed to fix his headquarters, and the escort of Cent Gardes was about to proceed thither. Moulin told me, however, that he and two of his colleagues were to travel in the same train as Napoleon, and it was agreed that he should forward either to Paris or to London, as might prove most convenient, such sketches as he might from time to time contrive to make. He suggested that there should be one of the Emperor's departure from Saint Cloud, and that in order to avoid delay I should accompany him on the occasion and take it from him. We therefore went down together on July 28, promptly obtained admittance to the château, where Moulin took certain instructions, and then repaired to the railway-siding in the park, whence the Imperial train was to start.
Officers and high officials, nearly all in uniform, were constantly going to and fro between the siding and the château, and presently the Imperial party appeared, the Emperor being between the Empress and the young Imperial Prince. Quite a crowd of dignitaries followed. I do not recollect seeing Emile Ollivier, though he must have been present, but I took particular note of Rouher, the once all-powerful minister, currently nicknamed the Vice-Emperor, and later President of the Senate. In spite of his portliness, he walked with a most determined stride, held his head very erect, and spoke in his customary loud voice. The Emperor, who wore the undress uniform of a general, looked very grave and sallow. The disease which eventually ended in his death had already become serious, [I have given many particulars of it in my two books, "The Court of the Tuileries, 1862-1870" (Chatto and Windus), and "Republican France, 1870-1912" (Holden and Hardingham).] and only a few days later, that is, during the Saarbrucken affair (August 2), he was painfully affected by it. Nevertheless, he had undertaken to command the Army of France! The Imperial Prince, then fourteen years of age, was also in uniform, it having been arranged that he should accompany his father to the front, and he seemed to be extremely animated and restless, repeatedly turning to exchange remarks with one or another officer near him. The Empress, who was very simply gowned, smiled once or twice in response to some words which fell from her husband, but for the most part she looked as serious as he did. Whatever Emile Ollivier may have said about beginning this war with a light heart, it is certain that these two sovereigns of France realized, at that hour of parting, the magnitude of the issues at stake. After they had exchanged a farewell kiss, the Empress took her eager young son in her arms and embraced him fondly, and when we next saw her face we could perceive the tears standing in her eyes. The Emperor was already taking his seat and the boy speedily sprang after him. Did the Empress at that moment wonder when, where, and how she would next see them again? Perchance she did. Everything, however, was speedily in readiness for departure. As the train began to move, both the Emperor and the Prince waved their hands from the windows, whilst all the enthusiastic Imperial dignitaries flourished their hats and raised a prolonged cry of "Vive l'Empereur!" It was not, perhaps, so loud as it might have been; but, then, they were mostly elderly men. Moulin, during the interval, had contrived to make something in the nature of a thumb-nail sketch; I had also taken a few notes myself; and thus provided I hastened back to Paris.
III
ON THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION
First French Defeats—A Great Victory rumoured—The Marseillaise, Capoul
and Marie Sass—Edward Vizetelly brings News of Forbach to Paris—Emile
Ollivier again—His Fall from Power—Cousin Montauban, Comte de Palikao—
English War Correspondents in Paris—Gambetta calls me "a Little Spy"—
More French Defeats—Palikao and the Defence of Paris—Feats of a Siege—
Wounded returning from the Front—Wild Reports of French Victories—The
Quarries of Jaumont—The Anglo-American Ambulance—The News of Sedan—
Sala's Unpleasant Adventure—The Fall of the Empire.
It was, I think, two days after the Emperor's arrival at Metz that the first Germans—a detachment of Badeners—entered French territory. Then, on the second of August came the successful French attack on Saarbrucken, a petty affair but a well-remembered one, as it was on this occasion that the young Imperial Prince received the "baptism of fire." Appropriately enough, the troops, whose success he witnessed, were commanded by his late governor, General Frossard. More important was the engagement at Weissenburg two days later, when a division of the French under General Abel Douay was surprised by much superior forces, and utterly overwhelmed, Douay himself being killed during the fighting. Yet another two days elapsed, and then the Crown Prince of Prussia—later the Emperor Frederick—routed MacMahon at Wörth, in spite of a vigorous resistance, carried on the part of the French Cuirassiers, under General the Vicomte de Bonnemains, to the point of heroism. In later days the general's son married a handsome and wealthy young lady of the bourgeoisie named Marguerite Crouzet, whom, however, he had to divorce, and who afterwards became notorious as the mistress of General Boulanger.
Curiously enough, on the very day of the disaster of Wörth a rumour of a great French victory spread through Paris. My father had occasion to send me to his bankers in the Rue Vivienne, and on making my way to the Boulevards, which I proposed to follow, I was amazed to see the shopkeepers eagerly setting up the tricolour flags which they habitually displayed on the Emperor's fête-day (August 15). Nobody knew exactly how the rumours of victory had originated, nobody could give any precise details respecting the alleged great success, but everybody believed in it, and the enthusiasm was universal. It was about the middle of the day when I repaired to the Rue Vivienne, and after transacting my business there, I turned into the Place de la Bourse, where a huge crowd was assembled. The steps of the exchange were also covered with people, and amidst a myriad eager gesticulations a perfect babel of voices was ascending to the blue sky. One of the green omnibuses, which in those days ran from the Bourse to Passy, was waiting on the square, unable to depart owing to the density of the crowd; and all at once, amidst a scene of great excitement and repeated shouts of "La Marseillaise!" "La Marseillaise!" three or four well-dressed men climbed on to the vehicle, and turning towards the mob of speculators and sightseers covering the steps of the Bourse, they called to them repeatedly: "Silence! Silence!" The hubbub slightly subsided, and thereupon one of the party on the omnibus, a good-looking slim young fellow with a little moustache, took off his hat, raised his right arm, and began to sing the war-hymn of the Revolution. The stanza finished, the whole assembly took up the refrain.
Since the days of the Coup d'État, the Marseillaise had been banned in France, the official imperial air being "Partant pour la Syrie," a military march composed by the Emperor's mother, Queen Hortense, with words by Count Alexandre de Laborde, who therein pictured a handsome young knight praying to the Blessed Virgin before his departure for Palestine, and soliciting of her benevolence that he might "prove to be the bravest brave, and love the fairest fair." During the twenty years of the third Napoleon's rule, Paris had heard the strains of "Partant pour la Syrie" many thousand times, and, though they were tuneful enough, had become thoroughly tired of them. To stimulate popular enthusiasm in the war the Ollivier Cabinet had accordingly authorized the playing and singing of the long-forbidden "Marseillaise," which, although it was well-remembered by the survivors of '48, and was hummed even by the young Republicans of Belleville and the Quartier Latin, proved quite a novelty to half the population, who were destined to hear it again and again and again from that period until the present time.
The young vocalist who sang it from the top of a Passy-Bourse omnibus on that fateful day of Wörth, claimed to be a tenor, but was more correctly a tenorino, his voice possessing far more sweetness than power. He was already well-known and popular, for he had taken the part of Romeo in Gounod's well-known opera based on the Shakespearean play. Like many another singer, Victor Capoul might have become forgotten before very long, but a curious circumstance, having nothing to do with vocalism, diffused and perpetuated his name. He adopted a particular way of dressing his hair, "plastering" a part of it down in a kind of semi-circle over the forehead; and the new style "catching on" among young Parisians, the "coiffure Capoul" eventually went round the world. It is exemplified in certain portraits of King George V.
In those war-days Capoul sang the "Marseillaise" either at the Opéra Comique or the Théâtre Lyrique; but at the Opera it was sung by Marie Sass, then at the height of her reputation. I came in touch with her a few years later when she was living in the Paris suburbs, and more than once, when we both travelled to the city in the same train, I had the honour of assisting her to alight from it—this being no very easy matter, as la Sass was the very fattest and heaviest of all the prime donne that I have ever seen.
On the same day that MacMahon was defeated at Wörth, Frossard was badly beaten at Forbach, an engagement witnessed by my elder brother Edward, [Born January 1, 1847, and therefore in 1870 in his twenty-fourth year.] who, as I previously mentioned, had gone to the front for an American journal. Finding it impossible to telegraph the news of this serious French reverse, he contrived to make his way to Paris on a locomotive- engine, and arrived at our flat in the Rue de Miromesnil looking as black as any coal-heaver. When he had handed his account of the affair to Ryan, the Paris representative of the New York Times, it was suggested that his information might perhaps be useful to the French Minister of War. So he hastened to the Ministry, where the news he brought put a finishing touch to the dismay of the officials, who were already staggering under the first news of the disaster of Wörth.
Paris, jubilant over an imaginary victory, was enraged by the tidings of Wörth and Forbach. Already dreading some Revolutionary enterprise, the Government declared the city to be in a state of siege, thereby placing it under military authority. Although additional men had recently been enrolled in the National Guard the arming of them had been intentionally delayed, precisely from a fear of revolutionary troubles, which the entourage of the Empress-Regent at Saint Cloud feared from the very moment of the first defeats. I recollect witnessing on the Place Venddme one day early in August a very tumultuous gathering of National Guards who had flocked thither in order to demand weapons of the Prime Minister, that is, Emile Ollivier, who in addition to the premiership, otherwise the "Presidency of the Council," held the offices of Keeper of the Seals and Minister of Justice, this department then having its offices in one of the buildings of the Place Vendôme. Ollivier responded to the demonstration by appearing on the balcony of his private room and delivering a brief speech, which, embraced a vague promise to comply with the popular demand. In point of fact, however, nothing of the kind was done during his term of office.
Whilst writing these lines I hear that this much-abused statesman has just passed away at Saint Gervais-les-Bains in Upper Savoy (August 20, 1913). Born at Marseilles in July, 1825, he lived to complete his eighty-eighth year. His second wife (née Gravier), to whom I referred in a previous chapter, survives him. I do not wish to be unduly hard on his memory. He came, however, of a very Republican family, and in his earlier years he personally evinced what seemed to be most staunch Republicanism. When he was first elected as a member of the Legislative Body in 1857, he publicly declared that he would appear before that essentially Bonapartist assembly as one of the spectres of the crime of the Coup d'Etat. But subsequently M. de Morny baited him with a lucrative appointment connected with the Suez Canal. Later still, the Empress smiled on him, and finally he took office under the Emperor, thereby disgusting nearly every one of his former friends and associates.
I believe, however, that Ollivier was sincerely convinced of the possibility of firmly establishing a liberal-imperialist regime. But although various reforms were carried out under his auspices, it is quite certain that he was not allowed a perfectly free hand. Nor was he fully taken into confidence with respect to the Emperor's secret diplomatic and military policy. That was proved by the very speech in which he spoke of entering upon the war with Prussia "with a light heart"; for in his very next sentences he spoke of that war as being absolutely forced upon France, and of himself and his colleagues as having done all that was humanly and honourably possible to avoid it. Assuredly he would not have spoken quite as he did had he realized at the time that Bismarck had merely forced on the war in order to defeat the Emperor Napoleon's intention to invade Germany in the ensuing spring. The public provocation on Prussia's part was, as I previously showed, merely her reply to the secret provocation offered by France, as evidenced by all the negotiations with Archduke Albert on behalf of Austria, and with Count Vimercati on behalf of Italy. On all those matters Ollivier was at the utmost but very imperfectly informed. Finally, be it remembered that he was absent from the Council at Saint Cloud at which war was finally decided upon.
At a very early hour on the morning of Sunday, August 7—the day following Wörth and Forbach—the Empress Eugénie came in all haste and sore distress from Saint Cloud to the Tuileries. The position was very serious, and anxious conferences were held by the ministers. When the Legislative Body met on the morrow, a number of deputies roundly denounced the manner in which the military operations were being conducted. One deputy, a certain Guyot-Montpeyroux, who was well known for the outspokenness of his language, horrified the more devoted Imperialists by describing the French forces as an army of lions led by jackasses. On the following day Ollivier and his colleagues resigned office. Their position had become untenable, though little if any responsibility attached to them respecting the military operations. The Minister of War, General Dejean, had been merely a stop-gap, appointed to carry out the measures agreed upon before his predecessor, Marshal Le Boeuf, had gone to the front as Major General of the army.
It was felt; however, among the Empress's entourage that the new Prime Minister ought to be a military man of energy, devoted, moreover, to the Imperial régime. As the marshals and most of the conspicuous generals of the time were already serving in the field, it was difficult to find any prominent individual possessed of the desired qualifications. Finally, however, the Empress was prevailed upon to telegraph to an officer whom she personally disliked, this being General Cousin-Montauban, Comte de Palikao. He was certainly, and with good reason, devoted to the Empire, and in the past he had undoubtedly proved himself to be a man of energy. But he was at this date in his seventy-fifth year—a fact often overlooked by historians of the Franco-German war—and for that very reason, although he had solicited a command in the field at the first outbreak of hostilities, it had been decided to decline his application, and to leave him at Lyons, where he had commanded the garrison for five years past.
Thirty years of Palikao's life had been spent in Algeria, contending, during most of that time, against the Arabs; but in 1860 he had been appointed commander of the French expedition to China, where with a small force he had conducted hostilities with the greatest vigour, repeatedly decimating or scattering the hordes of Chinamen who were opposed to him, and, in conjunction with the English, victoriously taking Pekin. A kind of stain rested on the expedition by reason of the looting of the Chinese Emperor's summer-palace, but the entire responsibility of that affair could not be cast on the French commander, as he only continued and completed what the English began. On his return to France, Napoleon III created him Comte de Palikao (the name being taken from one of his Chinese victories), and in addition wished the Legislative Body to grant him a dotation. However, the summer-palace looting scandal prevented this, much to the Emperor's annoyance, and subsequent to the fall of the Empire it was discovered that, by Napoleon's express orders, the War Ministry had paid Palikao a sum of about £60,000, diverting that amount of money (in accordance with the practices of the time) from the purpose originally assigned to it in the Estimates.
This was not generally known when Palikao became Chief Minister. He was then what might be called a very well preserved old officer, but his lungs had been somewhat affected by a bullet-wound of long standing, and this he more than once gave as a reason for replying with the greatest brevity to interpellations in the Chamber. Moreover, as matters went from bad to worse, this same lung trouble became a good excuse for preserving absolute silence on certain inconvenient occasions. When, however, Palikao was willing to speak he often did so untruthfully, repeatedly adding the suggestio falsi to the suppressio veri. As a matter of fact, he, like other fervent partisans of the dynasty, was afraid to let the Parisians know the true state of affairs. Besides, he himself was often ignorant of it. He took office (he was the third War Minister in fifty days) without any knowledge whatever of the imperial plan of campaign, or the steps to be adopted in the event of further French reverses, and a herculean task lay before this septuagenarian officer, who by experience knew right well how to deal with Arabs and Chinamen, but had never had to contend with European troops. Nevertheless, he displayed zeal and activity in his new semi-political and semi-military position. He greatly assisted MacMahon to reconstitute his army at Châlons, he planned the organization of three more army corps, and he started on the work of placing Paris in a state of defence, whilst his colleague, Clément Duvernois, the new Minister of Commerce, began gathering flocks and herds together, in order that the city, if besieged, might have the necessary means of subsistence.
At this time there were quite a number of English "war" as well as "own" correspondents in Paris. The former had mostly returned from Metz, whither they had repaired at the time of the Emperor's departure for the front. At the outset it had seemed as though the French would allow foreign journalists to accompany them on their "promenade to Berlin," but, on reverses setting in, all official recognition was denied to newspaper men, and, moreover, some of the representatives of the London Press had a very unpleasant time at Metz, being arrested there as spies and subjected to divers indignities. I do not remember whether they were ordered back to Paris or whether they voluntarily withdrew to the capital on their position with the army becoming untenable; but in any case they arrived in the city and lingered there for a time, holding daily symposiums at the Grand Café at the corner of the Ruè Scribe, on the Boulevards.
From time to time I went there with my father, and amongst, this galaxy of journalistic talent I met certain men with whom I had spoken in my childhood. One of them, for instance, was George Augustus Sala, and another was Henry Mayhew, the famous author of "London Labour and the London Poor," he being accompanied by his son Athol. Looking back, it seems to me that, in spite of all their brilliant gifts, neither Sala nor Henry Mayhew was fitted to be a correspondent in the field, and they were certainly much better placed in Paris than at the headquarters of the Army of the Rhine. Among the resident correspondents who attended the gatherings at the Grand Café were Captain Bingham, Blanchard (son of Douglas) Jerrold, and the jaunty Bower, who had once been tried for his life and acquitted by virtue of the "unwritten law" in connection with an affaire passíonelle in which he was the aggrieved party. For more than forty years past, whenever I have seen a bluff looking elderly gentleman sporting a buff-waistcoat and a white-spotted blue necktie, I have instinctively thought of Bower, who wore such a waistcoat and such a necktie, with the glossiest of silk hats and most shapely of patent-leather boots, throughout the siege of Paris, when he was fond of dilating on the merits of boiled ostrich and stewed elephant's foot, of which expensive dainties he partook at his club, after the inmates of the Jardin des Plantes had been slaughtered.
Bower represented the Morning Advertiser. I do not remember seeing Bowes of the Standard at the gatherings I have referred to, or Crawford of the Daily News, who so long wrote his Paris letters at a little café fronting the Bourse. But it was certainly at the Grand Café that I first set eyes on Labouchere, who, like Sala, was installed at the neighbouring Grand Hotel, and was soon to become famous as the Daily News' "Besieged Resident." As for Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles, who represented the Morning Post during the German Siege, I first set eyes on him at the British Embassy, when he had a beautiful little moustache (which I greatly envied) and wore his hair nicely parted down the middle. Eheu! fugaces labuntur anni.
Sala was the life and soul of those gatherings at the Grand Café, always exuberantly gay, unless indeed the conversation turned on the prospects of the French forces, when he railed at them without ceasing. Blanchard Jerrold, who was well acquainted with the spy system of the Empire, repeatedly warned Sala to be cautious—but in vain; and the eventual result of his outspokenness was a very unpleasant adventure on the eve of the Empire's fall. In the presence of all those distinguished men of the pen, I myself mostly preserved, as befitted my age, a very discreet silence, listening intently, but seldom opening my lips unless it were to accept or refuse another cup of coffee, or some sirop de groseille or grenadine. I never touched any intoxicant excepting claret at my meals, and though, in my Eastbourne days, I had, like most boys of my time, experimented with a clay pipe and some dark shag, I did not smoke. My father personally was extremely fond of cigars, but had he caught me smoking one, he would, I believe, have knocked me down.
In connection with those Grand Café gatherings I one day had a little adventure. It had been arranged that I should meet my father there, and turning into the Boulevards from the Madeleine I went slowly past what was then called the Rue Basse du Rempart. I was thinking of something or other—I do not remember what, but in any case I was absorbed in thought, and inadvertently I dogged the footsteps of two black-coated gentlemen who were deep in conversation. I was almost unconscious of their presence, and in any case I did not hear a word of what they were saying. But all at once one of them turned round, and said to me angrily: "Veux-tu bien t'en aller, petit espion!" otherwise: "Be off, little spy!" I woke up as it were, looked at him, and to my amazement recognized Gambetta, whom I had seen several times already, when I was with my mentor Brossard at either the Café de Suède or the Café de Madrid. At the same time, however, his companion also turned round, and proved to be Jules Simon, who knew me through a son of his. This was fortunate, for he immediately exclaimed: "Why, no! It is young Vizetelly, a friend of my son's," adding, "Did you wish to speak to me?"
I replied in the negative, saying that I had not even recognized him from behind, and trying to explain that it was purely by chance that I had been following him and M. Gambetta. "You know me, then?" exclaimed the future dictator somewhat sharply; whereupon I mentioned that he had been pointed out to me more than once, notably when he was in the company of M. Delescluze. "Ah, oui, fort bien," he answered. "I am sorry if I spoke as I did. But"—and here he turned to Simon—"one never knows, one can never take too many precautions. The Spaniard would willingly send both of us to Mazas." By "the Spaniard," of course, he meant the Empress Eugénie, just as people meant Marie-Antoinette when they referred to "the Austrian" during the first Revolution. That ended the affair. They both shook hands with me, I raised my hat, and hurried on to the Grand Café, leaving them to their private conversation. This was the first time that I ever exchanged words with Gambetta. The incident must have occurred just after his return from Switzerland, whither he had repaired fully anticipating the triumph of the French arms, returning, however, directly he heard of the first disasters. Simon and he were naturally drawn together by their opposition to the Empire, but they were men of very different characters, and some six months later they were at daggers drawn.
Events moved rapidly during Palikao's ministry. Reviving a former proposition of Jules Favre's, Gambetta proposed to the Legislative Body the formation of a Committee of National Defence, and one was ultimately appointed; but the only member of the Opposition included in it was Thiers. In the middle of August there were some revolutionary disturbances at La Villette. Then, after the famous conference at Châlons, where Rouher, Prince Napoleon, and others discussed the situation with the Emperor and MacMahon, Trochu was appointed Military Governor of Paris, where he soon found himself at loggerheads with Palikao. Meantime, the French under Bazaine, to whom the Emperor was obliged to relinquish the supreme command—the Opposition deputies particularly insisting on Bazaine's appointment in his stead—were experiencing reverse after reverse. The battle of Courcelles or Pange, on August 14, was followed two days later by that of Vionville or Mars-la-Tour, and, after yet another two days, came the great struggle of Gravelotte, and Bazaine was thrown back on Metz.
At the Châlons conference it had been decided that the Emperor should return to Paris and that MacMahon's army also should retreat towards the capital. But Palikao telegraphed to Napoleon: "If you abandon Bazaine there will be Revolution in Paris, and you yourself will be attacked by all the enemy's forces. Paris will defend herself from all assault from outside. The fortifications are completed." It has been argued that the plan to save Bazaine might have succeeded had it been immediately carried into effect, and in accordance, too, with Palikao's ideas; but the original scheme was modified, delay ensued, and the French were outmarched by the Germans, who came up with them at Sedan. As for Palikao's statement that the Paris fortifications were completed at the time when he despatched his telegram, that was absolutely untrue. The armament of the outlying forts had scarcely begun, and not a single gun was in position on any one of the ninety-five bastions of the ramparts. On the other hand, Palikao was certainly doing all he could for the city. He had formed the aforementioned Committee of Defence, and under his auspices the fosse or ditch in front of the ramparts was carried across the sixty-nine roads leading into Paris, whilst drawbridges were installed on all these points, with armed lunettes in front of them. Again, redoubts were thrown up in advance of some of the outlying forts, or on spots where breaks occurred in the chain of defensive works.
At the same time, ships' guns were ordered up from Cherbourg, Brest, Lorient, and Toulon, together with naval gunners to serve them. Sailors, customhouse officers, and provincial gendarmes were also conveyed to Paris in considerable numbers. Gardes-mobiles, francs-tireurs, and even firemen likewise came from the provinces, whilst the work of provisioning the city proceeded briskly, the Chamber never hesitating to vote all the money asked of it. At the same time, whilst there were many new arrivals in Paris, there were also many departures from the city. The general fear of a siege spread rapidly. Every day thousands of well-to-do middle-class folk went off in order to place themselves out of harm's way; and at the same time thousands of foreigners were expelled on the ground that, in the event of a siege occurring, they would merely be "useless mouths." In contrast with that exodus was the great inrush of people from the suburbs of Paris. They poured into the city unceasingly, from villas, cottages, and farms, employing every variety of vehicle to convey their furniture and other household goods, their corn, flour, wine, and other produce. There was a block at virtually every city gate, so many were the folk eager for shelter within the protecting ramparts raised at the instigation of Thiers some thirty years previously.
In point of fact, although the Germans were not yet really marching on Paris—for Bazaine's army had to be bottled up, and MacMahon's disposed of, before there could be an effective advance on the French capital—it was imagined in the city and its outskirts that the enemy might arrive at any moment. The general alarm was intensified when, on the night of August 21, a large body of invalided men, who had fought at Weissenburg or Worth, made their way into Paris, looking battle and travel-stained, some with their heads bandaged, others with their arms in slings, and others limping along with the help of sticks. It is difficult to conceive by what aberration the authorities allowed the Parisians to obtain that woeful glimpse of the misfortunes of France. The men in question ought never to have been sent to Paris at all. They might well have been cared for elsewhere. As it happened, the sorry sight affected all who beheld it. Some were angered by it, others depressed, and others well-nigh terrified.
As a kind of set-off, however, to that gloomy spectacle, fresh rumours of French successes began to circulate. There was a report that Bazaine's army had annihilated the whole of Prince Frederick-Charles's cavalry, and, in particular, there was a most sensational account of how three German army-corps, including the famous white Cuirassiers to which Bismarck belonged, had been tumbled into the "Quarries of Jaumont" and there absolutely destroyed! I will not say that there is no locality named Jaumont, but I cannot find any such place mentioned in Joanne's elaborate dictionary of the communes of France, and possibly it was as mythical as was the alleged German disaster, the rumours of which momentarily revived the spirits of the deluded Parisians, who were particularly pleased to think that the hated Bismarck's regiment had been annihilated.
On or about August 30, a friend of my eldest brother Adrian, a medical man named Blewitt, arrived in Paris with the object of joining an Anglo-American ambulance which was being formed in connection with the Red Cross Society. Dr. Blewitt spoke a little French, but he was not well acquainted with the city, and I was deputed to assist him whilst he remained there. An interesting account of the doings of the ambulance in question was written some sixteen or seventeen years ago by Dr. Charles Edward Ryan, of Glenlara, Tipperary, who belonged to it. Its head men were Dr. Marion-Sims and Dr. Frank, others being Dr. Ryan, as already mentioned, and Drs. Blewitt, Webb, May, Nicholl, Hayden, Howett, Tilghmann, and last but not least, the future Sir William MacCormack. Dr. Blewitt had a variety of business to transact with the officials of the French Red Cross Society, and I was with him at his interviews with its venerable-looking President, the Count de Flavigny, and others. It is of interest to recall that at the outbreak of the war the society's only means was an income of £5 6_s._ 3_d._, but that by August 28 its receipts had risen to nearly £112,000. By October it had expended more than £100,000 in organizing thirty-two field ambulances. Its total outlay during the war exceeded half a million sterling, and in its various field, town, and village ambulances no fewer than 110,000 men were succoured and nursed.
In Paris the society's headquarters were established at the Palace de l'Industrie in the Champs Elysées, and among the members of its principal committee were several ladies of high rank. I well remember seeing there that great leader of fashion, the Marquise de Galliffet, whose elaborate ball gowns I had more than once admired at Worth's, but who, now that misfortune had fallen upon France, was, like all her friends, very plainly garbed in black. At the Palais de l'Industrie I also found Mme. de MacMahon, short and plump, but full of dignity and energy, as became a daughter of the Castries. I remember a brief address which she delivered to the Anglo-American Ambulance on the day when it quitted Paris, and in which she thanked its members for their courage and devotion in coming forward, and expressed her confidence, and that of all her friends, in the kindly services which they would undoubtedly bestow upon every sufferer who came under their care.
I accompanied the ambulance on its march through Paris to the Eastern Hallway Station. When it was drawn up outside the Palais de l'Industrie, Count de Flavigny in his turn made a short but feeling speech, and immediately afterwards the cortége started. At the head of it were three young ladies, the daughters of Dr. Marion-Sims, who carried respectively the flags of France, England, and the United States. Then came the chief surgeons, the assistant-surgeons, the dressers and male nurses, with some waggons of stores bringing up the rear. I walked, I remember, between Dr. Blewitt and Dr. May. On either side of the procession were members of the Red Cross Society, carrying sticks or poles tipped with collection bags, into which money speedily began to rain. We crossed the Place de la Concorde, turned up the Rue Royale, and then followed the main Boulevards as far, I think, as the Boulevard de Strasbourg. There were crowds of people on either hand, and our progress was necessarily slow, as it was desired to give the onlookers full time to deposit their offerings in the collection-bags. From the Cercle Impérial at the corner of the Champs Elysées, from the Jockey Club, the Turf Club, the Union, the Chemins-de- Fer, the Ganaches, and other clubs on or adjacent to the Boulevards, came servants, often in liveries, bearing with them both bank-notes and gold. Everybody seemed anxious to give something, and an official of the society afterwards told me that the collection had proved the largest it had ever made. There was also great enthusiasm all along the line of route, cries of "Vivent les Anglais! Vivent les Américains!" resounding upon every side.
The train by which the ambulance quitted Paris did not start until a very late hour in the evening. Prior to its departure most of us dined at a restaurant near the railway-station. No little champagne was consumed at this repast, and, unaccustomed as I was to the sparkling wine of the Marne, it got, I fear, slightly into my head. However, my services as interpreter were requisitioned more than once by some members of the ambulance in connection with certain inquiries which they wished to make of the railway officials; and I recollect that when some question arose of going in and out of the station, and reaching the platform again without let or hindrance—the departure of the train being long delayed—the sous-chef de gare made me a most courteous bow, and responded: "À vous, messieurs, tout est permis. There are no regulations for you!" At last the train started, proceeding on its way to Soissons, where it arrived at daybreak on August 29, the ambulance then hastening to join MacMahon, and reaching him just in time to be of good service at Sedan. I will only add here that my friend Dr. Blewitt was with Dr. Frank at Balan and Bazeilles, where the slaughter was so terrible. The rest of the ambulance's dramatic story must be read in Dr. Ryan's deeply interesting pages.
Whilst the Parisians were being beguiled with stories of how the Prince of Saxe-Meiningen had written to his wife telling her that the German troops were suffering terribly from sore feet, the said troops were in point of fact lustily outmarching MacMahon's forces. On August 30, General de Failly was badly worsted at Beaumont, and on the following day MacMahon was forced to move on Sedan. The first reports which reached Paris indicated, as usual, very favourable results respecting the contest there. My friend Captain Bingham, however, obtained some correct information— from, I believe, the British Embassy—and I have always understood that it was he who first made the terrible truth known to one of the deputies of the Opposition party, who hastened to convey it to Thiers. The battle of Sedan was fought on Thursday, September 1; but it was only on Saturday, September 3, that Palikao shadowed forth the disaster in the Chamber, stating that MacMahon had failed to effect a junction with Bazaine, and that, after alternate reverses and successes—that is, driving a part of the German army into the Meuse!—he had been obliged to retreat on Sedan and Mézières, some portion of his forces, moreover, having been compelled to cross the Belgian frontier.
That tissue of inaccuracies, devised perhaps to palliate the effect of the German telegrams of victory which were now becoming known to the incredulous Parisians, was torn to shreds a few hours later when the Legislative Body assembled for a night-sitting. Palikao was then obliged to admit that the French army and the Emperor Napoleon had surrendered to the victorious German force. Jules Favre, who was the recognized leader of the Republican Opposition, thereupon brought forward a motion of dethronement, proposing that the executive authority should be vested in a parliamentary committee. In accordance with the practice of the Chamber, Farve's motion had to be referred to its bureaux, or ordinary committees, and thus no decision was arrived at that night, it being agreed that the Chamber should reassemble on the morrow at noon.
The deputies separated at a very late hour. My father and myself were among all the anxious people who had assembled on the Place de la Concorde to await the issue of the debate. Wild talk was heard on every side, imprecations were levelled at the Empire, and it was already suggested that the country had been sold to the foreigner. At last, as the crowd became extremely restless, the authorities, who had taken their precautions in consequence of the revolutionary spirit which was abroad, decided to disperse it. During the evening a considerable body of mounted Gardes de Paris had been stationed in or near the Palais de l'Industrie, and now, on instructions being conveyed to their commander, they suddenly cantered down the Champs Elysées and cleared the square, chasing people round and round the fountains and the seated statues of the cities of France, until they fled by way either of the quays, the Rue de Rivoti, or the Rue Royale. The vigour which the troops displayed did not seem of good augury for the adversaries of the Empire. Without a doubt Revolution was already in the air, but everything indicated that the authorities were quite prepared to contend with it, and in all probability successfully.
It was with difficulty that my father and myself contrived to avoid the troopers and reach the Avenue Gabriel, whence we made our way home. Meantime there had been disturbances in other parts of Paris. On the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle a band of demonstrators had come into collision with the police, who had arrested several of them. Thus, as I have already mentioned, the authorities seemed to be as vigilant and as energetic as ever. But, without doubt, on that night of Saturday, September 3, the secret Republican associations were very active, sending the mot d'ordre from one to another part of the city, so that all might be ready for Revolution when the Legislative Body assembled on the morrow.
It was on this same last night of the Empire that George Augustus Sala met with the very unpleasant adventure to which I previously referred. During the evening he went as usual to the Grand Café, and meeting Blanchard Jerrold there, he endeavoured to induce him to go to supper at the Café du Helder. Sala being in an even more talkative mood than usual, and—now that he had heard of the disaster of Sedan—more than ever inclined to express his contempt of the French in regard to military matters, Jerrold declined the invitation, fearing, as he afterwards said to my father in my presence, that some unpleasantness might well ensue, as Sala, in spite of all remonstrances, would not cease "gassing." Apropos of that expression, it is somewhat amusing to recall that Sala at one time designed for himself an illuminated visiting-card, on which appeared his initials G. A. S. in letters of gold, the A being intersected by a gas-lamp diffusing many vivid rays of light, whilst underneath it was a scroll bearing the appropriate motto, "Dux est Lux."
But, to return to my story, Jerrold having refused the invitation; Sala repaired alone to the Café du Helder, an establishment which in those imperial times was particularly patronized by officers of the Paris garrison and officers from the provinces on leave. It was the height of folly for anybody to "run down" the French army in such a place, unless, indeed, he wished to have a number of duels on his hands. It is true that on the night of September 3, there may have been few, if any, military men at the Helder. Certain it is, however, that whilst Sala was supping in the principal room upstairs, he entered into conversation with other people, spoke incautiously, as he had been doing for a week past, and on departing from the establishment was summarily arrested and conveyed to the Poste de Police on the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle. The cells there were already more or less crowded with roughs who had been arrested during the disturbance earlier in the evening, and when a police official thrust Sala into their midst, at the same time calling him a vile Prussian spy, the patriotism of the other prisoners was immediately aroused, though, for the most part, they were utter scamps who had only created a disturbance for the purpose of filling their pockets.
Sala was subjected not merely to much ill-treatment, but also to indignities which only Rabelais or Zola could have (in different ways) adequately described; and it was not until the morning that he was able to communicate with the manager of the Grand Hotel, where he had his quarters. The manager acquainted the British Embassy with his predicament, and it was, I think, Mr. Sheffield who repaired to the Préfecture de Police to obtain an order for Sala's liberation. The story told me at the time was that Lord Lyons's representative found matters already in great confusion at the Préfecture. There had been a stampede of officials, scarcely any being at their posts, in such wise that he made his way to the Prefect's sanctum unannounced. There he found M. Piétri engaged with a confidential acolyte in destroying a large number of compromising papers, emptying boxes and pigeon-holes in swift succession, and piling their contents on an already huge fire, which was stirred incessantly in order that it might burn more swiftly. Piétri only paused in his task in order to write an order for Sala's release, and I have always understood that this was the last official order that emanated from the famous Prefect of the Second Empire. It is true that he presented himself at the Tuileries before he fled to Belgium, but the Empress, as we know, was averse from any armed conflict with the population of Paris. As a matter of fact, the Prefecture had spent its last strength during the night of September 3. Disorganized as it was on the morning of the 4th, it could not have fought the Revolution. As will presently appear, those police who on the night of the 3rd were chosen to assist in guarding the approaches to the Palais Bourbon on the morrow, were quite unable to do so.
Disorder, indeed, prevailed in many places. My father had recently found himself in a dilemma in regard to the requirements of the Illustrated London News. In those days the universal snap-shotting hand-camera was unknown. Every scene that it was desired to depict in the paper had to be sketched, and in presence of all the defensive preparations which were being made, a question arose as to what might and what might not be sketched. General Trochu was Governor of Paris, and applications were made to him on the subject. A reply came requiring a reference from the British Embassy before any permission whatever was granted. In due course a letter was obtained from the Embassy, signed not, I think, by Lord Lyons himself, but by one of the secretaries—perhaps Sir Edward Malet, or Mr. Wodehouse, or even Mr. Sheffield. At all events, on the morning of September 4, my father, being anxious to settle the matter, commissioned me to take the Embassy letter to Trochu's quarters at the Louvre. Here I found great confusion. Nobody was paying the slightest attention to official work. The bureaux were half deserted. Officers came and went incessantly, or gathered in little groups in the passages and on the stairs, all of them looking extremely upset and talking anxiously and excitedly together. I could find nobody to attend to any business, and was at a loss what to do, when a door opened and a general officer in undress uniform appeared on the threshold of a large and finely appointed room.
I immediately recognized Trochu's extremely bald head and determined jaw, for since his nomination as Governor, Paris had been flooded with portraits of him. He had opened the door, I believe, to look for an officer, but on seeing me standing there with a letter in my hand he inquired what I wanted. I replied that I had brought a letter from the British Embassy, and he may perhaps have thought that I was an Embassy messenger. At all events, he took the letter from me, saying curtly: "C'est bien, je m'en occuperai, revenez cet après-midi." With those words he stepped back into the room and carefully placed the letter on the top of several others which were neatly disposed on a side-table.
The incident was trivial in itself, yet it afforded a glimpse of Trochu's character. Here was the man who, in his earlier years, had organized the French Expedition to the Crimea in a manner far superior to that in which our own had been organized; a man of method, order, precision, fully qualified to prepare the defence of Paris, though not to lead her army in the field. Brief as was that interview of mine, I could not help noticing how perfectly calm and self-possessed he was, for his demeanour greatly contrasted with the anxious or excited bearing of his subordinates. Yet he had reached the supreme crisis of his life. The Empire was falling, a first offer of Power had been made to him on the previous evening; and a second offer, which he finally accepted, [See my book, "Republican France," p. 8.] was almost imminent. Yet on that morning of Revolution he appeared as cool as a cucumber.
I quitted the Louvre, going towards the Rue Royale, it having been arranged with my father that we should take déjeuner at a well-known restaurant there. It was called "His Lordship's Larder," and was pre-eminently an English house, though the landlord bore the German name of Weber. He and his family were unhappily suffocated in the cellars of their establishment during one of the conflagrations which marked the Bloody Week of the Commune. At the time when I met my father, that is about noon, there was nothing particularly ominous in the appearance of the streets along which I myself passed. It was a fine bright Sunday, and, as was usual on such a day, there were plenty of people abroad. Recently enrolled National Guards certainly predominated among the men, but the latter included many in civilian attire, and there was no lack of women and children. As for agitation, I saw no sign of it.
As I was afterwards told, however, by Delmas, the landlord of the Café Grétry, [Note] matters were very different that morning on the Boulevards, and particularly on the Boulevard Montmartre. By ten o'clock, indeed, great crowds had assembled there, and the excitement grew apace. The same words were on all lips: "Sedan—the whole French army taken—the wretched Emperor's sword surrendered—unworthy to reign—dethrone him!" Just as, in another crisis of French history, men had climbed on to the chairs and tables in the garden of the Palais Royal to denounce Monsieur and Madame Véto and urge the Parisians to march upon Versailles, so now others climbed on the chairs outside the Boulevard cafés to denounce the Empire, and urge a march upon the Palais Bourbon, where the Legislative Body was about to meet. And amidst the general clamour one cry persistently prevailed. It was: "Déchéance! Déchéance!—Dethronement! Dethronement!"
[Note: This was a little café on the Boulevard des Italiens, and was noted for its quietude during the afternoon, though in the evening it was, by reason of its proximity to the "Petite Bourse" (held on the side-walk in front of it), invaded by noisy speculators. Captain Bingham, my father, and myself long frequented the Café Grétry, often writing our "Paris letters" there. Subsequent to the war, Bingham and I removed to the Café Cardinal, where, however, the everlasting rattle of dominoes proved very disturbing. In the end, on that account, and in order to be nearer to a club to which we both belonged, we emigrated to the Café Napolitain. One reason for writing one's copy at a café instead of at one's club was that, at the former, one could at any moment receive messengers bringing late news; in addition to which, afternoon newspapers were instantly available.]
At every moment the numbers of the crowd increased. New-comers continually arrived from the eastern districts by way of the Boulevards, and from the north by way of the Faubourg Montmartre and the Rue Drouot, whilst from the south—the Quartier Latin and its neighbourhood—contingents made their way across the Pont St. Michel and the Pont Notre Dame, and thence, past the Halles, along the Boulevard de Sebastopol and the Rue Montmartre. Why the Quartier Latin element did not advance direct on the Palais Bourbon from its own side of the river I cannot exactly say; but it was, I believe, thought desirable to join hands, in the first instance, with the Revolutionary elements of northern Paris. All this took place whilst my father and myself were partaking of our meal. When we quitted the "Larder," a little before one o'clock, all the small parties of National Guards and civilians whom we had observed strolling about at an earlier hour, had congregated on the Place de la Concorde, attracted thither by the news of the special Sunday sitting, at which the Legislative Body would undoubtedly take momentous decisions.
It should be added that nearly all the National Guards who assembled on the Place de la Concorde before one o'clock were absolutely unarmed. At that hour, however, a large force of them, equivalent to a couple of battalions or thereabouts, came marching down the Rue Royale from the Boulevards, and these men (who were preceded by a solitary drummer) carried, some of them, chassepots and others fusils-à-tabatière, having moreover, in most instances, their bayonets fixed. They belonged to the north of Paris, though I cannot say precisely to what particular districts, nor do I know exactly by whose orders they had been assembled and instructed to march on the Palais Bourbon, as they speedily did. But it is certain that all the fermentation of the morning and all that occurred afterwards was the outcome of the night-work of the secret Republican Committees.
As the guards marched on, loud cries of "Déchéance! Déchéance!" arose among them, and were at once taken up by the spectators. Perfect unanimity, indeed, appeared to prevail on the question of dethroning the Emperor. Even the soldiers who were scattered here and there—a few Linesmen, a few Zouaves, a few Turcos, some of them invalided from MacMahon's forces—eagerly joined in the universal cry, and began to follow the guards on to the Place de la Concorde. Never, I believe, had that square been more crowded—not even in the days when it was known as the Place Louis Quinze, and when hundreds of people were crushed to death there whilst witnessing a display of fireworks in connection with the espousals of the future Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, not even when it had become the Place de la Révolution and was thronged by all who wished to witness the successive executions of the last King and Queen of the old French monarchy. From the end of the Rue Royale to the bridge conducting across the Seine to the Palais Bourbon, from the gate of the Tuileries garden to the horses of Marly at the entrance of the Champs Elysées, around the obelisk of Luxor, and the fountains which were playing as usual in the bright sunshine which fell from the blue sky, along all the balustrades connecting the seated statues of the cities of France, here, there, and everywhere, indeed, you saw human heads. And the clamour was universal. The great square had again become one of Revolution, and yet it remained one of Concord also, for there was absolute agreement among the hundred thousand or hundred and fifty thousand people who had chosen it as their meeting-place, an agreement attested by that universal and never-ceasing cry of "Dethronement!"
As the armed National Guards debouched from the Rue Royale, their solitary drummer plied his sticks. But the roll of the drum was scarcely heard in the general uproar, and so dense was the crowd that the men could advance but very slowly. For a while it took some minutes to make only a few steps. Meantime the ranks of the men were broken here and there, other people got among them, and at last my father and myself were caught in the stream and carried with it, still somewhat slowly, in the direction of the Pont de la Concorde. I read recently that the bridge was defended by mounted men of the Garde de Paris (the forerunner of the Garde Républicaine of to-day); a French writer, in recalling the scene, referring to "the men's helmets glistening in the sunshine." But that is pure imagination. The bridge was defended by a cordon of police ranged in front of a large body of Gendarmerie mobile, wearing the familiar dark blue white-braided képis and the dark blue tunics with white aiguillettes. At first, as I have already said, we advanced but slowly towards that defending force; but, all at once, we were swept onward by other men who had come from the Boulevards, in our wake. A minute later an abrupt halt ensued, whereupon it was only with great difficulty that we were able to resist the pressure from behind.
I at last contrived to raise myself on tiptoes. Our first ranks had effected a breach in those of the sergents-de-ville, but before us were the mounted gendarmes, whose officer suddenly gave a command and drew his sword. For an instant I saw him plainly: his face was intensely pale. But a sudden rattle succeeded his command, for his men responded to it by drawing their sabres, which flashed ominously. A minute, perhaps two minutes, elapsed, the pressure in our rear still and ever increasing. I do not know what happened exactly at the head of our column: the uproar was greater than ever, and it seemed as if, in another moment, we should be charged, ridden over, cut down, or dispersed. I believe, however, that in presence of that great concourse of people, in presence too of the universal reprobation of the Empire which had brought defeat, invasion, humiliation upon France, the officer commanding the gendarmes shrank from carrying out his orders. There must have been a brief parley with the leaders of our column. In any case, the ranks of the gendarmes suddenly opened, many of them taking to the footways of the bridge, over which our column swept at the double-quick, raising exultant shouts of "Vive la République!" It was almost a race as to who should be the first to reach the Palais Bourbon. Those in the rear were ever impelling the foremost onward, and there was no time to look about one. But in a rapid vision, as it were, I saw the gendarmes reining in their horses on either side of us; and, here and there, medals gleamed on their dark tunics, and it seemed to me as if more than one face wore an angry expression. These men had fought under the imperial eagles, they had been decorated for their valour in the Crimean, Italian, and Cochin-China wars. Veterans all, and faithful servants of the Empire, they saw the régime for which they had fought, collapsing. Had their commanding officer ordered it, they might well have charged us; but, obedient to discipline, they had opened their ranks, and now the Will of the People was sweeping past them.
None of our column had a particularly threatening mien; the general demeanour was rather suggestive of joyful expectancy. But, the bridge once crossed, there was a fresh pause at the gates shutting off the steps of the Palais Bourbon. Here infantry were assembled, with their chassepots in readiness. Another very brief but exciting interval ensued. Then the Linesmen were withdrawn, the gates swung open, and everybody rushed up the steps. I was carried hither and thither, and at last from the portico into the building, where I contrived to halt beside one of the statues in the "Salle des Pas Perdus." I looked for my father, but could not see him, and remained wedged in my corner for quite a considerable time. Finally, however, another rush of invaders dislodged me, and I was swept with many others into the Chamber itself. All was uproar and confusion there. Very few deputies were present. The public galleries, the seats of the members, the hemicycle in front of the tribune, were crowded with National Guards. Some were standing on the stenographers' table and on the ushers' chairs below the tribune. There were others on the tribune stairs. And at the tribune itself, with his hat on his head, stood Gambetta, hoarsely shouting, amidst the general din, that Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and his dynasty had for ever ceased to reign. Then, again and again, arose the cry of "Vive la République!" In the twinkling of an eye, however, Gambetta was lost to view—he and other Republican deputies betaking themselves, as I afterwards learnt, to the palace steps, where the dethronement of the Bonapartes was again proclaimed. The invaders of the chamber swarmed after them, and I was watching their departure when I suddenly saw my father quietly leaning back in one of the ministerial seats—perhaps that which, in the past, had been occupied by Billault, Rouher, Ollivier, and other powerful and prominent men of the fallen régime.
At the outset of the proceedings that day Palikao had proposed the formation of a Council of Government and National Defence which was to include five members of the Legislative Body. The ministers were to be appointed by this Council, and he was to be Lieutenant-General of France. It so happened that the more fervent Imperialists had previously offered him a dictatorship, but he had declined it. Jules Favre met the General's proposal by claiming priority for the motion which he had submitted at the midnight sitting, whilst Thiers tried to bring about a compromise by suggesting such a Committee as Palikao had indicated, but placing the choice of its members entirely in the hands of the Legislative Body, omitting all reference to Palikao's Lieutenancy, and, further, setting forth that a Constituent Assembly should be convoked as soon as circumstances might permit. The three proposals—Thiers', Favre's, and Palikao's—were submitted to the bureaux, and whilst these bureaux were deliberating in various rooms the first invasion of the Chamber took place in spite of the efforts of Jules Ferry, who had promised Palikao that the proceedings of the Legislature should not be disturbed. When the sitting was resumed the "invaders," who, at that moment, mainly occupied the galleries, would listen neither to President Schneider nor to their favourite Gambetta, though both appealed to them for silence and order. Jules Favre alone secured a few moments' quietude, during which he begged that there might be no violence. Palikao was present, but did not speak. [Later in the day, after urging Trochu to accept the presidency of the new Government, as otherwise "all might be lost," Palikao quitted Paris for Belgium. He stayed at Namur during the remainder of the war, and afterwards lived in retirement at Versailles, where he died in January, 1878.] Amidst the general confusion came the second invasion of the Chamber, when I was swept off my feet and carried on to the floor of the house. That second invasion precipitated events. Even Gambetta wished the dethronement of the dynasty to be signified by a formal vote, but the "invaders" would brook no delay.
Both of us, my father and I, were tired and thirsty after our unexpected experiences. Accordingly we did not follow the crowd back to the steps overlooking the Place de la Concorde, but, like a good many other people, we went off by way of the Place de Bourgogne. No damage had been done in the Chamber itself, but as we quitted the building we noticed several inscriptions scrawled upon the walls. In some instances the words were merely "Vive la République!" and "Mort aux Prussiens!" At other times, however, they were too disgusting to be set down here. In or near the Rue de Bourgogne we found a fairly quiet wine-shop, where we rested and refreshed ourselves with cannettes of so-called Bière de Strasbourg. We did not go at that moment to the Hôtel-de-Ville, whither a large part of the crowd betook itself by way of the quays, and where the Republic was again proclaimed; but returned to the Place de la Concorde, where some thousands of people still remained. Everybody was looking very animated and very pleased. Everybody imagined that, the Empire being overthrown, France would soon drive back the German invader. All fears for the future seemed, indeed, to have departed. Universal confidence prevailed, and everybody congratulated everybody else. There was, in any case, one good cause for congratulation: the Revolution had been absolutely bloodless—the first and only phenomenon of the kind in all French history.
Whilst we were strolling about the Place de la Concorde I noticed that the chief gate of the Tuileries garden had been forced open and damaged. The gilded eagles which had decorated it had been struck off and pounded to pieces, this, it appeared, having been chiefly the work of an enterprising Turco. A few days later Victorien Sardou wrote an interesting account of how he and others obtained admittance, first to the reserved garden, and then to the palace itself. On glancing towards it I observed that the flag which had still waved over the principal pavilion that morning, had now disappeared. It had been lowered after the departure of the Empress. Of the last hours which she spent in the palace, before she quitted it with Prince Metternich and Count Nigra to seek a momentary refuge at the residence of her dentist, Dr. Evans, I have given a detailed account, based on reliable narratives and documents, in my "Court of the Tuileries."
Quitting, at last, the Place de la Concorde, we strolled slowly homeward. Some tradespeople in the Rue Royale and the Faubourg St. Honoré, former purveyors to the Emperor or the Empress, were already hastily removing the imperial arms from above their shops. That same afternoon and during the ensuing Monday and Tuesday every escutcheon, every initial N, every crown, every eagle, every inscription that recalled the Empire, was removed or obliterated in one or another manner. George Augustus Sala, whose recent adventure confined him to his room at the Grand Hotel, spent most of his time in watching the men who removed the eagles, crowns, and Ns from the then unfinished Opera-house. Even the streets which recalled the imperial regime were hastily renamed. The Avenue de l'Impératrice at once became the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne; and the Rue du Dix-Décembre (so called in memory of Napoleon's assumption of the imperial dignity) was rechristened Rue du Quatre Septembre—this being the "happy thought" of a Zouave, who, mounted on a ladder, set the new name above the old one, whilst the plate bearing the latter was struck off with a hammer by a young workman.
As we went home on the afternoon of that memorable Fourth, we noticed that all the cafés and wine-shops were doing a brisk trade. Neither then nor during the evening, however, did I perceive much actual drunkenness. It was rather a universal jollity, as though some great victory had been gained. Truth to tell, the increase of drunkenness in Paris was an effect of the German Siege of the city, when drink was so plentiful and food so scarce.
My father and I had reached the corner of our street when we witnessed an incident which I have related in detail in the first pages of my book, "Republican France." It was the arrival of Gambetta at the Ministry of the Interior, by way of the Avenue de Marigny, with an escort of red-shirted Francs-tireurs de la Presse. The future Dictator had seven companions with him, all huddled inside or on the roof of a four-wheel cab, which was drawn by two Breton nags. I can still picture him alighting from the vehicle and, in the name of the Republic, ordering a chubby little Linesman, who was mounting guard at the gate of the Ministry, to have the said gate opened; and I can see the sleek and elderly concierge, who had bowed to many an Imperial Minister, complying with the said injunction, and respectfully doffing his tasselled smoking-cap and bending double whilst he admitted his new master. Then the gate is closed, and from behind the finely-wrought ornamental iron-work Gambetta briefly addresses the little throng which has recognized him, saying that the Empire is dead, but that France is wounded, and that her very wounds will inflame her with fresh courage; promising, too, that the whole nation shall be armed; and asking one and all to place confidence in the new Government, even as the latter will place confidence in the people.
In the evening I strolled with my father to the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, where many people were congregated, A fairly large body of National Guards was posted in front of the building, most of whose windows were lighted up. The members of the New Government of National Defence were deliberating there. Trochu had become its President, and Jules Favre its Vice-President and Minister for Foreign Affairs. Henri Rochefort, released that afternoon by his admirers from the prison of Sainte Pélagie, was included in the administration, this being in the main composed of the deputies for Paris. Only one of the latter, the cautious Thiers, refused to join it. He presided, however, that same evening over a gathering of some two hundred members of the moribund Legislative Body, which then made a forlorn attempt to retain some measure of authority, by coming to some agreement with the new Government. But Jules Favre and Jules Simon, who attended the meeting on the latter's behalf, would not entertain the suggestion. It was politely signified to the deputies that their support in Paris was not required, and that if they desired to serve their country in any way, they had better betake themselves to their former constituencies in the provinces. So far as the Legislative Body and the Senate, [Note] also, were concerned, everything ended in a delightful bit of comedy. Not only were the doors of their respective meeting halls looked, but they were "secured" with strips of tape and seals of red wax. The awe with which red sealing-wax inspires Frenchmen is distinctly a trait of the national character. Had there been, however, a real Bonaparte in Paris at that time, he would probably have cut off the aforesaid seals with his sword.
[Note: The Senate, over which Rouher presided, dispensed quietly on hearing of the invasion of the Chamber. The proposal that it should adjourn till more fortunate times emanated from Rouher himself. A few cries of "Vive l'Empereur!" were raised as the assembly dispersed. Almost immediately afterwards, however, most of the Senators, including Rouher, who knew that he was very obnoxious to the Parisians, quitted the city and even France.]
On the morning of September 5, the Charivari—otherwise the daily Parisian Punch—came out with a cartoon designed to sum up the whole period covered by the imperial rule. It depicted France bound hand and foot and placed between the mouths of two cannons, one inscribed "Paris, 1851," and the other "Sedan, 1870"—those names and dates representing the Alpha and Omega of the Second Empire.
IV
FROM REVOLUTION TO SIEGE
The Government of National Defence—The Army of Paris—The Return of Victor Hugo—The German advance on Paris—The National Guard reviewed—Hospitable Preparations for the Germans—They draw nearer still—Departure of Lord Lyons—Our Last Day of Liberty—On the Fortifications—The Bois de Boulogne and our Live Stock—Mass before the Statue of Strasbourg—Devout Breton Mobiles—Evening on the Boulevards and in the Clubs—Trochu and Ducrot—The Fight and Panic of Chatillon—The Siege begins.
As I shall have occasion in these pages to mention a good many members of the self-constituted Government which succeeded the Empire, it may be as well for me to set down here their names and the offices they held. I have already mentioned that Trochu was President, and Jules Favre Vice-President, of the new administration. The former also retained his office as Governor of Paris, and at the same time became Generalissimo. Favre, for his part, took the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. With him and Trochu were Gambetta, Minister of the Interior; Jules Simon, Minister of Public Instruction; Adolphe Crémieux, Minister of Justice; Ernest Picard, Minister of Finance; Jules Ferry, Secretary-General to the Government, and later Mayor of Paris; and Henri Rochefort, President of the Committee of Barricades. Four of their colleagues, Emmanuel Arago, Garnier-Pagès, Eugène Pelletan, and Glais-Bizoin, did not take charge of any particular administrative departments, the remainder of these being allotted to men whose co-operation was secured. For instance, old General Le Flô became Minister of War—under Trochu, however, and not over him. Vice-Admiral Fourichon was appointed Minister of Marine; Magnin, an iron-master, became Minister of Commerce and Agriculture; Frédéric Dorian, another iron-master, took the department of Public Works; Count Emile de Kératry acted as Prefect of Police, and Etienne Arago, in the earlier days, as Mayor of Paris.
The new Government was fully installed by Tuesday, September 6. It had already issued several more or less stirring proclamations, which were followed by a despatch which Jules Favre addressed to the French diplomatic representatives abroad. As a set-off to the arrival of a number of dejected travel-stained fugitives from MacMahon's army, whose appearance was by no means of a nature to exhilarate the Parisians, the defence was reinforced by a large number of Gardes Mobiles, who poured into the city, particularly from Brittany, Trochu's native province, and by a considerable force of regulars, infantry, cavalry, and artillery, commanded by the veteran General Vinoy (then seventy years of age), who had originally been despatched to assist MacMahon, but, having failed to reach him before the disaster of Sedan, retreated in good order on the capital. At the time when the Siege actually commenced there were in Paris about 90,000 regulars (including all arms and categories), 110,000 Mobile Guards, and a naval contingent of 13,500 men, that is a force of 213,000, in addition to the National Guards, who were about 280,000 in number. Thus, altogether, nearly half a million armed men were assembled in Paris for the purpose of defending it. As all authorities afterwards admitted, this was a very great blunder, as fully 100,000 regulars and mobiles might have been spared to advantage for service in the provinces. Of course the National Guards themselves could not be sent away from the city, though they were often an encumbrance rather than a help, and could not possibly have carried on the work of defence had they been left to their own resources.
Besides troops, so long as the railway trains continued running, additional military stores and supplies of food, flour, rice, biscuits, preserved meats, rolled day by day into Paris. At the same time, several illustrious exiles returned to the capital. Louis Blanc and Edgar Quinet arrived there, after years of absence, in the most unostentatious fashion, though they soon succumbed to the prevailing mania of inditing manifestoes and exhortations for the benefit of their fellow-countrymen. Victor Hugo's return was more theatrical. In those famous "Châtiments" in which he had so severely flagellated the Third Napoleon (after, in earlier years, exalting the First to the dignity of a demi-god), he had vowed to keep out of France and to protest against the Empire so long as it lasted, penning, in this connection, the famous line:
"Et s'il n'en reste qu'un, je serai celui-là!"
But now the Empire had fallen, and so Hugo returned in triumph to Paris. When he alighted from the train which brought him, he said to those who had assembled to give him a fitting greeting, that he had come to do his duty in the hour of danger, that duty being to save Paris, which meant more than saving France, for it implied saving the world itself—Paris being the capital of civilization, the centre of mankind. Naturally enough, those fine sentiments were fervently applauded by the great poet's admirers, and when he had installed himself with his companions in an open carriage, two or three thousand people escorted him processionally along the Boulevards. It was night-time, and the cafés were crowded and the footways covered with promenaders as the cortége went by, the escort singing now the "Marseillaise" and now the "Chant du Départ," whilst on every side shouts of "Vive Victor Hugo!" rang out as enthusiastically as if the appointed "Saviour of Paris" were indeed actually passing. More than once I saw the illustrious poet stand up, uncover, and wave his hat in response to the acclamations, and I then particularly noticed the loftiness of his forehead, and the splendid crop of white hair with which it was crowned. Hugo, at that time sixty-eight years old, still looked vigorous, but it was beyond the power of any such man as himself to save the city from what was impending. All he could do was to indite perfervid manifestoes, and subsequently, in "L'Année terrible," commemorate the doings and sufferings of the time. For the rest, he certainly enrolled himself as a National Guard, and I more than once caught sight of him wearing képi and vareuse. I am not sure, however, whether he ever did a "sentry-go."
It must have been on the day following Victor Hugo's arrival that I momentarily quitted Paris for reasons in which my youthful but precocious heart was deeply concerned. I was absent for four days or so, and on returning to the capital I was accompanied by my stepmother, who, knowing that my father intended to remain in the city during the impending siege, wished to be with him for a while before the investment began. I recollect that she even desired to remain with us, though that was impossible, as she had young children, whom she had left at Saint Servan; and, besides, as I one day jocularly remarked to her, she would, by staying in Paris, have added to the "useless mouths," whose numbers the Republican, like the Imperial, Government was, with very indifferent success, striving to diminish. However, she only quitted us at the last extremity, departing on the evening of September 17, by the Western line, which, on the morrow, the enemy out at Conflans, some fourteen miles from Paris.
Day by day the Parisians had received news of the gradual approach of the German forces. On the 8th they heard that the Crown Prince of Prussia's army was advancing from Montmirail to Coulommiers—whereupon the city became very restless; whilst on the 9th there came word that the black and white pennons of the ubiquitous Uhlans had been seen at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. That same day Thiers quitted Paris on a mission which he had undertaken for the new Government, that of pleading the cause of France at the Courts of London, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Rome. Then, on the 11th, there were tidings that Laon had capitulated, though not without its defenders blowing up a powder-magazine and thereby injuring some German officers of exalted rank—for which reason the deed was enthusiastically commended by the Parisian Press, though it would seem to have been a somewhat treacherous one, contrary to the ordinary usages of war. On the 12th some German scouts reached Meaux, and a larger force leisurely occupied Melun. The French, on their part, were busy after a fashion. They offered no armed resistance to the German advance, but they tried to impede it in sundry ways. With the idea of depriving the enemy of "cover," various attempts were made to fire some of the woods in the vicinity of Paris, whilst in order to cheat him of supplies, stacks and standing crops were here and there destroyed. Then, too, several railway and other bridges were blown up, including the railway bridge at Creil, so that direct communication with Boulogne and Calais ceased on September 12.
The 13th was a great day for the National Guards, who were then reviewed by General Trochu. With my father and my young stepmother, I went to see the sight, which was in many respects an interesting one. A hundred and thirty-six battalions, or approximately 180,000 men, of the so-called "citizen soldiery" were under arms; their lines extending, first, along the Boulevards from the Bastille to the Madeleine, then down the Rue Royale, across the Place de la Concorde and up the Champs Elysées as far as the Rond Point. In addition, 100,000 men of the Garde Mobile were assembled along the quays of the Seine and up the Champs Elysées from the Rond Point to the Arc de Triomphe. I have never since set eyes on so large a force of armed men. They were of all sorts. Some of the Mobiles, notably the Breton ones, who afterwards gave a good account of themselves, looked really soldierly; but the National Guards were a strangely mixed lot. They all wore képis, but quite half of them as yet had no uniforms, and were attired in blouses and trousers of various hues. Only here and there could one see a man of military bearing; most of them struck happy-go-lucky attitudes, and were quite unable to keep step in marching. A particular feature of the display was the number of flowers and sprigs of evergreen with which the men had decorated the muzzles of the fusils-à-tabatière which they mostly carried. Here and there, moreover, one and another fellow displayed on his bayonet-point some coloured caricature of the ex-Emperor or the ex-Empress. What things they were, those innumerable caricatures of the months which followed the Revolution! Now and again there appeared one which was really clever, which embodied a smart, a witty idea; but how many of them were simply the outcome of a depraved, a lewd, a bestial imagination! The most offensive caricatures of Marie-Antoinette were as nothing beside those levelled at that unfortunate woman, the Empress Eugénie.
Our last days of liberty were now slipping by. Some of the poorest folk of the environs of Paris were at last coming into the city, bringing their chattels with them. Strange ideas, however, had taken hold of some of the more simple-minded suburban bourgeois. Departing hastily into the provinces, so as to place their skins out of harm's reach, they had not troubled to store their household goods in the city; but had left them in their coquettish villas and pavilions, the doors of which were barely looked. The German soldiers would very likely occupy the houses, but assuredly they would do no harm to them. "Perhaps, however, it might be as well to propitiate the foreign soldiers. Let us leave something for them," said worthy Monsieur Durand to Madame Durand, his wife; "they will be hungry when they get here, and if they find something ready for them they will be grateful and do no damage." So, although the honest Durands carefully barred—at times even walled-up—their cellars of choice wines, they arranged that plenty of bottles, at times even a cask, of vin ordinaire should be within easy access; and ham, cheese, sardines, saucissons de Lyon, and patés de foie gras were deposited in the pantry cupboards, which were considerately left unlocked in order that the good, mild-mannered, honest Germans (who, according to a proclamation issued by "Unser Fritz" at an earlier stage of the hostilities, "made war on the Emperor Napoleon and not on the French nation") might regale themselves without let or hindrance. Moreover, the nights were "drawing in," the evenings becoming chilly; so why not lay the fires, and place matches and candles in convenient places for the benefit of the unbidden guests who would so soon arrive? All those things being done, M. and Mme. Durand departed to seek the quietude of Fouilly-les-Oies, never dreaming that on their return to Montfermeil, Palaiseau, or Sartrouville, they would find their salon converted into a pigstye, their furniture smashed, and their clocks and chimney-ornaments abstracted. Of course the M. Durand of to-day knows what happened to his respected parents; he knows what to think of the good, honest, considerate German soldiery; and, if he can help it, he will not in any similar case leave so much as a wooden spoon to be carried off to the Fatherland, and added as yet another trophy to the hundred thousand French clocks and the million French nick-nacks which are still preserved there as mementoes of the "grosse Zeit."
On September 15, we heard of some petty skirmishes between Uhlans and Francs-tireurs in the vicinity of Montereau and Melun; on the morrow the enemy captured a train at Senlis, and fired on another near Chantilly, fortunately without wounding any of the passengers; whilst on the same day his presence was signalled at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, only ten miles south of Paris. That evening, moreover, he attempted to ford the Seine at Juvisy. On the 16th some of his forces appeared between Créteil and Neuilly-sur-Marne, on the eastern side of the city, and only some five miles from the fort of Vincennes. Then we again heard of him on the south—of his presence at Brunoy, Ablon, and Athis, and of the pontoons by which he was crossing the Seine at Villeneuve and Choisy-le-Roi.
Thus the advance steadily continued, quite unchecked by force of arms, save for just a few trifling skirmishes initiated by sundry Francs-tireurs. Not a road, not a barricade, was defended by the authorities; not once was the passage of a river contested. Here and there the Germans found obstructions: poplars had been felled and laid across a highway, bridges and railway tunnels had occasionally been blown up; but all such impediments to their advance were speedily overcome by the enemy, who marched on quietly, feeling alternately puzzled and astonished at never being confronted by any French forces. As the invaders drew nearer to Paris they found an abundance of vegetables and fruit at their disposal, but most of the peasantry had fled, taking their live stock with them, and, as a German officer told me in after years, eggs, cheese, butter, and milk could seldom be procured.
On the 17th the French began to recover from the stupor which seemed to have fallen on them. Old General Vinoy crossed the Marne at Charenton with some of his forces, and a rather sharp skirmish ensued in front of the village of Mesly. That same day Lord Lyons, the British Ambassador, took his departure from Paris, proceeding by devious ways to Tours, whither, a couple of days previously, three delegates of the National Defence—two septuagenarians and one sexagenarian, Crémieux, Glais-Bizoin, and Fourichon—had repaired in order to take over the general government of France. Lord Lyons had previously told Jules Favre that he intended to remain in the capital, but I believe that his decision was modified by instructions from London. With him went most of the Embassy staff, British interests in Paris remaining in the hands of the second secretary, Mr. Wodehouse, and the vice-consul. The consul himself had very prudently quitted Paris, in order "to drink the waters," some time previously. Colonel Claremont, the military attaché, still remained with us, but by degrees, as the siege went on, the Embassy staff dwindled down to the concierge and two—or was it four?—sheep browsing on the lawn. Mr. Wodehouse went off (my father and myself being among those who accompanied him, as I shall relate in a future chapter) towards the middle of November; and before the bombardment began Colonel Claremont likewise executed a strategical retreat. Nevertheless—or should I say for that very reason?—he was subsequently made a general officer.
A day or two before Lord Lyons left he drew up a notice warning British subjects that if they should remain in Paris it would be at their own risk and peril. The British colony was not then so large as it is now, nevertheless it was a considerable one. A good many members of it undoubtedly departed on their own initiative. Few, if any, saw Lord Lyons's notice, for it was purely and simply conveyed to them through the medium of Galignani's Messenger, which, though it was patronized by tourists staying at the hotels, was seldom seen by genuine British residents, most of whom read London newspapers.
The morrow of Lord Lyons's departure, Sunday, September 18, was our last day of liberty. The weather was splendid, the temperature as warm as that of June. All Paris was out of doors. We were not without women-folk and children. Not only were there the wives and offspring of the working-classes; but the better halves of many tradespeople and bourgeois had remained in the city, together with a good many ladies of higher social rank. Thus, in spite of all the departures, "papa, mamma, and baby" were still to be met in many directions on that last day preceding the investment. There were gay crowds everywhere, on the Boulevards, on the squares, along the quays, and along the roads skirting the ramparts. These last were the "great attraction," and thousands of people strolled about watching the work which was in progress. Stone casements were being roofed with earth, platforms were being prepared for guns, gabions were being set in position at the embrasures, sandbags were being carried to the parapets, stakes were being pointed for the many pièges-à-loups, and smooth earthworks were being planted with an infinity of spikes. Some guns were already in position, others, big naval guns from Brest or Cherbourg, were still lying on the turf. Meanwhile, at the various city gates, the very last vehicles laden with furniture and forage were arriving from the suburbs. And up and down went all the promenaders, chatting, laughing, examining this and that work of defence or engine of destruction in such a good-humoured, light-hearted way that the whole chemin-de-ronde seemed to be a vast fair, held solely for the amusement of the most volatile people that the world has ever known.
Access to the Bois de Boulogne was forbidden. Acres of timber had already been felled there, and from the open spaces the mild September breeze occasionally wafted the lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep, and the grunting of pigs. Our live stock consisted of 30,000 oxen, 175,000 sheep, 8,800 pigs, and 6,000 milch-cows. Little did we think how soon those animals (apart from the milch-cows) would be consumed! Few of us were aware that, according to Maxime Ducamp's great work on Paris, we had hitherto consumed, on an average, every day of the year, 935 oxen, 4680 sheep, 570 pigs, and 600 calves, to say nothing of 46,000 head of poultry, game, etc., 50 tons of fish, and 670,000 eggs.
Turning from the Bois de Boulogne, which had become our principal ranch and sheep-walk, one found companies of National Guards learning the "goose-step" in the Champs Elysées and the Cours-la-Reine. Regulars were appropriately encamped both in the Avenue de la Grande Armée and on the Champ de Mars. Field-guns and caissons filled the Tuileries garden, whilst in the grounds of the Luxembourg Palace one again found cattle and sheep; yet other members of the bovine and ovine species being installed, singularly enough, almost cheek by jowl with the hungry wild beasts of the Jardin des Plantes, whose mouths fairly watered at the sight of their natural prey. If you followed the quays of the Seine you there found sightseers gazing at the little gunboats and floating batteries on the water; and if you climbed to Montmartre you there came upon people watching "The Neptune," the captive balloon which Nadar, the aeronaut and photographer, had already provided for purposes of military observation. I shall have occasion to speak of him and his balloons again.
Among all that I myself saw on that memorable Sunday, I was perhaps most struck by the solemn celebration of Mass in front of the statue of Strasbourg on the Place de la Concorde. The capital of Alsace had been besieged since the middle of August, but was still offering a firm resistance to the enemy. Its chief defenders, General Uhrich and Edmond Valentin, were the most popular heroes of the hour. The latter had been appointed Prefect of the city by the Government of National Defence, and, resolving to reach his post in spite of the siege which was being actively prosecuted, had disguised himself and passed successfully through the German lines, escaping the shots which were fired at him. In Paris the statue of Strasbourg had become a place of pilgrimage, a sacred shrine, as it were, adorned with banners and with wreaths innumerable. Yet I certainly had not expected to see an altar set up and Mass celebrated in front of it, as if it had been, indeed, a statue of the Blessed Virgin.
At this stage of affairs there was no general hostility to the Church in Paris. The bourgeoisie—I speak of its masculine element—was as sceptical then as it is now, but it knew that General Trochu, in whom it placed its trust, was a practising and fervent Catholic, and that in taking the Presidency of the Government he had made it one of his conditions that religion should be respected. Such animosity as was shown against the priesthood emanated from some of the public clubs where the future Communards perorated. It was only as time went on, and the defence grew more and more hopeless, that Trochu himself was denounced as a cagot and a souteneur de soutanes; and not until the Commune did the Extremists give full rein to their hatred of the Church and its ministers.
In connection with religion, there was another sight which impressed me on that same Sunday. I was on the point of leaving the Place de la Concorde when a large body of Mobiles debouched either from the Rue Royale or the Rue de Rivoli, and I noticed, with some astonishment, that not only were they accompanied by their chaplains, but that they bore aloft several processional religious banners. They were Bretons, and had been to Mass, I ascertained, at the church of Notre Dame des Victoires—the favourite church of the Empress Eugénie, who often attended early Mass there—and were now returning to their quarters in the arches of the railway viaduct of the Point-du-Jour. Many people uncovered as they thus went by processionally, carrying on high their banners of the Virgin, she who is invoked by the Catholic soldier as "Auzilium Christianorum." For a moment my thoughts strayed back to Brittany, where, during my holidays the previous year, I had witnessed the "Pardon" of Guingamp,
In the evening I went to the Boulevards with my father, and we afterwards dropped into one or two of the public clubs. The Boulevard promenaders had a good deal to talk about. General Ambert, who under the Empire had been mayor of our arrondissement, had fallen out with his men, through speaking contemptuously of the Republic, and after being summarily arrested by some of them, had been deprived of his command. Further, the Official Journal had published a circular addressed by Bismarck to the German diplomatists abroad, in which he stated formally that if France desired peace she would have to give "material guarantees." That idea, however, was vigorously pooh-poohed by the Boulevardiers, particularly as rumours of sudden French successes, originating nobody knew how, were once more in the air. Scandal, however, secured the attention of many of the people seated in the cafés, for the Rappel—Victor Hugo's organ—had that day printed a letter addressed to Napoleon III by his mistress Marguerite Bellenger, who admitted in it that she had deceived her imperial lover with respect to the paternity of her child.
However, we went, my father and I, from the Boulevards to the Folies-Bergere, which had been turned for the time into a public club, and there we listened awhile to Citizen Lermina, who, taking Thiers's mission and Bismarck's despatch as his text, protested against France concluding any peace or even any armistice so long as the Germans had not withdrawn across the frontier. There was still no little talk of that description. The old agitator Auguste Blanqui—long confined in one of the cages of Mont Saint-Michel, but now once more in Paris—never wearied of opposing peace in the discourses that he delivered at his own particular club, which, like the newspaper he inspired, was called "La Patrie en Danger." In other directions, for instance at the Club du Maine, the Extremists were already attacking the new Government for its delay in distributing cartridges to the National Guards, being, no doubt, already impatient to seize authority themselves.
Whilst other people were promenading or perorating, Trochu, in his room at the Louvre, was receiving telegram after telegram informing him that the Germans were now fast closing round the city. He himself, it appears, had no idea of preventing it; but at the urgent suggestion of his old friend and comrade General Ducrot, he had consented that an effort should be made to delay, at any rate, a complete investment. In an earlier chapter I had occasion to mention Ducrot in connexion with the warnings which Napoleon III received respecting the military preparations of Prussia. At this time, 1870, the general was fifty-three years old, and therefore still in his prime. As commander of a part of MacMahon's forces he had distinguished himself at the battle of Wörth, and when the Marshal was wounded at Sedan, it was he who, by right of seniority, at first assumed command of the army, being afterwards compelled, however, to relinquish the poet to Wimpfen, in accordance with an order from Palikao which Wimpfen produced. Included at the capitulation, among the prisoners taken by the Germans, Ducrot subsequently escaped—the Germans contending that he had broken his parole in doing so, though this does not appear to have been the case. Immediately afterwards he repaired to Paris to place himself at Trochu's disposal. At Wörth he had suggested certain tactics which might have benefited the French army; at Sedan he had wished to make a supreme effort to cut through the German lines; and now in Paris he proposed to Trochu a plan which if successful might, he thought, retard the investment and momentarily cut the German forces in halves.
In attempting to carry out this scheme (September 19) Ducrot took with him most of Vinoy's corps, that is four divisions of infantry, some cavalry, and no little artillery, having indeed, according to his own account, seventy-two guns with him. The action was fought on the plateau of Châtillon (south of Paris), where the French had been constructing a redoubt, which was still, however, in a very unfinished state. At daybreak that morning all the districts of Paris lying on the left bank of the Seine were roused by the loud booming of guns. The noise was at times almost deafening, and it is certain that the French fired a vast number of projectiles, though, assuredly, the number—25,000—given in a copy of the official report which I have before me must be a clerical error. In any case, the Germans replied with an even more terrific fire than that of the French, and, as had previously happened at Sedan and elsewhere, the French ordnance proved to be no match for that emanating from Krupp's renowned workshops. The French defeat was, however, precipitated by a sudden panic which arose among a provisional regiment of Zouaves, who suddenly turned tail and fled. Panic is often, if not always, contagious, and so it proved to be on this occasion. Though some of the Gardes Mobiles, notably the Bretons of Ile-et-Vilaine, fought well, thanks to the support of the artillery (which is so essential in the case of untried troops), other men weakened, and imitated the example of the Zouaves. Duorot soon realized that it was useless to prolong the encounter, and after spiking the guns set up in the Châtillon redoubt, he retired under the protection of the Forts of Vanves and Montrouge.
My father and I had hastened to the southern side of Paris as soon as the cannonade apprised us that an engagement was going on. Pitiful was the spectacle presented by the disbanded soldiers as they rushed down the Chaussée du Maine. Many had flung away their weapons. Some went on dejectedly; others burst into wine-shops, demanded drink with threats, and presently emerged swearing, cursing and shouting, "Nous sommes trahis!" Riderless horses went by, instinctively following the men, and here and there one saw a bewildered and indignant officer, whose orders were scouted with jeers. The whole scene was of evil augury for the defence of Paris.
At a later hour, when we reached the Boulevards, we found the wildest rumours in circulation there. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but there was talk of 20,000 French troops having been annihilated by five times that number of Germans. At last a proclamation emanating from Gambetta was posted up and eagerly perused. It supplied no details of the fighting, but urged the Parisians to give way neither to excitement nor to despondency, and reminded them that a court-martial had been instituted to deal with cowards and deserters. Thereupon the excitement seemed to subside, and people went to dinner. An hour afterwards the Boulevards were as gay as ever, thronged once more with promenaders, among whom were many officers of the Garde Mobile and the usual regiment of painted women. Cynicism and frivolity were once more the order of the day. But in the midst of it there came an unexpected incident. Some of the National Guards of the district were not unnaturally disgusted by the spectacle which the Boulevards presented only a few hours after misfortune had fallen on the French arms. Forming, therefore, into a body, they marched along, loudly calling upon the cafés to close. Particularly were they indignant when, on reaching Brébant's Restaurant at the corner of the Faubourg Montmartre, they heard somebody playing a lively Offenbachian air on a piano there. A party of heedless viveurs and demoiselles of the half-world were enjoying themselves together as in the palmy imperial days. But the piano was soon silenced, the cafés and restaurants were compelled to close, and the Boulevardian world went home in a slightly chastened mood. The Siege of Paris had begun.
V
BESIEGED
The Surrender of Versailles—Captain Johnson, Queen's Messenger—No more
Paris Fashions!—Prussians versus Germans—Bismarck's Hard Terms for
Peace—Attempts to pass through the German Lines—Chartreuse Verte as an
Explosive!—Tommy Webb's Party and the Germans—Couriers and Early
Balloons—Our Arrangements with Nadar—Gambetta's Departure and Balloon
Journey—The Amusing Verses of Albert Millaud—Siege Jokes and Satire—The
Spy and Signal Craze—Amazons to the Rescue!
It was at one o'clock on the afternoon of September 19 that the telegraph wires between Paris and Versailles, the last which linked us to the outside world, were suddenly cut by the enemy; the town so closely associated with the Grand Monarque and his magnificence having then surrendered to a very small force of Germans, although it had a couple of thousand men—Mobile and National Guards—to defend it. The capitulation which was arranged between the mayor and the enemy was flagrantly violated by the latter almost as soon as it had been concluded, tins being only one of many such instances which occurred during the war. Versailles was required to provide the invader with a number of oxen, to be slaughtered for food, numerous casks of wine, the purpose of which was obvious, and a large supply of forage valued at £12,000. After all, however, that was a mere trifle in comparison with what the present Kaiser's forces would probably demand on landing at Hull or Grimsby or Harwich, should they some day do so. By the terms of the surrender of Versailles, however, the local National Guards were to have remained armed and entrusted with the internal police of the town, and, moreover, there were to have been no further requisitions. But Bismarck and Moltke pooh-poohed all such stipulations, and the Versaillese had to submit to many indignities.
In Paris that day the National Defence Government was busy in various ways, first in imposing fines, according to an ascending scale, on all absentees who ought to have remained in the city and taken their share of military duty; and, secondly, in decreeing that nobody with any money lodged in the Savings Bank should be entitled to draw out more than fifty francs, otherwise two pounds, leaving the entire balance of his or her deposit at the Government's disposal. This measure provoked no little dissatisfaction. It was also on September 19, the first day of the siege, that the last diplomatic courier entered Paris. I well remember the incident. Whilst I was walking along the Faubourg Saint Honoré I suddenly perceived an open calèche, drawn by a pair of horses, bestriding one of which was a postillion arrayed in the traditional costume—hair à la Catogan, jacket with scarlet facings, gold-banded hat, huge boots, and all the other appurtenances which one saw during long years on the stage in Adolphe Adam's sprightly but "impossible" opéra-comique "Le Postillon de Longjumeau." For an instant, indeed, I felt inclined to hum the famous refrain, "Oh, oh, oh, oh, qu'il était beau"—but many National Guards and others regarded the equipage with great suspicion, particularly as it was occupied by on individual in semi-military attire. Quite a number of people decided in their own minds that this personage must be a Prussian spy, and therefore desired to stop his carriage and march him off to prison. As a matter of fact, however, he was a British officer, Captain Johnson, discharging the duties of a Queen's Messenger; and as he repeatedly flourished a cane in a very menacing manner, and the door-porter of the British Embassy—a German, I believe—energetically came to his assistance, he escaped actual molestation, and drove in triumph into the courtyard of the ambassadorial mansion.
At this time a great shock was awaiting the Parisians. During the same week the Vicomtesse de Renneville issued an announcement stating that in presence of the events which were occurring she was constrained to suspend the publication of her renowned journal of fashions, La Gazette Rose. This was a tragic blow both for the Parisians themselves and for all the world beyond them. There would be no more Paris fashions! To what despair would not millions of women be reduced? How would they dress, even supposing that they should contrive to dress at all? The thought was appalling; and as one and another great couturier closed his doors, Paris began to realize that her prestige was indeed in jeopardy.
A day or two after the investment the city became very restless on account of Thiers's mission to foreign Courts and Jules Favre's visit to the German headquarters, it being reported by the extremists that the Government did not intend to be a Government of National Defence but one of Capitulation. In reply to those rumours the authorities issued the famous proclamation in which they said;
"The Government's policy is that formulated in these terms:
Not an Inch of our Territory.
Not a Stone of our Fortresses.
The Government will maintain it to the end."
On the morrow, September 21, Gambetta personally reminded us that it was the seventy-eighth anniversary of the foundation of the first French Republic, and, after recalling to the Parisians what their fathers had then accomplished, he exhorted them to follow that illustrious example, and to "secure victory by confronting death." That same evening the clubs decided that a great demonstration should be made on the morrow by way of insisting that no treaty should be discussed until the Germans had been driven out of France, that no territory, fort, vessel, or treasure should be surrendered, that all elections should be adjourned, and that a levée en masse should be decreed. Jules Favre responded that he and his colleagues personified Defence and not Surrender, and Rochefort—poor Rochefort!—solemnly promised that the barricades of Paris should be begun that very night. That undertaking mightily pleased the agitators, though the use of the said barricades was not apparent; and the demonstrators dispersed with the usual shouts of "Vive la République! Mort aux Prussiens!"
In connexion with that last cry it was a curious circumstance that from the beginning to the end of the war the French persistently ignored the presence of Saxons, Würtembergers, Hessians, Badeners, and so forth in the invading armies. Moreover, on only one or two occasions (such as the Bazeilles episode of the battle of Sedan) did they evince any particular animosity against the Bavarians. I must have heard "Death to the Prussians!" shouted at least a thousand times; but most certainly I never once heard a single cry of "Death to the Germans!" Still in the same connexion, let me mention that it was in Paris, during the siege, that the eminent naturalist and biologist Quatrefages de Bréau wrote that curious little book of his, "La Race Prussienne," in which he contended that the Prussians were not Germans at all. There was at least some measure of truth in the views which he enunciated.
As I previously indicated, Jules Favre, the Foreign Minister of the National Defence, had gone to the German headquarters in order to discuss the position with Prince (then Count) Bismarck. He met him twice, first at the Comte de Rillac's Château de la Haute Maison, and secondly at Baron de Rothschild's Château de Ferrières—the German staff usually installing itself in the lordly "pleasure-houses" of the French noble or financial aristocracy, and leaving them as dirty as possible, and, naturally, bereft of their timepieces. Baron Alphonse de Rothschild told me in later years that sixteen clocks were carried off from Ferrières whilst King (afterwards the Emperor) William and Bismarck were staying there. I presume that they now decorate some of the salons of the schloss at Berlin, or possibly those of Varzin and Friedrichsruhe. Bismarck personally had an inordinate passion for clocks, as all who ever visited his quarters in the Wilhelmstrasse, when he was German Chancellor, will well remember.
But he was not content with the clocks of Ferrières. He told Jules Favre that if France desired peace she must surrender the two departments of the Upper and the Lower Rhine, a part of the department of the Moselle, together with Metz, Chateau Salins, and Soissons; and he would only grant an armistice (to allow of the election of a French National Assembly to decide the question of War or Peace) on condition that the Germans should occupy Strasbourg, Toul, and Phalsburg, together with a fortress, such as Mont Valerien, commanding the city of Paris. Such conditions naturally stiffened the backs of the French, and for a time there was no more talk of negotiating.
During the earlier days of the Siege of Paris I came into contact with various English people who, having delayed their departure until it was too late, found themselves shut up in the city, and were particularly anxious to depart from it. The British Embassy gave them no help in the matter. Having issued its paltry notice in Galignani's Messenger, it considered that there was no occasion for it to do anything further. Moreover, Great Britain had not recognized the French Republic, so that the position of Mr. Wodehouse was a somewhat difficult one. However, a few "imprisoned" Englishmen endeavoured to escape from the city by devices of their own. Two of them who set out together, fully expecting to get through the German lines and then reach a convenient railway station, followed the course of the Seine for several miles without being able to cross it, and in spite of their waving pocket-handkerchiefs (otherwise flags of truce) and their constant shouts of "English! Friends!" and so forth, were repeatedly fired at by both French and German outposts. At last they reached Rueil, where the villagers, on noticing how bad their French was, took them to be Prussian spies, and nearly lynched them. Fortunately, the local commissary of police believed their story, and they were sent back to Paris to face the horseflesh and the many other hardships which they had particularly desired to avoid.
I also remember the representative of a Birmingham small-arms factory telling me of his unsuccessful attempt to escape. He had lingered in Paris in the hope of concluding a contract with the new Republican Government. Not having sufficient money to charter a balloon, and the Embassy, as usual at that time, refusing any help (O shades of Palmerston!), he set out as on a walking-tour with a knapsack strapped to his shoulders and an umbrella in his hand. His hope was to cross the Seine by the bridge of Saint Cloud or that of Suresnes, but he failed in both attempts, and was repeatedly fired upon by vigilant French outposts. After losing his way in the Bois de Boulogne, awakening both the cattle and the sheep there in the course of his nightly ramble, he at last found one of the little huts erected to shelter the gardeners and wood-cutters, and remained there until daybreak, when he was able to take his bearings and proceed towards the Auteuil gate of the ramparts. As he did not wish to be fired upon again, he deemed it expedient to hoist his pocket handkerchief at the end of his umbrella as a sign of his pacific intentions, and finding the gate open and the drawbridge down, he attempted to enter the city, but was immediately challenged by the National Guards on duty. These vigilant patriots observed his muddy condition—the previous day had been a wet one—and suspiciously inquired where he had come from at that early hour. His answer being given in broken French and in a very embarrassed manner, he was at once regarded as a Prussian spy, and dragged off to the guard-room. There he was carefully searched, and everything in his pockets having been taken from him, including a small bottle which the sergeant on duty regarded with grave suspicion, he was told that his after-fate would be decided when the commanding officer of that particular secteur of the ramparts made his rounds.
When this officer arrived he closely questioned the prisoner, who tried to explain his circumstances, and protested that his innocence was shown by the British passport and other papers which had been taken from him. "Oh! papers prove nothing!" was the prompt retort. "Spies are always provided with papers. But, come, I have proof that you are an unmitigated villain!" So saying, the officer produced the small bottle which had been taken from the unfortunate traveller, and added: "You see this? You had it in your pocket. Now, don't attempt to deceive me, for I know very well what is the nature of the green liquid which it contains—it is a combustible fluid with which you wanted to set fire to our chevaux-de-frise!"
Denials and protests were in vain. The officer refused to listen to his prisoner until the latter at last offered to drink some of the terrible fluid in order to prove that it was not at all what it was supposed to be. With a little difficulty the tight-fitting cork was removed from the flask, and on the latter being handed to the prisoner he proceeded to imbibe some of its contents, the officer, meanwhile, retiring to a short distance, as if he imagined that the alleged "spy" would suddenly explode. Nothing of that kind happened, however. Indeed, the prisoner drank the terrible stuff with relish, smacked his lips, and even prepared to take a second draught, when the officer, feeling reassured, again drew near to him and expressed his willingness to sample the suspected fluid himself. He did so, and at once discovered that it was purely and simply some authentic Chartreuse verte! It did not take the pair of them long to exhaust this supply of the liqueur of St. Bruno, and as soon as this was done, the prisoner was set at liberty with profuse apologies.
Now and again some of those who attempted to leave the beleaguered city succeeded in their attempt. In one instance a party of four or five Englishmen ran the blockade in the traditional carriage and pair. They had been staying at the Grand Hotel, where another seven or eight visitors, including Labouchere, still remained, together with about the same number of servants to wait upon them; the famous caravanserai—then undoubtedly the largest in Paris—being otherwise quite untenanted. The carriage in which the party I have mentioned took their departure was driven by an old English jockey named Tommy Webb, who had been in France for nearly half a century, and had ridden the winners of some of the very first races started by the French Jockey Club. Misfortune had overtaken him, however, in his declining years, and he had become a mere Parisian "cabby." The party sallied forth from the courtyard of the Grand Hotel, taking with it several huge hampers of provisions and a quantity of other luggage; and all the participants in the attempt seemed to be quite confident of success. But a few hours later they returned in sore disappointment, having been stopped near Neuilly by the French outposts, as they were unprovided with any official laisser-passer. A document of that description having been obtained, however, from General Trochu on the morrow, a second attempt was made, and this time the party speedily passed through the French lines. But in trying to penetrate those of the enemy, some melodramatic adventures occurred. It became necessary, indeed, to dodge both the bullets of the Germans and those of the French Francs-tireurs, who paid not the slightest respect either to the Union Jack or to the large white flag which were displayed on either side of Tommy Webb's box-seat. At last, after a variety of mishaps, the party succeeded in parleying with a German cavalry officer, and after they had addressed a written appeal to the Crown Prince of Prussia (who was pleased to grant it), they were taken, blindfolded, to Versailles, where Blumenthal, the Crown Prince's Chief of Staff, asked them for information respecting the actual state of Paris, and then allowed them to proceed on their way.
Captain Johnson, the Queen's Messenger of whom I have already spoken, also contrived to quit Paris again; but the Germans placed him under strict surveillance, and Blumenthal told him that no more Queen's Messengers would be allowed to pass through the German lines. About this same time, however, the English man-servant of one of Trochu's aides-de-camp contrived, not only to reach Saint Germain-en-Laye, where his master's family was residing, but also to return to Paris with messages. This young fellow had cleverly disguised himself as a French peasant, and on the Prefect of Police hearing of his adventures, he sent out several detectives in similar disguises, with instructions to ascertain all they could about the enemy, and report the same to him. Meantime, the Paris Post Office was endeavouring to send out couriers. One of them, named Létoile, managed to get as far as Evreux, in Normandy, and to return to the beleaguered city with a couple of hundred letters. Success also repeatedly attended the efforts of two shrewd fellows named Gême and Brare, who made several journeys to Saint Germain, Triel, and even Orleans. On one occasion they brought as many as seven hundred letters with them on their return to Paris; but between twenty and thirty other couriers failed to get through the German lines; whilst several others fell into the hands of the enemy, who at once confiscated the correspondence they carried, but did not otherwise molest them.
The difficulty in sending letters out of Paris and in obtaining news from relatives and friends in other parts of France led to all sorts of schemes. The founder and editor of that well-known journal Le Figaro, Hippolyte de Villemessant, as he called himself, though I believe that his real Christian name was Auguste, declared in his paper that he would willingly allow his veins to be opened in return for a few lines from his beloved and absent wife. Conjugal affection could scarcely have gone further. Villemessant, however, followed up his touching declaration by announcing that a thousand francs (£40) a week was to be earned by a capable man willing to act as letter-carrier between Paris and the provinces. All who felt qualified for the post were invited to present themselves at the office of Le Figaro, which in those days was appropriately located in the Rue Rossini, named, of course, after the illustrious composer who wrote such sprightly music round the theme of Beaumarchais' comedy. As a result of Villemessant's announcement, the street was blocked during the next forty-eight hours by men of all classes, who were all the more eager to earn the aforesaid £40 a week as nearly every kind of work was at a standstill, and the daily stipend of a National Guard amounted only to 1_s._ 2-1/2_d._
It was difficult to choose from among so many candidates, but we were eventually assured that the right man had been found in the person of a retired poacher who knew so well how to circumvent both rural guards and forest guards, that during a career of twenty years or so he had never once been caught in flagrante delicto. Expert, moreover, in tracking game, he would also well know how to detect—and to avoid—the tracks of the Prussians. We were therefore invited to confide our correspondence to this sagacious individual, who would undertake to carry it through the German lines and to return with the answers in a week or ten days. The charge for each letter, which was to be of very small weight and dimensions, was fixed at five francs, and it was estimated that the ex-poacher would be able to carry about 200 letters on each journey.
Many people were anxious to try the scheme, but rival newspapers denounced it as being a means of acquainting the Prussians with everything which was occurring in Paris—Villemessant, who they declared had taken bribes from the fallen Empire, being probably one of Bismarck's paid agents. Thus the enterprise speedily collapsed without even being put to the proof. However, the public was successfully exploited by various individuals who attempted to improve on Villemessant's idea, undertaking to send letters out of Paris for a fixed charge, half of which was to be returned to the sender if his letter were not delivered. As none of the letters handed in on these conditions was even entrusted to a messenger, the ingenious authors of this scheme made a handsome profit, politely returning half of the money which they received, but retaining the balance without making the slightest effort to carry out their contract.
Dr. Rampont, a very clever man, who was now our postmaster-general, had already issued a circular bidding us to use the very thinnest paper and the smallest envelopes procurable. There being so many failures among the messengers whom he sent out of Paris with correspondence, the idea of a balloon postal service occurred to him. Although ninety years or so had elapsed since the days of the brothers Montgolfier, aeronautics had really made very little progress. There were no dirigible balloons at all. Dupuy de Lôme's first experiments only dated from the siege days, and Renard's dirigible was not devised until the early eighties. We only had the ordinary type of balloon at our disposal; and at the outset of the investment there were certainly not more than half a dozen balloons within our lines. A great city like Paris, however, is not without resources. Everything needed for the construction of balloons could be found there. Gas also was procurable, and we had amongst us quite a number of men expert in the science of ballooning, such as it then was. There was Nadar, there was Tissandier, there were the Godard brothers, Yon, Dartois, and a good many others. Both the Godards and Nadar established balloon factories, which were generally located in our large disused railway stations, such as the Gare du Nord, the Gare d'Orléans, and the Gare Montparnasse; but I also remember visiting one which Nadar installed in the dancing hall called the Elysée Montmartre. Each of these factories provided work for a good many people, and I recollect being particularly struck by the number of women who were employed in balloon-making. Such work was very helpful to them, and Nadar used to say to me that it grieved him to have to turn away so many applicants for employment, for every day ten, twenty, and thirty women would come to implore him to "take them on." Nearly all their usual workrooms were closed; some were reduced to live on charity and only very small allowances, from fivepence to sevenpence a day, were made to the wives and families of National Guards.
But to return to the balloon postal-service which the Government organized, it was at once realized by my father and myself that it could be of little use to us so far as the work for the Illustrated London News was concerned, on account of the restrictions which were imposed in regard to the size and weight of each letter that might be posted. The weight, indeed, was fixed at no more than three grammes! Now, there were a number of artists working for the Illustrated in Paris, first and foremost among them being M. Jules Pelcoq, who must personally have supplied two-thirds of the sketches by which the British public was kept acquainted with the many incidents of Parisian siege-life. The weekly diary which I helped my father to compile could be drawn up in small handwriting on very thin, almost transparent paper, and despatched in the ordinary way. But how were we to circumvent the authorities in regard to our sketches, which were often of considerable size, and were always made on fairly substantial paper, the great majority of them being wash-drawings? Further, though I could prepare two or three drafts of our diary or our other "copy" for despatch by successive balloons—to provide for the contingency of one of the latter falling into the hands of the enemy—it seemed absurd that our artists should have to recopy every sketch they made. Fortunately, there was photography, the thought of which brought about a solution of the other difficulty in which we were placed.
I was sent to interview Nadar on the Place Saint Pierre at Montmartre, above which his captive balloon the "Neptune" was oscillating in the September breeze. He was much the same man as I had seen at the Crystal Palace a few years previously, tall, red-haired, and red-shirted. He had begun life as a caricaturist and humorous writer, but by way of buttering his bread had set up in business as a photographer, his establishment on the Boulevard de la Madeleine soon becoming very favourably known. There was still a little "portrait-taking" in Paris during those early siege days. Photographs of the celebrities or notorieties of the hour sold fairly well, and every now and again some National Guard with means was anxious to be photographed in his uniform. But, naturally enough, the business generally had declined. Thus, Nadar was only too pleased to entertain the proposal which I made to him on my father's behalf, this being that every sketch for the Illustrated should be taken to his establishment and there photographed, so that we might be able to send out copies in at least three successive balloons.
When I broached to Nadar the subject of the postal regulations in regard to the weight and size of letters, he genially replied: "Leave that to me. Your packets need not go through the ordinary post at all—at least, here in Paris. Have them stamped, however, bring them whenever a balloon is about to sail, and I will see that the aeronaut takes them in his pocket. Wherever he alights they will be posted, like the letters in the official bags."
That plan was carried out, and although several balloons were lost or fell within the German lines, only one small packet of sketches, which, on account of urgency, had not been photographed, remained subsequently unaccounted for. In all other instances either the original drawing or one of the photographic copies of it reached London safely.
The very first balloon to leave Paris (in the early days of October) was precisely Nadar's "Neptune," which had originally been intended for purposes of military observation. One day when I was with Nadar on the Place Saint Pierre, he took me up in it. I found the experience a novel but not a pleasing one, for all my life I have had a tendency to vertigo when ascending to any unusual height. I remember that it was a clear day, and that we had a fine bird's-eye view of Paris on the one hand and of the plain of Saint Denis on the other, but I confess that I felt out of-my element, and was glad to set foot on terra firma once more.
From that day I was quite content to view the ascent of one and another balloon, without feeling any desire to get out of Paris by its aerial transport service. I must have witnessed the departure of practically all the balloons which left Paris until I myself quitted the city in November. The arrangements made with Nadar were perfected, and something very similar was contrived with the Godard brothers, the upshot being that we were always forewarned whenever it was proposed to send off a balloon. Sometimes we received by messenger, in the evening, an intimation that a balloon would start at daybreak on the morrow. Sometimes we were roused in the small hours of the morning, when everything intended for despatch had to be hastily got together and carried at once to the starting-place, such, for instance, as the Northern or the Orleans railway terminus, both being at a considerable distance from our flat in the Rue de Miromesnil. Those were by no means agreeable walks, especially when the cold weather had set in, as it did early that autumn; and every now and again at the end of the journey one found that it had been made in vain, for, the wind having shifted at the last moment, the departure of the balloon had been postponed. Of course, the only thing to be done was to trudge back home again. There was no omnibus service, all the horses having been requisitioned, and in the latter part of October there were not more than a couple of dozen cabs (drawn by decrepit animals) still plying for hire in all Paris. Thus Shanks's pony was the only means of locomotion.
In the earlier days my father accompanied me on a few of those expeditions, but he soon grew tired of them, particularly as his health became affected by the siege diet. We were together, however, when Gambetta took his departure on October 7, ascending from the Place Saint Pierre in a balloon constructed by Nadar. It had been arranged that he should leave for the provinces, in order to reinforce the three Government delegates who had been despatched thither prior to the investment. Jules Favre, the Foreign Minister, had been previously urged to join those delegates, but would not trust himself to a balloon, and it was thereupon proposed to Gambetta that he should do so. He willingly assented to the suggestion, particularly as he feared that the rest of the country was being overlooked, owing to the prevailing opinion that Paris would suffice to deliver both herself and all the rest of France from the presence of the enemy. Born in April, 1838, he was at this time in his thirty-third year, and full of vigour, as the sequel showed. The delegates whom he was going to join were, as I previously mentioned, very old men, well meaning, no doubt, but incapable of making the great effort which was made by Gambetta in conjunction with Charles de Freycinet, who was just in his prime, being the young Dictator's senior by some ten years.
I can still picture Gambetta's departure, and particularly his appearance on the occasion—his fur cap and his fur coat, which made him look somewhat like a Polish Jew. He had with him his secretary, the devoted Spuller. I cannot recall the name of the aeronaut who was in charge of the balloon, but, if my memory serves me rightly, it was precisely to him that Nadar handed the packet of sketches which failed to reach the Illustrated London News. They must have been lost in the confusion of the aerial voyage, which was marked by several dramatic incidents. Some accounts say that Gambetta evinced no little anxiety during the preparations for the ascent, but to me he appeared to be in a remarkably good humour, as if, indeed, in pleasurable anticipation of what he was about to experience. When, in response to the call of "Lachez tout!" the seamen released the last cables which had hitherto prevented the balloon from rising, and the crowd burst into shouts of "Vive la Republique!" and "Vive Gambetta!" the "youthful statesman," as he was then called, leant over the side of the car and waved his cap in response to the plaudits. [Another balloon, the "George Sand," ascended at the same time, having in its car various officials who were to negotiate the purchase of fire-arms in the United States.]
The journey was eventful, for the Germans repeatedly fired at the balloon. A first attempt at descent had to be abandoned when the car was at an altitude of no more than 200 feet, for at that moment some German soldiers were seen almost immediately beneath it. They fired, and before the balloon could rise again a bullet grazed Gambetta's head. At four o'clock in the afternoon, however, the descent was renewed near Roye in the Somme, when the balloon was caught in an oak-tree, Gambetta at one moment hanging on to the ropes of the car, with his head downward. Some countryfolk came up in great anger, taking the party to be Prussians; but, on learning the truth, they rendered all possible assistance, and Gambetta and his companions repaired to the house of the mayor of the neighbouring village of Tricot. Alluding in after days to his experiences on this journey, the great man said that the earth, as seen by him from the car of the balloon, looked like a huge carpet woven chance-wise with different coloured wools. It did not impress him at all, he added, as it was really nothing but "une vilaine chinoiserie." It was from Rouen, where he arrived on the following day, that he issued the famous proclamation in which he called on France to make a compact with victory or death. On October 9, he joined the other delegates at Tours and took over the post of Minister of War as well as that of Minister of the Interior.
His departure from the capital was celebrated by that clever versifier of the period, Albert Millaud, who contributed to Le Figaro an amusing effusion, the first verse of which was to this effect:
"Gambetta, pale and gloomy,
Much wished to go to Tours,
But two hundred thousand Prussians
In his project made him pause.
To aid the youthful statesman
Came the aeronaut Nadar,
Who sent up the 'Armand Barbes'
With Gambetta in its car."
Further on came the following lines, supposed to be spoken by Gambetta himself whilst he was gazing at the German lines beneath him—
"See how the plain is glistening
With their helmets in a mass!
Impalement would be dreadful
On those spikes of polished brass!"
Millaud, who was a Jew, the son, I think—or, at all events, a near relation—of the famous founder of Le Petit Journal, the advent of which constituted a great landmark in the history of the French Press—set himself, during several years of his career, to prove the truth of the axiom that in France "tout finit par des chansons." During those anxious siege days he was for ever striving to sound a gay note, something which, for a moment, at all events, might drive dull care away. Here is an English version of some verses which he wrote on Nadar:
What a strange fellow is Nadar,
Photographer and aeronaut!
He is as clever as Godard.
What a strange fellow is Nadar,
Although, between ourselves, as far
As art's concerned he knoweth naught.
What a strange fellow is Nadar,
Photographer and aeronaut!
To guide the course of a balloon
His mind conceived the wondrous screw.
Some day he hopes unto the moon
To guide the course of a balloon.
Of 'airy navies' admiral soon,
We'll see him 'grappling in the blue'—
To guide the course of a balloon
His mind conceived the wondrous screw.
Up in the kingdom of the air
He now the foremost rank may claim.
If poor Gambetta when up there,
Up in the kingdom of the air,
Does not find good cause to stare,
Why, Nadar will not be to blame.
Up in the kingdom of the air
He now the foremost rank may claim.
At Ferrières, above the park,
Behold him darting through the sky,
Soaring to heaven like a lark.
At Ferrières above the park;
Whilst William whispers to Bismarck—
'Silence, see Nadar there on high!'
At Ferrières above the park
Behold him darting through the sky.
Oh, thou more hairy than King Clodion,
Bearer on high of this report,
Thou yellower than a pure Cambodian,
And far more daring than King Clodion,
We'll cast thy statue in collodion
And mount it on a gas retort.
Oh, thou more hairy than King Clodion,
Bearer on high of this report!
Perhaps it may not be thought too pedantic on my part if I explain that the King Clodion referred to in Millaud's last verse was the legendary "Clodion the Hairy," a supposed fifth-century leader of the Franks, reputed to be a forerunner of the founder of the, Merovingian dynasty. Nadar's hair, however, was not long like that of les rois chevelue, for it was simply a huge curly and somewhat reddish mop. As for his complexion, Millaud's phrase, "yellow as a pure Cambodian," was a happy thought.
These allusions to Millaud's sprightly verse remind me that throughout the siege of Paris the so-called mot pour rire was never once lost sight of. At all times and in respect to everything there was a superabundance of jests—jests on the Germans, the National and the Mobile Guard, the fallen dynasty, and the new Republic, the fruitless sorties, the wretched rations, the failing gas, and many other people and things. One of the enemy's generals was said to have remarked one day: "I don't know how to satisfy my men. They complain of hunger, and yet I lead them every morning to the slaughterhouse." At another time a French colonel, of conservative ideas, was said to have replaced the inscription "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," which he found painted on the walls of his barracks, by the words, "Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery," declaring that the latter were far more likely to free the country of the presence of the hated enemy. As for the "treason" mania, which was very prevalent at this time, it was related that a soldier remarked one day to a comrade: "I am sure that the captain is a traitor!" "Indeed! How's that?" was the prompt rejoinder. "Well," said the suspicious private, "have you not noticed that every time he orders us to march forward we invariably encounter the enemy?"
When Trochu issued a decree incorporating all National Guards, under forty-five years of age, in the marching battalions for duty outside the city, one of these Guards, on being asked how old he was, replied, "six-and-forty." "How is that?" he was asked. "A few weeks ago, you told everybody that you were only thirty-six." "Quite true," rejoined the other, "but what with rampart-duty, demonstrating at the Hôtel-de-Ville, short rations, and the cold weather, I feel quite ten years older than I formerly did." When horseflesh became more or less our daily provender, many Parisian bourgeois found their health failing. "What is the matter, my dearest?" Madame du Bois du Pont inquired of her husband, when he had collapsed one evening after dinner. "Oh! it is nothing, mon amie" he replied; "I dare say I shall soon feel well again, but I used to think myself a better horseman!"
Directly our supply of gas began to fail, the wags insinuated that Henri Rochefort was jubilant, and if you inquired the reason thereof, you were told that owing to the scarcity of gas everybody would be obliged to buy hundreds of "Lanternes." We had, of course, plenty of sensations in those days, but if you wished to cap every one of them you merely had to walk into a café and ask the waiter for—a railway time-table.
Once before I referred to the caricatures of the period, notably to those libelling the Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie, the latter being currently personified as Messalina—or even as something worse, and this, of course, without the faintest shadow of justification. But the caricaturists were not merely concerned with the fallen dynasty. One of the principal cartoonists of the Charivari at that moment was "Cham," otherwise the Vicomte Amédée de Noé, an old friend of my family's. It was he, by the way, who before the war insisted on my going to a fencing-school, saying: "Look here, if you mean to live in France and be a journalist, you must know how to hold a sword. Come with me to Ruzé's. I taught your uncle Frank and his friend Gustave Doré how to fence many years ago, and now I am going to have you taught." Well, in one of his cartoons issued during the siege, Cham (disgusted, like most Frenchmen, at the seeming indifference of Great Britain to the plight in which France found herself) summed up the situation, as he conceived it, by depicting the British Lion licking the boots of Bismarck, who was disguised as Davy Crockett. When my father remonstrated with Cham on the subject, reminding him of his own connexion with England, the indignant caricaturist replied: "Don't speak of it. I have renounced England and all her works." He, like other Frenchmen of the time, contended that we had placed ourselves under great obligations to France at the period of the Crimean War.
Among the best caricatures of the siege-days was one by Daumier, which showed Death appearing to Bismarck in his sleep, and murmuring softly, "Thanks, many thanks." Another idea of the period found expression in a cartoon representing a large mouse-trap, labelled "France," into which a company of mice dressed up as German soldiers were eagerly marching, their officer meanwhile pointing to a cheese fixed inside the trap, and inscribed with the name of Paris. Below the design ran the legend: "Ah! if we could only catch them all in it!" Many, indeed most, of the caricatures of the time did not appear in the so-called humorous journals, but were issued separately at a penny apiece, and were usually coloured by the stencilling process. In one of them, I remember, Bismarck was seen wearing seven-league boots and making ineffectual attempts to step from Versailles to Paris. Another depicted the King of Prussia as Butcher William, knife in hand and attired in the orthodox slaughter-house costume; whilst in yet another design the same monarch was shown urging poor Death, who had fallen exhausted in the snow, with his scythe lying broken beside him, to continue on the march until the last of the French nation should be exterminated. Of caricatures representing cooks in connexion with cats there was no end, the lapin de gouttière being in great demand for the dinner-table; and, after Gambetta had left us, there were designs showing the armies of succour (which were to be raised in the provinces) endeavouring to pass ribs of beef, fat geese, legs of mutton, and strings of sausages over several rows of German helmets, gathered round a bastion labelled Paris, whence a famished National Guard, eager for the proffered provisions, was trying to spring, but could not do so owing to the restraining arm of General Trochu.
Before the investment began Paris was already afflicted with a spy mania. Sala's adventure, which I recounted in an earlier chapter, was in a way connected with this delusion, which originated with the cry "We are betrayed!" immediately after the first French reverses. The instances of so-called "spyophobia" were innumerable, and often curious and amusing. There was a slight abatement of the mania when, shortly before the siege, 188,000 Germans were expelled from Paris, leaving behind them only some 700 old folk, invalids, and children, who were unable to obey the Government's decree. But the disease soon revived, and we heard of rag-pickers having their baskets ransacked by zealous National Guards, who imagined that these receptacles might contain secret despatches or contraband ammunition. On another occasion Le Figaro wickedly suggested that all the blind beggars in Paris were spies, with the result that several poor infirm old creatures were abominably ill-treated. Again, a fugitive sheet called Les Nouvelles denounced all the English residents as spies. Labouchere was one of those pounced upon by a Parisian mob in consequence of that idiotic denunciation, but as he had the presence of mind to invite those who assailed him to go with him to the nearest police-station, he was speedily released. On two occasions my father and myself were arrested and carried to guard-houses, and in the course of those experiences we discovered that the beautifully engraved but essentially ridiculous British passport, which recited all the honours and dignities of the Secretary of State or the Ambassador delivering it, but gave not the slightest information respecting the person to whom it had been delivered (apart, that is, from his or her name), was of infinitely less value in the eyes of a French officer than a receipt for rent or a Parisian tradesman's bill. [That was forty-three years ago. The British passport, however, remains to-day as unsatisfactory as it was then.]
But let me pass to other instances. One day an unfortunate individual, working in the Paris sewers, was espied by a zealous National Guard, who at once gave the alarm, declaring that there was a German spy in the aforesaid sewers, and that he was depositing bombs there with the intention of blowing up the city. Three hundred Guards at once volunteered their services, stalked the poor workman, and blew him to pieces the next time he popped his head out of a sewer-trap. The mistake was afterwards deplored, but people argued (wrote Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles, who sent the story to The Morning Post) that it was far better that a hundred innocent Frenchmen should suffer than that a single Prussian should escape. Cham, to whom I previously alluded, old Marshal Vaillant, Mr. O'Sullivan, an American diplomatist, and Alexis Godillot, the French army contractor, were among the many well-known people arrested as spies at one or another moment. A certain Mme: de Beaulieu, who had joined a regiment of Mobiles as a cantiniere, was denounced as a spy "because her hands were so white." Another lady, who had installed an ambulance in her house, was carried off to prison on an equally frivolous pretext; and I remember yet another case in which a lady patron of the Societe de Secours aux Blesses was ill-treated. Matters would, however, probably be far worse at the present time, for Paris, with all her apaches and anarchists, now includes in her population even more scum than was the case three-and-forty years ago.
There were, however, a few authentic instances of spying, one case being that of a young fellow whom Etienne Arago, the Mayor of Paris, engaged as a secretary, on the recommendation of Henri Rochefort, but who turned out to be of German extraction, and availed himself of his official position to draw up reports which were forwarded by balloon post to an agent of the German Government in London. I have forgotten the culprit's name, but it will be found, with particulars of his case, in the Paris journals of the siege days. There was, moreover, the Hardt affair, which resulted in the prisoner, a former lieutenant in the Prussian army, being convicted of espionage and shot in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire.
Co-existent with "spyophobia" there was another craze, that of suspecting any light seen at night-time in an attic or fifth-floor window to be a signal intended for the enemy. Many ludicrous incidents occurred in connexion with this panic. One night an elderly bourgeois, who had recently married a charming young woman, was suddenly dragged from his bed by a party of indignant National Guards, and consigned to the watch-house until daybreak. This had been brought about by his wife's maid placing a couple of lighted candles in her window as a signal to the wife's lover that, "master being at home," he was not to come up to the flat that night. On another occasion a poor old lady, who was patriotically depriving herself of sleep in order to make lint for the ambulances, was pounced upon and nearly strangled for exhibiting green and red signals from her window. It turned out, however, that the signals in question were merely the reflections of a harmless though charmingly variegated parrot which was the zealous old dame's sole and faithful companion.
No matter what might be the quarter of Paris in which a presumed signal was observed, the house whence it emanated was at once invaded by National Guards, and perfectly innocent people were often carried off and subjected to ill-treatment. To such proportions did the craze attain that some papers even proposed that the Government should forbid any kind of light whatever, after dark, in any room situated above the second floor, unless the windows of that room were "hermetically sealed"! Most victims of the mania submitted to the mob's invasion of their homes without raising any particular protest; but a volunteer artilleryman, who wrote to the authorities complaining that his rooms had been ransacked in his absence and his aged mother frightened out of her wits, on the pretext that some fusees had been fired from his windows, declared that if there should be any repetition of such an intrusion whilst he was at home he would receive the invaders bayonet and revolver in hand. From that moment similar protests poured into the Hôtel-de-Ville, and Trochu ended by issuing a proclamation in which he said: "Under the most frivolous pretexts, numerous houses have been entered, and peaceful citizens have been maltreated. The flags of friendly nations have been powerless to protect the houses where they were displayed. I have ordered an inquiry on the subject, and I now command that all persons guilty of these abusive practices shall be arrested. A special service has been organized in order to prevent the enemy from keeping up any communication with any of its partisans in the city; and I remind everybody that excepting in such instances as are foreseen by the law every citizen's residence is inviolable."
We nowadays hear a great deal about the claims of women, but although the followers of Mrs. Pankhurst have carried on "a sort of a war" for a considerable time past, I have not yet noticed any disposition on their part to "join the colours." Men currently assert that women cannot serve as soldiers. There are, however, many historical instances of women distinguishing themselves in warfare, and modern conditions are even more favourable than former ones for the employment of women as soldiers. There is splendid material to be derived from the golf-girl, the hockey-girl, the factory- and the laundry-girl—all of them active, and in innumerable instances far stronger than many of the narrow-chested, cigarette-smoking "boys" whom we now see in our regiments. Briefly, a day may well come when we shall see many of our so-called superfluous women taking to the "career of arms." However, the attempts made to establish a corps of women-soldiers in Paris, during the German siege, were more amusing than serious. Early in October some hundreds of women demonstrated outside the Hôtel-de-Ville, demanding that all the male nurses attached to the ambulances should be replaced by women. The authorities promised to grant that application, and the women next claimed the right to share the dangers of the field with their husbands and their brothers. This question was repeatedly discussed at the public clubs, notably at one in the Rue Pierre Levée, where Louise Michel, the schoolmistress who subsequently participated in the Commune and was transported to New Caledonia, officiated as high-priestess; and at another located at the Triat Gymnasium in the Avenue Montaigne, where as a rule no men were allowed to be present, that is, excepting a certain Citizen Jules Allix, an eccentric elderly survivor of the Republic of '48, at which period he had devised a system of telepathy effected by means of "sympathetic snails."
One Sunday afternoon in October the lady members of this club, being in urgent need of funds, decided to admit men among their audience at the small charge of twopence per head, and on hearing this, my father and myself strolled round to witness the proceedings. They were remarkably lively. Allix, while reading a report respecting the club's progress, began to libel some of the Paris convents, whereupon a National Guard in the audience flatly called him a liar. A terrific hubbub arose, all the women gesticulating and protesting, whilst their présidente energetically rang her bell, and the interrupter strode towards the platform. He proved to be none other than the Duc de Fitz-James, a lineal descendant of our last Stuart King by Marlborough's sister, Arabella Churchill. He tried to speak, but the many loud screams prevented him from doing so. Some of the women threatened him with violence, whilst a few others thanked him for defending the Church. At last, however, he leapt on the platform, and in doing so overturned both a long table covered with green baize, and the members of the committee who were seated behind it. Jules Allix thereupon sprang at the Duke's throat, they struggled and fell together from the platform, and rolled in the dust below it. It was long before order was restored, but this was finally effected by a good-looking young woman who, addressing the male portion of the audience, exclaimed: "Citizens! if you say another word we will fling what you have paid for admission in your faces, and order you out of doors!"
Business then began, the discussion turning chiefly upon two points, the first being that all women should be armed and do duty on the ramparts, and the second that the women should defend their honour from the attacks of the Germans by means of prussic acid. Allix remarked that it would be very appropriate to employ prussic acid in killing Prussians, and explained to us that this might be effected by means of little indiarubber thimbles which the women would place on their fingers, each thimble being tipped with a small pointed tube containing some of the acid in question. If an amorous Prussian should venture too close to a fair Parisienne, the latter would merely have to hold out her hand and prick him. In another instant he would fall dead! "No matter how many of the enemy may assail her," added Allix, enthusiastically, "she will simply have to prick them one by one, and we shall see her standing still pure and holy in the midst of a circle of corpses!" At these words many of the women in the audience were moved to tears, but the men laughed hilariously.
Such disorderly scenes occurred at this women's club, that the landlord of the Triat Gymnasium at last took possession of the premises again, and the ejected members vainly endeavoured to find accommodation elsewhere. Nevertheless, another scheme for organizing an armed force of women was started, and one day, on observing on the walls of Paris a green placard which announced the formation of a "Legion of Amazons of the Seine," I repaired to the Rue Turbigo, where this Legion's enlistment office had been opened. After making my way up a staircase crowded with recruits, who were mostly muscular women from five-and-twenty to forty years of age, the older ones sometimes being unduly stout, and not one of them, in my youthful opinion, at all good-looking, I managed to squeeze my way into the private office of the projector of the Legion, or, as he called himself, its "Provisional Chef de Bataillon." He was a wiry little man, with a grey moustache and a military bearing, and answered to the name of Félix Belly. A year or two previously he had unjustly incurred a great deal of ridicule in Paris, owing to his attempts to float a Panama Canal scheme. Only five years after the war, however, the same idea was taken up by Ferdinand de Lesseps, and French folk, who had laughed it to scorn in Belly's time, proved only too ready to fling their hard-earned savings into the bottomless gulf of Lesseps' enterprise.
I remember having a long chat with Belly, who was most enthusiastic respecting his proposed Amazons. They were to defend the ramparts and barricades of Paris, said he, being armed with light guns carrying some 200 yards; and their costume, a model of which was shown me, was to consist of black trousers with orange-coloured stripes down the outer seams, black blouses with capes, and black képis, also with orange trimmings. Further, each woman was to carry a cartridge-box attached to a shoulder-belt. It was hoped that the first battalion would muster quite 1200 women, divided into eight companies of 150 each. There was to be a special medical service, and although the chief doctor would be a man, it was hoped to secure several assistant doctors of the female sex. Little M. Belly dwelt particularly on the fact that only women of unexceptionable moral character would be allowed to join the force, all recruits having to supply certificates from the Commissaries of Police of their districts, as well as the consent of their nearest connexions, such as their fathers or their husbands. "Now, listen to this," added M. Belly, enthusiastically, as he went to a piano which I was surprised to find, standing in a recruiting office; and seating himself at the instrument, he played for my especial benefit the stirring strains of a new, specially-commissioned battle-song, which, said he, "we intend to call the Marseillaise of the Paris Amazons!"
Unfortunately for M. Belly, all his fine projects and preparations collapsed a few days afterwards, owing to the intervention of the police, who raided the premises in the Rue Turbigo, and carried off all the papers they found there. They justified these summary proceedings on the ground that General Trochu had forbidden the formation of any more free corps, and that M. Belly had unduly taken fees from his recruits. I believe, however, that the latter statement was incorrect. At all events, no further proceedings were instituted. But the raid sufficed to kill M. Belly's cherished scheme, which naturally supplied the caricaturists of the time with more or less brilliant ideas. One cartoon represented the German army surrendering en masse to a mere battalion of the Beauties of Paris.
VI
MORE ABOUT THE SIEGE DAYS
Reconnaissances and Sorties—Casimir-Perier at Bagneux—Some of the Paris Clubs—Demonstrations at the Hôtel-de-Ville—The Cannon Craze—The Fall of Metz foreshadowed—Le Bourget taken by the French—The Government's Policy of Concealment—The Germans recapture Le Bourget—Thiers, the Armistice, and Bazaine's Capitulation—The Rising of October 31—The Peril and the Rescue of the Government—Armistice and Peace Conditions—The Great Question of Rations—Personal Experiences respecting Food—My father, in failing Health, decides to leave Paris.
After the engagement of Châtillon, fought on September 19, various reconnaissances were carried out by the army of Paris. In the first of these General Vinoy secured possession of the plateau of Villejuif, east of Châtillon, on the south side of the city. Next, the Germans had to retire from Pierre-fitte, a village in advance of Saint Denis on the northern side. There were subsequent reconnaissances in the direction of Neuilly-sur-Marne and the Plateau d'Avron, east of Paris; and on Michaelmas Day an engagement was fought at L'Hay and Chevilly, on the south. But the archangel did not on this occasion favour the French, who were repulsed, one of their commanders, the veteran brigadier Guilhem, being killed. A fight at Châtillon on October 12 was followed on the morrow by a more serious action at Bagneux, on the verge of the Châtillon plateau. During this engagement the Mobiles from the Burgundian Côte d'Or made a desperate attack on a German barricade bristling with guns, reinforced by infantry, and also protected by a number of sharp-shooters installed in the adjacent village-houses, whose window-shutters and walls had been loop-holed. During the encounter, the commander of the Mobiles, the Comte de Dampierre, a well-known member of the French Jockey Club, fell mortally wounded whilst urging on his men, but was succoured by a captain of the Mobiles of the Aube, who afterwards assumed the chief command, and, by a rapid flanking movement, was able to carry the barricade. This captain was Jean Casimir-Perier, who, in later years, became President of the Republic. He was rewarded for his gallantry with the Cross of the Legion of Honour. Nevertheless, the French success was only momentary.
That same night the sky westward of Paris was illumined by a great ruddy glare. The famous Château of Saint Cloud, associated with many memories of the old régime and both the Empires, was seen to be on fire. The cause of the conflagration has never been precisely ascertained. Present-day French reference-books still declare that the destruction of the château was the wilful act of the Germans, who undoubtedly occupied Saint Cloud; but German authorities invariably maintain that the fire was caused by a shell from the French fortress of Mont Valérien. Many of the sumptuous contents of the Château of Saint Cloud—the fatal spot where that same war had been decided on—were consumed by the flames, while the remainder were appropriated by the Germans as plunder. Many very valuable paintings of the period of Louis XIV were undoubtedly destroyed.
By this time the word "reconnaissance," as applied to the engagements fought in the environs of the city, had become odious to the Parisians, who began to clamour for a real "sortie." Trochu, it may be said, had at this period no idea of being able to break out of Paris. In fact, he had no desire to do so. His object in all the earlier military operations of the siege was simply to enlarge the circle of investment, in the hope of thereby placing the Germans in a difficulty, of which he might subsequently take advantage. An attack which General Ducrot made, with a few thousand men, on the German position near La Malmaison, west of Paris, was the first action which was officially described as a "sortie." It took place on October 21, but the success which at first attended Ducrot's efforts was turned into a repulse by the arrival of German reinforcements, the affair ending with a loss of some four hundred killed and wounded on the French side, apart from that of another hundred men who were taken prisoners by the enemy.
This kind of thing did not appeal to the many frequenters of the public clubs which were established in the different quarters of Paris. All theatrical performances had ceased there, and there was no more dancing. Even the concerts and readings given in aid of the funds for the wounded were few and far between. Thus, if a Parisian did not care to while away his evening in a cafe, his only resource was to betake himself to one of the clubs. Those held at the Folies-Bergère music-hall, the Valentino dancing-hall, the Porte St. Martin theatre, and the hall of the Collège de France, were mostly frequented by moderate Republicans, and attempts were often made there to discuss the situation in a sensible manner. But folly, even insanity, reigned at many of the other clubs, where men like Félix Pyat, Auguste Blanqui, Charles Delescluze, Gustave Flourens, and the three Ms—Mégy, Mottu, and Millière—raved and ranted. Go where you would, you found a club. There was that of La Reine Blanche at Montmartre and that of the Salle Favié at Belleville; there was the club de la Vengeance on the Boulevard Rochechouart, the Club des Montagnards on the Boulevard de Strasbourg, the Club des Etats-Unis d'Europe in the Rue Cadet, the Club du Préaux-Clercs in the Rue du Bac, the Club de la Cour des Miracles on the Ile Saint Louis, and twenty or thirty others of lesser note. At times the demagogues who perorated from the tribunes at these gatherings, brought forward proposals which seemed to have emanated from some madhouse, but which were nevertheless hailed with delirious applause by their infatuated audiences. Occasionally new engines of destruction were advocated—so-called "Satan-fusees," or pumps discharging flaming petroleum! Another speaker conceived the brilliant idea of keeping all the wild beasts in the Jardin des Plantes on short commons for some days, then removing them from Paris at the next sortie, and casting them adrift among the enemy. Yet another imbecile suggested that the water of the Seine and the Marne should be poisoned, regardless of, the fact that, in any such event, the Parisians would suffer quite as much as the enemy.
But the malcontents were not satisfied with ranting at the clubs. On October 2, Paris became very gloomy, for we then received from outside the news that both Toul and Strasbourg had surrendered. Three days later, Gustave Flourens gathered the National Guards of Belleville together and marched with them on the Hôtel-de-Ville, where he called upon the Government to renounce the military tactics of the Empire which had set one Frenchman against three Germans, to decree a levée en masse, to make frequent sorties with the National Guards, to arm the latter with chassepots, and to establish at once a municipal "Commune of Paris." On the subject of sorties the Government promised to conform to the general desire, and to allow the National Guards to co-operate with the regular army as soon as they should know how to fight and escape being simply butchered. To other demands made by Flourens, evasive replies were returned, whereupon he indignantly resigned his command of the Belleville men, but resumed it at their urgent request.
The affair somewhat alarmed the Government, who issued a proclamation forbidding armed demonstrations, and, far from consenting to the establishment of any Commune, postponed the ordinary municipal elections which were soon to have taken place. To this the Reds retorted by making yet another demonstration, which my father and myself witnessed. Thousands of people, many of them being armed National Guards, assembled on the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, shouting: "La Commune! La Commune! Nous voulons la Commune!" But the authorities had received warning of their opponents' intentions, and the Hôtel-de-Ville was entirely surrounded by National Guards belonging to loyal battalions, behind whom, moreover, was stationed a force of trusty Mobile Guards, whose bayonets were already fixed. Thus no attempt could be made to raid the Hôtel-de-Ville with any chance of success. Further, several other contingents of loyal National Guards arrived on the square, and helped to check the demonstrators.
While gazing on the scene from an upper window of the Cafe de la Garde Nationale, at one corner of the square, I suddenly saw Trochu ride out of the Government building, as it then was, followed by a couple of aides-de-camp, His appearance was attended by a fresh uproar. The yells of "La Commune! La Commune!" rose more loudly than ever, but were now answered by determined shouts of "Vive la Republique! Vive Trochu! Vive le Gouvernement!" whilst the drums beat, the trumpets sounded, and all the Government forces presented arms. The general rode up and down the lines, returning the salute, amidst prolonged acclamations, and presently his colleagues, Jules Favre and the others—excepting, of course, Gambetta, who had already left Paris—also came out of the Hotel-de-Ville and received an enthusiastic greeting from their supporters. For the time, the Reds were absolutely defeated, and in order to prevent similar disturbances in future, Keratry, the Prefect of Police, wished to arrest Flourens, Blanqui, Milliere, and others, which suggestion was countenanced by Trochu, but opposed by Rochefort and Etienne Arago. A few days later, Rochefort patched up a brief outward reconciliation between the contending parties. Nevertheless, it was evident that Paris was already sharply divided, both on the question of its defence and on that of its internal government.
On October 23, some of the National Guards were at last allowed to join in a sortie. They were men from Montmartre, and the action, or rather skirmish, in which they participated took place at Villemomble, east of Paris, the guards behaving fairly well under fire, and having five of their number wounded. Patriotism was now taking another form in the city. There was a loud cry for cannons, more and more cannons. The Government replied that 227 mitrailleuses with over 800,000 cartridges, 50 mortars, 400 carriages for siege guns, several of the latter ordnance, and 300 seven-centimetre guns carrying 8600 yards, together with half a million shells of different sizes, had already been ordered, and in part delivered. Nevertheless, public subscriptions were started in order to provide another 1500 cannon, large sums being contributed to the fund by public bodies and business firms. Not only did the newspapers offer to collect small subscriptions, but stalls were set up for that purpose in different parts of Paris, as in the time of the first Revolution, and people there tendered their contributions, the women often offering jewelry in lieu of money. Trochu, however, deprecated the movement. There were already plenty of guns, said he; what he required was gunners to serve them.
On October 25 we heard of the fall of the little town of Châteaudun in Eure-et-Loir, after a gallant resistance offered by 1200 National Guards and Francs-tireurs against 6000 German infantry, a regiment of cavalry, and four field batteries. Von Wittich, the German general, punished that resistance by setting fire to Châteaudun and a couple of adjacent villages, and his men, moreover, massacred a number of non-combatant civilians. Nevertheless, the courage shown by the people of Châteaudun revived the hopes of the Parisians and strengthened their resolution to brave every hardship rather than surrender. Two days later, however, Félix Pyat's journal Le Combat published, within a mourning border, the following announcement: "It is a sure and certain fact that the Government of National Defence retains in its possession a State secret, which we denounce to an indignant country as high treason. Marshal Bazaine has sent a colonel to the camp of the King of Prussia to treat for the surrender of Metz and for Peace in the name of Napoleon III."
The news seemed incredible, and, indeed, at the first moment, very few people believed it. If it were true, however, Prince Frederick Charles's forces, released from the siege of Metz, would evidently be able to march against D'Aurelle de Paladines' army of the Loire just when it was hoped that the latter would overthrow the Bavarians under Von der Tann and hasten to the relief of Paris. But people argued that Bazaine was surely as good a patriot as Bourbaki, who, it was already known, had escaped from Metz and offered his sword to the National Defence in the provinces. A number of indignant citizens hastened to the office of Le Combat in order to seize Pyat and consign him to durance, but he was an adept in the art of escaping arrest, and contrived to get away by a back door. At the Hôtel-de-Ville Rochefort, on being interviewed, described Pyat as a cur, and declared that there was no truth whatever in his story. Public confidence completely revived on the following morning, when the official journal formally declared that Metz had not capitulated; and, in the evening, Paris became quite jubilant at the news that General Carré de Bellemare, who commanded on the north side of the city, had wrested from the Germans the position of Le Bourget, lying to the east of Saint Denis.
Pyat, however, though he remained in hiding, clung to his story respecting Metz, stating in Le Combat, on October 29, that the news had been communicated to him by Gustave Flourens, who had derived it from Rochefort, by whom it was now impudently denied. It subsequently became known, moreover, that another member of the Government, Eugène Pelletan, had confided the same intelligence to Commander Longuet, of the National Guard. It appears that it had originally been derived from certain members of the Red Cross Society, who, when it became necessary to bury the dead and tend the wounded after an encounter in the environs of Paris, often came in contact with the Germans. The report was, of course, limited to the statement that Bazaine was negotiating a surrender, not that he had actually capitulated. The Government's denial of it can only be described as a quibble—of the kind to which at times even British Governments stoop when faced by inconvenient questions in the House of Commons—and, as we shall soon see, the gentlemen of the National Defence spent a très mauvais quart d'heure as a result of the suppressio veri of which they were guilty. Similar "bad quarters of an hour" have fallen upon politicians in other countries, including our own, under somewhat similar circumstances.
On October 30, Thiers, after travelling all over Europe, pleading his country's cause at every great Court, arrived in Paris with a safe-conduct from Bismarck, in order to lay before the Government certain proposals for an armistice, which Russia, Great Britain, Austria, and Italy were prepared to support. And alas! he also brought with him the news that Metz had actually fallen—having capitulated, indeed, on October 27, the very day on which Pyat had issued his announcement. There was consternation at the Hôtel-de-Ville when this became known, and the gentlemen of the Government deeply but vainly regretted the futile tactics to which they had so foolishly stooped. To make matters worse, we received in the evening intelligence that the Germans had driven Carré de Bellemare's men out of Le Bourget after some brief but desperate fighting. Trochu declared that he had no need of the Bourget position, that it had never entered into his scheme of defence, and that Bellemare had been unduly zealous in attacking and taking it from the Germans. If that were the case, however, why had not the Governor of Paris ordered Le Bourget to be evacuated immediately after its capture, without waiting for the Germans to re-take it at the bayonet's point? Under the circumstances, the Parisians were naturally exasperated. Tumultuous were the scenes on the Boulevards that evening, and vehement and threatening were the speeches at the clubs.
When the Parisians quitted their homes on the morning of Monday, the 31st, they found the city placarded with two official notices, one respecting the arrival of Thiers and the proposals for an armistice, and the second acknowledging the disaster of Metz. A hurricane of indignation at once swept through the city. Le Bourget lost! Metz taken! Proposals for an armistice with the detested Prussians entertained! Could Trochu's plan and Bazaine's plan be synonymous, then? The one word "Treachery!" was on every lip. When noon arrived the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville was crowded with indignant people. Deputations, composed chiefly of officers of the National Guard, interviewed the Government, and were by no means satisfied with the replies which they received from Jules Ferry and others. Meantime, the crowd on the square was increasing in numbers. Several members of the Government attempted to prevail on it to disperse; but no heed was paid to them.
At last a free corps commanded by Tibaldi, an Italian conspirator of Imperial days, effected an entrance into the Hotel-de-Ville, followed by a good many of the mob. In the throne-room they were met by Jules Favre, whose attempts to address them failed, the shouts of "La Commune! La Commune!" speedily drowning his voice. Meantime, two shots were fired by somebody on the square, a window was broken, and the cry of the invaders became "To arms! to arms! Our brothers are being butchered!" In vain did Trochu and Rochefort endeavour to stem the tide of invasion. In vain, also, did the Government, assembled in the council-room, offer to submit itself to the suffrages of the citizens, to grant the election of municipal councillors, and to promise that no armistice should be signed without consulting the population. The mob pressed on through one room after another, smashing tables, desks, and windows on their way, and all at once the very apartment where the Government were deliberating was, in its turn, invaded, several officers of the National Guard, subsequently prominent at the time of the Commune, heading the intruders and demanding the election of a Commune and the appointment of a new administration under the presidency of Dorian, the popular Minister of Public Works.
Amidst the ensuing confusion, M. Ernest Picard, a very corpulent, jovial-looking advocate, who was at the head of the department of Finances, contrived to escape; but all his colleagues were surrounded, insulted by the invaders, and summoned to resign their posts. They refused to do so, and the wrangle was still at its height when Gustave Flourens and his Belleville sharpshooters reached the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville. Flourens entered the building, which at this moment was occupied by some seven or eight thousand men, and proposed that the Commune should be elected by acclamation. This was agreed upon; Dorian's name—though, by the way, he was a wealthy ironmaster, and in no sense a Communard—being put at the head of the list. This included Flourens himself, Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc, Raspail, Mottu, Delescluze, Blanqui, Ledru-Rollin, Rochefort, Félix Pyat, Ranvier, and Avrial. Then Flourens, in his turn, entered the council-room, climbed on to the table, and summoned the captive members of the Government to resign; Again they refused to do so, and were therefore placed under arrest. Jules Ferry and Emmanuel Arago managed to escape, however, and some friendly National Guards succeeded in entering the building and carrying off General Trochu. Ernest Picard, meanwhile, had been very active in devising plans for the recapture of the Hôtel-de-Ville and providing for the safety of various Government departments. Thus, when Flourens sent a lieutenant to the treasury demanding the immediate payment of £600,000(!) the request was refused, and the messenger placed under arrest. Nevertheless, the insurgents made themselves masters of several district town-halls.
But Jules Ferry was collecting the loyal National Guards together, and at half-past eleven o'clock that night they and some Mobiles marched on the Hôtel-de-Ville. The military force which had been left there by the insurgents was not large. A parley ensued, and while it was still in progress, an entire battalion of Mobiles effected an entry by a subterranean passage leading from an adjacent barracks. Delescluze and Flourens then tried to arrange terms with Dorian, but Jules Ferry would accept no conditions. The imprisoned members of the Government were released, and the insurgent leaders compelled to retire. About this time Trochu and Ducrot arrived on the scene, and between three and four o'clock in the morning I saw them pass the Government forces in review on the square.
On the following day, all the alleged conventions between M. Dorian and the Red Republican leaders were disavowed. There was, however, a conflict of opinion as to whether those leaders should be arrested or not, some members of the Government admitting that they had promised Delescluze and others that they should not be prosecuted. In consequence of this dispute, several officials, including Edmond Adam, Keratry's successor as Prefect of Police, resigned their functions. A few days later, twenty-one of the insurgent leaders were arrested, Pyat being among them, though nothing was done in regard to Flourens and Blanqui, both of whom had figured prominently in the affair.
On November 3 we had a plebiscitum, the question put to the Parisians being: "Does the population of Paris, yes or no, maintain the powers of the Government of National Defence?" So far as the civilian element—which included the National Guards—was concerned, the ballot resulted as follows: Voting "Yes," 321,373 citizens; voting "No," 53,585 citizens. The vote of the army, inclusive of the Mobile Guard, was even more pronounced: "Yes," 236,623; "No," 9063, Thus the general result was 557,996 votes in favour of the Government, and 62,638 against it—the proportion being 9 to 1 for the entire male population of the invested circle. This naturally rendered the authorities jubilant.
But the affair of October 31 had deplorable consequences with regard to the armistice negotiations. This explosion of sedition alarmed the German authorities. They lost confidence in the power of the National Defence to carry out such terms as might be stipulated, and, finally, Bismarck refused to allow Paris to be revictualled during the period requisite for the election of a legislative assembly—which was to have decided the question of peace or war—unless one fort, and possibly more than one, were surrendered to him. Thiers and Favre could not accept such a condition, and thus the negotiations were broken off. Before Thiers quitted Bismarck, however, the latter significantly told him that the terms of peace at that juncture would be the cession of Alsace to Germany, and the payment of three milliards of francs as an indemnity; but that after the fall of Paris the terms would be the cession of both Alsace and Lorraine, and a payment of five milliards.
In the earlier days of the siege there was no rationing of provisions, though the price of meat was fixed by Government decree. At the end of September, however, the authorities decided to limit the supply to a maximum of 500 oxen and 4000 sheep per diem. It was decided also that the butchers' shops should only open on every fourth day, when four days' meat should be distributed at the official prices. During the earlier period the daily ration ranged from 80 to 100 grammes, that is, about 2-2/3 oz. to 3-1/3 oz. in weight, one-fifth part of it being bone in the case of beef, though, with respect to mutton, the butchers were forbidden to make up the weight with any bones which did not adhere to the meat. At the outset of the siege only twenty or thirty horses were slaughtered each day; but on September 30 the number had risen to 275. A week later there were nearly thirty shops in Paris where horseflesh was exclusively sold, and scarcely a day elapsed without an increase in their number. Eventually horseflesh became virtually the only meat procurable by all classes of the besieged, but in the earlier period it was patronized chiefly by the poorer folk, the prices fixed for it by authority being naturally lower than those edicted for beef and mutton.
With regard to the arrangements made by my father and myself respecting food, they were, in the earlier days of the siege, very simple. We were keeping no servant at our flat in the Rue de Miromesnil. The concierge of the house, and his wife, did all such work as we required. This concierge, whose name was Saby, had been a Zouave, and had acted as orderly to his captain in Algeria. He was personally expert in the art of preparing "couscoussou" and other Algerian dishes, and his wife was a thoroughly good cook à la française. Directly meat was rationed, Saby said to me: "The allowance is very small; you and Monsieur votre père will be able to eat a good deal more than that. Now, some of the poorer folk cannot afford to pay for butchers' meat, they are contented with horseflesh, which is not yet rationed, and are willing to sell their ration cards. You can well afford to buy one or two of them, and in that manner secure extra allowances of beef or mutton."
That plan was adopted, and for a time everything went on satisfactorily. On a few occasions I joined the queue outside our butcher's in the Rue de Penthièvre, and waited an hour or two to secure our share of meat, We were not over-crowded in that part of Paris. A great many members of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, who usually dwelt there, had left the city with their families and servants prior to the investment; and thus the queues and the waits were not so long as in the poorer and more densely populated districts. Saby, however, often procured our meat himself or employed somebody else to do so, for women were heartily glad of the opportunity to earn half a franc or so by acting as deputy for other people.
We had secured a small supply of tinned provisions, and would have increased it if the prices had not gone up by leaps and bounds, in such wise that a tin of corned beef or something similar, which one saw priced in the morning at about 5 francs, was labelled 20 francs a few hours later. Dry beans and peas were still easily procurable, but fresh vegetables at once became both rare and costly. Potatoes failed us at an early date. On the other hand, jam and preserved fruit could be readily obtained at the grocer's at the corner of our street. The bread slowly deteriorated in quality, but was still very fair down to the date of my departure from Paris (November 8 [See the following chapter.]). Milk and butter, however, became rare—the former being reserved for the hospitals, the ambulances, the mothers of infants, and so forth—whilst one sighed in vain for a bit of Gruyère, Roquefort, Port-Salut, Brie, or indeed any other cheese.
Saby, who was a very shrewd fellow, had conceived a brilliant idea before the siege actually began. The Chateaubriands having quitted the house and removed their horses from the stables, he took possession of the latter, purchased some rabbits—several does and a couple of bucks—laid in a supply of food for them, and resolved to make his fortune by rabbit-breeding. He did not quite effect his purpose, but rabbits are so prolific that he was repaid many times over for the trouble which he took in rearing them. For some time he kept the affair quite secret. More than once I saw him going in and out of the stables, without guessing the reason; but one morning, having occasion to speak to him, I followed him and discovered the truth. He certainly bred several scores of rabbits during the course of the siege, merely ceasing to do so when he found it impossible to continue feeding the animals. On two or three occasions we paid him ten francs or so for a rabbit, and that was certainly "most-favoured-nation treatment;" for, at the same period, he was charging twenty and twenty-five francs to other people. Cooks, with whom he communicated, came to him from mansions both near and far. He sold quite a number of rabbits to Baron Alphonse de Rothschild's chef at the rate of £2 apiece, and others to Count Pillet-Will at about the same price, so that, so far as his pockets were concerned, he in no wise suffered by the siege of Paris.
We were blessed with an abundance of charcoal for cooking purposes, and of coals and wood for ordinary fires, having at our disposal not only the store in our own cellars, but that which the Chateaubriand family had left behind. The cold weather set in very soon, and firing was speedily in great demand. Our artist Jules Pelcoq, who lived in the Rue Lepic at Montmartre, found himself reduced to great straits in this respect, nothing being procurable at the dealers' excepting virtually green wood which had been felled a short time previously in the Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes. On a couple of occasions Pelcoq and I carried some coals in bags to his flat, and my father, being anxious for his comfort, wished to provide him with a larger supply. Saby was therefore requisitioned to procure a man who would undertake to convey some coals in a handcart to Montmartre. The man was found, and paid for his services in advance. But alas! the coals never reached poor Pelcoq. When we next saw the man who had been engaged, he told us that he had been intercepted on his way by some National Guards, who had asked him what his load was, and, on discovering that it consisted of coals, had promptly confiscated them and the barrow also, dragging the latter to some bivouac on the ramparts. I have always doubted that story, however, and incline to the opinion that our improvised porter had simply sold the coals and pocketed the proceeds.
One day, early in November, when our allowance of beef or mutton was growing small by degrees and beautifully less and infrequent—horseflesh becoming more and more en évidence at the butchers' shops, [Only 1-1/2 oz. of beef or mutton was now allowed per diem, but in lieu thereof you could obtain 1/4 lb. of horseflesh.] I had occasion to call on one of our artists, Blanchard, who lived in the Faubourg Saint Germain. When we had finished our business he said to me: "Ernest, it is my fête day. I am going to have a superb dinner. My brother-in-law, who is an official of the Eastern Railway Line, is giving it in my honour. Come with me; I invite you." We thereupon went to his brother-in-law's flat, where I was most cordially received, and before long we sat down at table in a warm and well-lighted dining-room, the company consisting of two ladies and three men, myself included.
The soup, I think, had been prepared from horseflesh with the addition of a little Liebig's extract of meat; but it was followed by a beautiful leg of mutton, with beans a la Bretonne and—potatoes! I had not tasted a potato for weeks past, for in vain had the ingenious Saby endeavoured to procure some. But the crowning triumph of the evening was the appearance of a huge piece of Gruyère cheese, which at that time was not to be seen in a single shop in Paris. Even Chevet, that renowned purveyor of dainties, had declared that he had none.
My surprise in presence of the cheese and the potatoes being evident, Blanchard's brother-in-law blandly informed me that he had stolen them. "There is no doubt," said he, "that many tradespeople hold secret stores of one thing and another, but wish prices to rise still higher than they are before they produce them. I did not, however, take those potatoes or that cheese from any shopkeeper's cellar. But, in the store-places of the railway company to which I belong, there are tons and tons of provisions, including both cheese and potatoes, for which the consignees never apply, preferring, as they do, to leave them there until famine prices are reached. Well, I have helped myself to just a few things, so as to give Blanchard a good dinner this evening. As for the leg of mutton, I bribed the butcher—not with money, he might have refused it—but with cheese and potatoes, and it was fair exchange." When I returned home that evening I carried in my pockets more than half a pound of Gruyère and two or three pounds of potatoes, which my father heartily welcomed. The truth about the provisions which were still stored at some of the railway dépôts was soon afterwards revealed to the authorities.
Although my father was then only fifty years of age and had plenty of nervous energy, his health was at least momentarily failing him. He had led an extremely strenuous life ever since his twentieth year, when my grandfather's death had cast great responsibilities on him. He had also suffered from illnesses which required that he should have an ample supply of nourishing food. So long as a fair amount of ordinary butcher's meat could be procured, he did not complain; but when it came to eating horseflesh two or three times a week he could not undertake it, although, only a year or two previously, he had attended a great banquet hippophagique given in Paris, and had then even written favourably of viande de cheval in an article he prepared on the subject. For my own part, being a mere lad, I had a lad's appetite and stomach, and I did not find horseflesh so much amiss, particularly as prepared with garlic and other savouries by Mme. Saby's expert hands. But, after a day or two, my father refused to touch it. For three days, I remember, he tried to live on bread, jam, and preserved fruit; but the sweetness of such a diet became nauseous to him—even as it became nauseous to our soldiers when the authorities bombarded them with jam in South Africa. It was very difficult to provide something to my father's taste; there was no poultry and there were no eggs. It was at this time that Saby sold us a few rabbits, but, again, toujours lapin was not satisfactory.
People were now beginning to partake of sundry strange things. Bats were certainly eaten before the siege ended, though by no means in such quantities as some have asserted. However, there were already places where dogs and cats, skinned and prepared for cooking, were openly displayed for sale. Labouchere related, also, that on going one day into a restaurant and seeing cochon de lait, otherwise sucking-pig, mentioned in the menu, he summoned the waiter and cross-questioned him on the subject, as he greatly doubted whether there were any sucking-pigs in all Paris. "Is it sucking-pig?" he asked the waiter. "Yes, monsieur," the man replied. But Labby was not convinced. "Is it a little pig?" he inquired. "Yes, monsieur, quite a little one." "Is it a young pig?" pursued Labby, who was still dubious. The waiter hesitated, and at last replied, "Well, I cannot be sure, monsieur, if it is quite young." "But it must be young if it is little, as you say. Come, what is it, tell me?" "Monsieur, it is a guinea-pig!" Labby bounded from his chair, took his hat, and fled. He did not feel equal to guinea-pig, although he was very hungry.
Perhaps, however, Labouchere's best story of those days was that of the old couple who, all other resources failing them, were at last compelled to sacrifice their little pet dog. It came up to table nicely roasted, and they both looked at it for a moment with a sigh. Then Monsieur summoned up his courage and helped Madame to the tender viand. She heaved another sigh, but, making a virtue of necessity, began to eat, and whilst she was doing so she every now and then deposited a little bone on the edge of her plate. There was quite a collection of little bones there by the time she had finished, and as she leant back in her chair and contemplated them she suddenly exclaimed: "Poor little Toto! If he had only been alive what a fine treat he would have had!"
To return, however, to my father and myself, I must mention that there was a little English tavern and eating-house in the Rue de Miromesnil, kept by a man named Lark, with whom I had some acquaintance. We occasionally procured English ale from him, and one day, late in October, when I was passing his establishment, he said to me: "How is your father? He seems to be looking poorly. Aren't you going to leave with the others?" I inquired of Lark what he meant by his last question; whereupon he told me that if I went to the Embassy I should see a notice in the consular office respecting the departure of British subjects, arrangements having been made to enable all who desired to quit Paris to do so. I took the hint and read the notice, which ran as Lark had stated, with this addendum: "The Embassy cannot, however, charge itself with the expense of assisting British subjects to leave Paris." Forthwith I returned home and imparted the information I had obtained to my father.
Beyond setting up that notice in the Consul's office, the Embassy took no steps to acquaint British subjects generally with the opportunity which was offered them to escape bombardment and famine. It is true that it was in touch with the British Charitable Fund and that the latter made the matter known to sundry applicants for assistance. But the British colony still numbered 1000 people, hundreds of whom would have availed themselves of this opportunity had it only come to their knowledge. My father speedily made up his mind to quit the city, and during the next few days arrangements were made with our artists and others so that the interests of the Illustrated London News might in no degree suffer by his absence. Our system had long been perfected, and everything worked well after our departure. I may add here, because it will explain something which follows, that my father distributed all the money he could possibly spare among those whom he left behind, in such wise that on quitting Paris we had comparatively little, and—as the sequel showed—insufficient money with us. But it was thought that we should be able to secure whatever we might require on arriving at Versailles.
VII
FROM PARIS TO VERSAILLES
I leave Paris with my Father—Jules Favre, Wodehouse, and Washburne—
Through Charenton to Créteil—At the Outposts—First Glimpses of the
Germans—A Subscription to shoot the King of Prussia—The Road to
Brie-Comte-Robert—Billets for the Night—Chats with German Soldiers—The
Difficulty with the Poorer Refugees—Mr. Wodehouse and my Father—On the
Way to Corbeil—A Franco-German Flirtation—Affairs at Corbeil—On the
Road in the Rain—Longjumeau—A Snow-storm—The Peasant of Champlan—
Arrival at Versailles.
Since Lord Lyons's departure from Paris, the Embassy had remained in the charge of the second Secretary, Mr. Wodehouse, and the Vice-Consul. In response to the notice set up in the latter's office, and circulated also among a tithe of the community by the British Charitable Fund, it was arranged that sixty or seventy persons should accompany the Secretary and Vice-Consul out of the city, the military attacheé, Colonel Claremont, alone remaining there. The provision which the Charitable Fund made for the poorer folk consisted of a donation of £4 to each person, together with some three pounds of biscuits and a few ounces of chocolate to munch on the way. No means of transport, however, were provided for these people, though it was known that we should have to proceed to Versailles—where the German headquarters were installed—by a very circuitous route, and that the railway lines were out.
We were to have left on November 2, at the same time as a number of Americans, Russians, and others, and it had been arranged that everybody should meet at an early hour that morning at the Charenton gate on the south-east side of Paris. On arriving there, however, all the English who joined the gathering were ordered to turn back, as information had been received that permission to leave the city was refused them. This caused no little consternation among the party, but the order naturally had to be obeyed, and half angrily and half disconsolately many a disappointed Briton returned to his recent quarters. We afterwards learnt that Jules Favre, the Foreign Minister, had in the first instance absolutely refused to listen to the applications of Mr. Wodehouse, possibly because Great Britain had not recognized the French Republic; though if such were indeed the reason, it was difficult to understand why the Russians received very different treatment, as the Czar, like the Queen, had so far abstained from any official recognition of the National Defence. On the other hand, Favre may, perhaps, have shared the opinion of Bismarck, who about this time tersely expressed his opinion of ourselves in the words: "England no longer counts"—so low, to his thinking, had we fallen in the comity of nations under our Gladstone cum Granville administration.