PARIS AFTER THE COMMUNE

I well remember Paris emerging from her trials. It is difficult to-day to realise the magnitude of the disaster which laid low the beautiful capital of France. When I arrived within its shattered walls, the monster conflagration that would have destroyed the whole city, had it not been for the timely arrival of the Versailles troops, was all but subdued. The firemen, however, were still kept busily engaged, for clouds of smoke and tongues of fire would at intervals burst forth from the smouldering ruins. Tottering walls on the one hand, huge façades of masonry on the other, marked the places where but yesterday glorious specimens of architecture, ancient and modern, had stood. There was the shell of what had been the Tuileries, that palace built in the 16th century, which had seen so much of the history of France. Mobs had pillaged and sacked it; within its state-rooms one crowned head had been forced to wear the cap of liberty, a humiliation which did not save it from the knife of the guillotine. Some fifty years later a bourgeois king had to fly for his life from the palace; and last, it was an unfortunate Empress who had to make good her escape, and seek refuge on the shores of England.

There would be no more pillaging and sacking now; the venerable specimen of the Renaissance style was destroyed. To-day the stranger is just shown the place where the Tuileries stood; then, as the walls crashed down, burying treasures and relics of bygone days in their fall, one was appalled by the tragedy enacted before one’s eyes. I had my little personal recollections too. I had danced there more than once with some of the fairest Parisians; I had drunk the future Emperor’s champagne with a conviction that it was quite the best of its kind, and was evidently intended to make us understand that our host meant business, imperial business, pretty sure to be settled ere long, whether we liked it or not.

Well, one fine old building is gone, I thought, as I turned away from the ruins, but at least the Louvre is saved. That marvel of architecture was intact. The principal works of art it contained had been taken to places of supposed safety, and the whereabouts of the Venus of Milo were said to be known only to some few persons, who had dug a hole and therein buried her. Much else had been providentially saved; there were large gaps in the Rue de Rivoli, but the unique old Tour St. Jacques had escaped unscathed. At the Palais de Justice the fire had stopped short on the threshold of the exquisite Sainte Chapelle, one of the most perfect works of the thirteenth century. I had with some difficulty obtained permission to roam over the ruins of that Palais de Justice and the Prefecture de Police, and whilst the firemen were working to subdue the flames wherever they broke out afresh, I used my brush to make a sketch of the huge maze before me. There were bundles of official papers at my feet; Actes de Naissance and Actes de Décès, charred only, and quite easy to decipher, but as I touched them, they crumbled to ashes. Some seemingly well-preserved parchments I consigned to my pocket, but a few hours later I found little more than dust in their place. The Hotel de Ville, too, which had fallen a prey to the flames, had many an association for me. Henri Lehmann, during the time I was studying under him, had been commissioned to decorate the great hall with a series of pictures. I had lent an apprentice’s hand, and had seen them grow under his brush, as, in an incredibly short space of time, he produced what was thought to be the best work of his life work destined to hand down his name to posterity as one of the most fertile and distinguished painters of the second empire. Ingres, too, who in those days was considered the greatest draughtsman since the time of Raphael, had contributed a masterpiece to the decoration of the hall, a plafond, “The Apotheosis of Napoleon I.” This work I had also seen in progress. On the occasion of a visit to his studio I recollect a lady asking him, in effusive language, where he had found the models for the ideally classical horses attached to the triumphant car of the great conqueror. Ingres led her straight to the window. “There are my models, madam,” he said bluntly, pointing to the cab-stand.

I wandered through Paris day after day, and everywhere the ghastly traces of war, as it really is, confronted me; blood-stained flagstones, broken-down gun-carriages, barricades that had been stormed, and homes that had been wrecked. Everywhere the iron shutters of the shops were riddled with shot or broken open. One climbed as best one could over a heterogeneous mass of impedimenta, collected for attack or defence, or thrown away in precipitate flight. Every effort had been made to prevent petroleum being poured into the basement of the houses. The gratings in the streets had been boarded over and otherwise secured against those female fiends the Pétroleuses. Some of the wealthiest quarters of Paris were known to be undermined, and it was only in the nick of time that the Versailles troops arrived to prevent the execution of such written orders as, “Faîtes sauter lé quartier de la Bourse.”

The fashionable quarters and the suburbs of Paris had suffered terribly from the bombardment. I wandered for days over fragments of every mortal thing that had once been whole, past dismantled batteries, along the barren wastes of the Bois de Boulogne, and through avenues of wrecked villas. Costly furniture and works of art had been shattered to atoms by the enemy’s bombs. In one place I came across a Louis Quinze sofa and chairs that had evidently been carried out for removal, and stood waiting so placidly, that they seemed to invite you to sit down and rest; and in one of the gardens there was a cottage piano, which appeared none the worse for its adventures; two coffee-cups stood unharmed upon it, showing that some two persons had taken their demie-tasse by the side of that piano.

The most striking effects of shot and shell showed themselves on the ornamental ironwork which had once enclosed those suburban villas. It seemed as if they had vented their fiercest passions on those beautifully designed gates and railings French art excels in producing. One could not suppress a feeling of pity as one saw them writhing in anguish and stretching out their weird iron arms as if in supplication. Here they were unhinged and started from their sockets; there their limbs, once so perfectly poised, were twisted into unsightly shapes, and stood out amongst the wreckage in fantastic and uncanny figures.

I had wended my way one afternoon to the revolutionary quarter of Belleville, and had got into conversation with a workman of more than average intelligence. Not feeling at our ease within earshot of the “Mouchards,” as the growling, spying, myrmidons of the police are termed, and not liking the looks of the gensdarmes a cheval with their revolvers at half-cock, we had adjourned to one of the numerous establishments kept by the Marchand de Vins, Traiteur, which take the place of our public-houses. There my workman became confidential and declared himself a Communist to the backbone. He scorned the idea that the German was his enemy.

“If I’m to fight at all,” he said, “let me find an enemy for myself. Let me shoot the richard en face, the capitalist who has been exploiting me and mine. We’ll make him and the like of him disgorge his plunder, and then we’ll start a fresh deal. As for the Germans, my dear sir, I dare say there are a lot of jolly good fellows amongst them, and plenty who would take a bumper, a canon de vin, with us, if they were here now, and drink to the perdition of the bourgeois.”

“That is all very well,” I answered, “but I’m pretty sure you were just like the rest, and went tearing along the boulevards and shouting ’A Berlin!’ And you would have been only too jolly glad to get the Rhine, if you had had a ”

“The Rhine, monsieur!” he interrupted me, “the Rhine! Do you think I know what the blessed thing is; and, supposing we had got it, do you think they’d have given me any of it?”

That was twenty-eight years ago, and since then many a workman has learnt that he does not get his share of the “blessed thing” he has to fight for. I wonder whether he will give up fighting, or whether he will see to it that he gets his share.

It was an impressive sight that met the eye in the Place Vendome. There was the famous column lying prostrate in huge fragments like so many mill-stones, with the bronze legends commemorating the conqueror’s march, battered and crushed out of all seeming in their fall. Those gigantic vertebrae of the mighty pillar made one ponder on the vicissitudes of greatness, and on the ups and downs of heroic symbols. One could not help marvelling at the audacity of the men who had ruptured that spinal cord of patriotic self-glorification.

It was an artist, and a great one too, who planned and directed the destruction of the work of art, Courbet, the most uncompromising of painters and of demagogues. I was living in Paris at the time his first great works were exhibited, and I recollect what a storm of abuse they raised. His “Enterrement a Ornans,” a large and striking picture, crudely realistic, depicting, as it did, mourners at the open grave, with reddened noses and swollen eyes, was considered a deliberate insult offered to all idealists, romanticists, and mannerists. His picture, “La Baigneuse,” was simply derided by the critics; there was no drawing, no modelling. “C’est un sac de noix!” A bag of nuts, not a woman of flesh and blood.

Well, Courbet’s work has outlived criticism; history remembers him as a chef d’ecole.

The only time I recollect meeting him was on the occasion of an international gathering of artists in Antwerp in 1861. He was quite a boon companion, and had a marked objection to retiring to rest before daylight. He would sing us jolly songs, one of which, “C’est l’amour qui nous mène," was a favourite of his.

The Commune went to work very systematically to bring down the huge column. An incision was made at the base in the shape of a notch; a double pulley was attached to the balustrade at the top, and another fixed to the ground in the Rue de la Paix, a rope passing through both to a capstan. When this was set in motion, after some preliminary difficulties had been overcome, the column oscillated for a moment, and then came crashing down in three colossal sections on to a bed of sand, fascines, and straw prepared for it, there to break up into a thousand smaller fragments. The statue of the great Emperor had lost its head and one arm.

An act of vandalism, we say. Yes, but of vandalism with a purpose. We can fancy Courbet declaring: “The work of art must be sacrificed as a warning to those who would honour and perpetuate the memory of selfish aggressors.”

It was History herself he meant to drag from her pedestal History, ever crowning herself with wreaths of laurel and halos of virtue. It was Art too he waged war upon, that Art which he deemed had too long served to glorify the rule of Force: sometimes in a picture or in a legion of pictures, as at Versailles, exalting Imperialism and inciting us to go forth and emulate the deeds and misdeeds of our ancestors; sometimes in a statue of some clever organiser of wholesale slaughter, appropriately cast in the bronze of cannon taken from the enemy; or, again, in a barbarous trophy, a triumphal arch in fact, in a scalp of some kind, that, from generation to generation, we are taught to gloat over.

This was the wording of the decree which condemned the column to destruction:

“THE COMMUNE OF PARIS

“Considering that the Imperial Column of the Place Vendome is a monument of barbarism, a symbol of brute force, of false glory, an encouragement of military spirit, a denial of international rights, a permanent insult offered by the conquerors to the conquered, a perpetual conspiracy against one of the great principles of the French Republic, namely fraternity,

“Decrees:

“Sole article The Vendome Column is to be demolished.”

One day it was a wretched day, the rain pouring in torrents I went to see the ruins of Saint Cloud. People were discussing the question as to who had really done the work of destruction there the Germans, the Versaillais, or the Communards. To the poor victims who had come forth from their hiding-places, returning only to find their homes and hearths ruined, it could really matter little whether the grim work was done by the six of one or the half-a-dozen of the other.

Wandering along the streets in ruins, I was struck by one piece of high wall left standing out against the grey sky to bear witness to the strange caprices of the destructive element; a large red umbrella hung in its place on that wall, and a striped petticoat bedrizzled with rain was being blown about by the wind. The fireplace had kept its every-day appearance, whilst the floor beneath it had gone; on the mantelpiece stood some little household gods, bits of china, a clock, and various nick-nacks one could not distinguish at a distance. Close to me was a touching little group of victims. A woman with three girls, their ages ranging from eight to twelve years, stood gazing at that wall which had once been part of their home. They did not give vent to their feelings in tears or loud lamentations, as so many around me did; the mother was simply dazed, the children overawed. They had come back to Saint Cloud from I know not where, and were carrying their little belongings tied up in cotton handkerchiefs. I think they would scarcely have been able to identify their home, if it had not been for the red umbrella and the striped petticoat.

After a while I spoke to the woman and elicited with some difficulty that her husband had been killed early in the campaign, one son was maimed for life, and the other had not been heard of for two months. When I gave her a few francs she put them in her pocket mechanically; her thoughts were elsewhere. I passed on to witness more destruction and distress. When I returned, some half-an-hour later, to where the high wall stood, I found the mother and the three girls just where I had left them, still hopelessly gazing at the household gods that were mocking their misery from on high.

It was not till that day that I quite realised what we mean when we speak of blank despair.

The recuperative power of the French people is truly extraordinary, and, from the first day and hour of his deliverance, the Parisian gave striking evidence of it. Endowed as he is with indomitable pluck, infinite resources, and inexhaustible light-heartedness, he could set to work with a will, or dance and fiddle with a vengeance, whilst the ashes of his city were still glowing. It came quite natural to him to repossess himself of that city, and to drop unconcernedly into his old ways of life.

There he was once more, the typical Parisian who must have his daily stroll along the Boulevards; he must sit somewhere where he can sip something and see somebody else sipping or strolling. He must watch his opportunity of saying something polite to somebody, and, at a given hour, he must call for an absinthe and concentrate his thoughts on the importance of an approaching meal.

And there he was again, the expert diner we all know, devoutly pinning his napkin under his chin, and thanking the gods that at last the sacred rites of the dinner-table could be duly performed.

One of the characteristics of the Parisian, I always thought, is that exquisite politeness of his. What a lesson to us, who won’t even make room for a fellow-creature in a ’bus if we can help it!

In former days I used to say that I could always tell, if I wanted, to what nationality any particular man in the motley crowd of loungers on the Boulevards belonged. I need but tread on his toes, and he would use strong language in his mother-tongue. The German would invoke the “holy thunder-weather,” the Dutchman would be still more sacrilegious, the Englishman would damn something probably the eyes I should have made use of; and so on each would fling his pet wicked word at me. Only the Frenchman would raise his hat and say, “Pardon, monsieur.”

Knowing and loving the amiable city as I did I had spent altogether about six years there I was deeply interested in her fortunes and misfortunes, and now warmly welcomed the first signs of returning prosperity.

The cannon’s roar had ceased, people were coming from their cellars or other hiding-places, looking for their friends and congratulating one another on being alive. Crowds of sightseers filled the streets and stood gaping at the ruins or commenting on the unique spectacle before them. Barricades were being demolished, and squads of men and women were set to work to clear the roads of broken glass, splintered wood, and other accumulations of nondescript rubbish. Shops were being opened, and the Dames de Comptoir, as correct and business-like as ever, were getting out their books. Goods and wares that had been hidden away, were being brought to light. Shopkeepers were counting up their losses and discounting their prospects.

Matters political were in abeyance. Whenever I asked, “What is to come next? What Government would you vote for?” I got the answer: “Cela nous est bien egal, monsieur, pourvu qu’il-y-ait du travail." One lived in a sort of interregnum, a period of transition from lawlessness to order. War had ceased, but peace had only just begun to strike roots. There was no bragging, no cheap oratory nobody seemed to think himself particularly “trahi." There was no show of military rule. Even the sentries chatted freely with the bourgeois, and there were no ominous cries of “Passez au large,” coupled with the significant thrust of the fixed bayonet, as one used to hear in the days of the Coup d’Etat. On the contrary, thousands of soldiers, with their Chassepots slung carelessly across their shoulders, were sauntering along the streets, most of them evidently provincials, amazed at the grandeur of the capital they were visiting for the first time.

Cabs were about, and even the heavy three-horse omnibuses were resuming their well-regulated course; but no private carriages were to be seen. In fact, the upper ten as well as the submerged tenth seemed to have disappeared, and the odd million about was made up of the bourgeois, the piou-piou, the badaud de province, and other sightseers.

I scorned conveyances of any kind, and tramped along on foot from morning to night, for it was only thus I felt I was my own master. I could pull up, stumble, or climb as circumstances required, or I could turn in, stand, drink, talk, listen, and argue or, better still, hold my tongue.

In the evening darkness reigned, except in the neighbourhood of the cafes. There people were congregating as usual, seeking the light like so many moths, and settling like flies on the sugar that was to sweeten their demie-tasse or to be pocketed for home consumption. At eleven o’clock the cafes were closed, and nothing remained to do but to go home in the dark. The moths, by the way, must have had a dull time of it, for the graceful lamp-posts had suffered so severely that very few of them were fit for service.

The Commune had naturally produced a great quantity of scurrilous literature and vile caricatures, some quite unmentionable; but they are interesting historically, throwing, as they do, a lurid light on the events of those days and the passions they evoked. I bought whatever I could find of such papers and drawings, as also a few of the more respectable publications, and the collection is a pretty complete one, including, as it does, copies of the Pere Duchene, La Lanterne, Le National, La Verite, &c., and some sixty caricatures of the Emperor, the Empress, Thiers, Jules Favre, and many other leading men, all furnishing abundant material for recording and illustrating the politics, hysterics, and erotics of those troublesome times.

Towards the end of my stay I went to Saint Denis. Peace and its blessings were really coming, and welcome signs of their approach were not wanting; even little twigs of olive branches were being held out where I least expected to see them.

Saint Denis was still in the hands of the Germans, and was not to be evacuated till a stipulated sum, forming part of the war indemnity, had been paid. Officers and men quartered there had made themselves very much at home, and some did not seem to be on bad terms with the inhabitants, as in one case, when a bright young fellow on the German side seemed on particularly good terms with an attractive young lady on the French side. He and I had got into conversation; he was evidently pleased to meet a countryman of his (I can be a German occasionally), and was disposed to be friendly and confidential. “Come with me,” he said; “I will show you the prettiest girl in Saint Denis.” I went to see “the prettiest girl,” who, it seemed to me, had been watching for him at the window, and now came down to the door.

He was a non-commissioned officer in I forget which regiment. When not in uniform he was a lawyer for aught I know, a rising young Rechtsanwalt, with plenty of clients. I hope so, for the sake of the young lady, who was charming, and was as much smitten with him as he was with her. He had taught her a few German words, which she could not pronounce without laughing and showing her pretty teeth; she again had lent him some books from her little library. He spoke French fluently, and was happy to be put through a course of French literature by his fair friend.

Love being thicker than blood, I feel sure they eventually got married; and after so romantic an opening, their story cannot but have proved interesting. Should anybody care to write it, I think the line to be taken should be this: They married, and lived “happy ever after” as happily as their children would let them. They had four, differing widely in their tastes and convictions. One son enlisted in the German army; the other in the French. Both were deeply grieved to have fallen on evil times, when emperors and presidents were ever proclaiming the blessings of peace, and when even the people were beginning to question the desirability of attacking their neighbours.

Of the daughters, one loved the Germans, and was unhappy because she was to marry a Frenchman her parents had selected; the other hated the Germans, and was broken-hearted because she was not to marry the Frenchman she loved.

It must all end happily, however, for it is essential that the moral should be pointed: Love your neighbour, if only to show you are unshackled by prejudice. Marry him or her, whether he or she is your hereditary foe or not, and settle down to a life of peace and happiness, that you may inaugurate, by your noble example, the blessed era, when the lion and the lamb shall no longer hesitate to go and do likewise.

But not often was it my good fortune to spend a pleasant hour as at Saint Denis and to imagine little romances built on slight foundations. The tragedy being enacted around me forced itself on my view more than once, when I met batches of miserable prisoners marched off, some to be judged by court-martial, others already sentenced to be shot. The Parisian looked on without exhibiting much interest in their fate. He had seen so much of bloodshed in every form lately that he had grown callous. The day of settlement had come, the murder of the hostages must be avenged, and the canaille must be cleared away, just as the broken glass and the wrecked barricades had to be.

The reign of terror continued; it had only changed its name. Now it was called Justice. Shocking specimens of depraved humanity were those ill-fated prisoners, dragged from their haunts to be tried by the military authorities in Versailles.

I saw types such as only come to the surface when conflicting passions of the worst kind stir up the very dregs of society: dishevelled viragos, brutalised men, female fiends, men devils hyaenas, ready to spring and fasten their claws on you, were they not chained. I heard their howl of despair and their laugh of defiance, as they were led off to be shot.

And thus, whilst the beautiful city was smoothing her ruffled feathers and taking out a new lease of life, the poor wretches met their doom at the foot of the blood-spattered wall.

Wild beasts if you like but men and women our brothers and our sisters alas! born in squalor, bred in vice, and tainted with hereditary ugliness of body and mind.

Who made them what they are? Let us try to find out, and, if we can, let us stand the guilty ones up against that wall, and clear them away with the other human wreckage. But no! neither you nor I would be left to do the clearing away.