UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY

by Eco, Umberto

  I decided to cross the Seine and follow the whole of rue du Bac above ground as far as the Croix-Rouge, assuming that in those areas where buildings were still on fire I'd be unlikely to find any Communards, and that the government forces would not yet be on patrol. From there I could go straight into the abandoned storeroom and take the rest of the route below ground.

  I feared that the defenses at the Croix-Rouge would have prevented me from reaching the building, but they didn't. Armed groups stood at the entrances of various houses, awaiting orders. Conflicting information was circulating — it wasn't clear from which direction the government forces would arrive, and someone was laboriously building and dismantling barricades, changing the entrance of the road according to the latest rumor. A larger contingent of National Guardsmen was arriving, and many of the people living in that respectable district tried to persuade the soldiers not to attempt useless acts of heroism. After all, they said, the men from Versailles were compatriots and, what is more, republicans, and Thiers had promised an amnesty for all Communards who surrendered.

  I found the door of my building ajar, went inside and closed it firmly behind me, climbed down to the storeroom, then down to the underground passageway, and found my way to Montparnasse without difficulty. There I met thirty or so brassardiers who followed me back along the same route. From the storeroom, the men went up to various top-floor apartments, ready to overpower the occupants, but were welcomed with relief by well-dressed people who pointed out the windows commanding the best positions over the crossroads. At that moment, an officer arrived on horseback from rue du Dragon, carrying an order of alert. The order was obviously for them to prepare for an attack from rue de Sèvres or rue du Cherche-Midi, and at the corner of the two streets the Communards were pulling up paving slabs to build a new barricade.

  While the brassardiers were readying themselves at the windows of the occupied apartments, I did not think it fit to remain in a place where Communard bullets would, sooner or later, be flying, and so returned downstairs while there was still plenty of commotion below. Knowing the direction of fire from the windows of the building, I positioned myself at the corner of rue du Vieux Colombier so I could slip away in the event of danger.

  Most of the Communards had stacked their weapons in a pile while they worked away, so when the shooting started from the windows they were caught unprepared. And even when they had retrieved them, they had no idea where the shots were coming from and began firing toward the corner of rue de Grenelle and rue du Four— I had to move back, fearing that the shots would also reach rue du Vieux Colombier. Finally, someone realized their enemy was shooting from above, and there was an exchange of fire between the crossroads and the windows of the houses, except that while the government soldiers could clearly see whom they were shooting at, and fired into the mob, the Communards were still unsure which windows to aim for. In short, it was an easy massacre. Meanwhile, someone at the crossroads was shouting that they'd been betrayed. It's always the same. When you fail at something, you try to blame someone else for your incompetence. But what betrayal? I thought — you simply have no idea how to fight. And you call this a revolution!

  Someone eventually managed to work out which building was occupied by the government troops, and the survivors tried to break down the door. I imagined that by then the brassardiers had already returned into the underground tunnel and the Communards had found the house empty, but I decided not to wait around to find out. As I later discovered, the government forces were indeed approaching from rue du Cherche-Midi, and in large numbers, so the last defenders of the Croix-Rouge must have been easily wiped out.

  I returned to my own alleyway by the back streets, avoiding those directions from which I could hear the rattle of gunshots. Along the walls I saw notices, freshly pasted up, from the Committee for Public Safety, urging citizens to make a last stand: "Aux barricades! L'ennemi est dans nos murs. Pas d'hésitations!"

  In a brasserie in place Maubert I received the latest news: seven hundred Communards had been shot in rue Saint-Jacques, the powder keg went up at the Luxembourg, and in revenge the Communards had taken hostages from the prison of La Roquette, including the archbishop of Paris, and lined them up against the wall. The execution of the archbishop marked the point of no return. There had to be a complete bloodbath for things to return to normal.

  Just as these events were being described to me, several women arrived to shouts of jubilation from the other customers. They were les femmes returning to their brasserie! The prostitutes banned by the Commune had been brought back from Versailles by the government forces, who allowed them once again to circulate in the city, as if to show that all was returning to normal.

  I couldn't stay there in the midst of that mob. They were undoing the one good thing the Commune had achieved.

  In the next few days the Commune came to an end with the last hand-to-hand combat in Père-Lachaise cemetery. It was said that 147 survivors were captured and executed on the spot.

  That way, they learned not to stick their noses into other people's affairs.

  18

  THE PROTOCOLS

  From the diary for 10th and 11th April 1897 With the war over, Simonini resumed his normal work. Fortunately, with all the deaths, problems of inheritance were an everyday occurrence. Large numbers of those killed on or in front of the barricades were young and hadn't yet thought about making a will, and Simonini was inundated with work — and handsome profits. How wonderful it was to have peace, even if there had first been a sacrificial purification.

  His diary makes little mention of the legal routine of the following years and refers only to his hope, which during that period he had never abandoned, of finding new contacts for the sale of his document on the Prague cemetery. He had no idea what Goedsche had been up to in the meantime, but had to keep ahead of him, not least because the Jews seemed to have curiously disappeared during almost the whole time of the Commune. Were they inveterate conspirators, secretly pulling strings in the Commune? Or were they, on the contrary, accumulators of capital hiding at Versailles waiting for the war to finish? But they were behind the Freemasons, and the Paris Freemasons had sided with the Commune, and the Communards had shot an archbishop. The Jews had to be involved in some way. They killed children, so killing archbishops was hardly a problem.

  One day in 1876, while Simonini was pondering this question, he heard the bell downstairs. At the door was an elderly man in a cassock. He thought at first it was the usual satanist priest come to sell consecrated hosts, but then, studying him more closely, under that mass of gray but still curly hair, he recognized Father Bergamaschi. It had been almost thirty years since he'd last seen him.

  For the Jesuit it was more difficult to be sure that the person in front of him was indeed the Simonini he had known as an adolescent, mainly because of the beard (which, after the return of peace, had become black again, with a touch of gray, as befitted a man in his mid-forties). Then his eyes brightened, and he said, with a smile, "But of course. Simonino, it's you, my boy, isn't it? Why keep me at the door?"

  He was smiling, though we would hardly venture to say it was the smile of a tiger, but rather that of a cat. Simonini invited him upstairs and asked, "How did you manage to find me?"

  "Ah, my boy," said Bergamaschi, "didn't you know we Jesuits are always one step ahead of the devil? Even though the Piedmontese had driven us out of Turin, I managed to maintain a good circle of contacts. I discovered, first of all, that you were working at a notary's office and forging wills, and then, alas, that you had sent a report to the Piedmont secret service in which I appeared as adviser to Napoleon III, and was supposed to be plotting against France and the Kingdom of Piedmont at the Prague cemetery. A fine invention, there's no denying it, but then I realized you'd copied the whole thing from that heathen Sue. I tried to find you but was told you were in Sicily with Garibaldi and then that you'd left Italy. General Negri di Saint Front is still on friendly terms with the Society an
d directed me to Paris, where my brethren had good connections with the imperial secret service. That was how I discovered you were in touch with the Russians and that your report about us at the Prague cemetery had become a report on the Jews. But at the same time I learned you'd been spying on a certain Joly. I was able secretly to obtain a copy of his book, left in the office of someone called Lacroix, who had died heroically in an armed encounter with Carbonaro bombers, and I could see that, though Joly had taken his ideas from Sue, you had copied from Joly. Finally my German brethren informed me that a certain Goedsche had written about a ceremony, once again at the Prague cemetery, where the Jews said more or less the same things you had written in your report to the Russians. Except that I knew the first version, involving us Jesuits, was yours, and predated Goedsche's potboiler by many years."

  "At last someone who gives me my due!"

  "Let me finish. After that, what with war, siege and the days of the Commune, Paris was better avoided by a man of the cloth like me. I decided to come and search you out because that same story about the Jews at the Prague cemetery appeared in a booklet published in St. Petersburg. But it was presented as a passage from a novel based on true facts, and therefore originated with Goedsche. And now, this year, more or less the same text has appeared in a pamphlet in Moscow. In short, up there (or down there, however you wish to put it) the whole question of the Jews is turning into a state matter. They're becoming a threat, but they're also a threat to us. Hidden behind this Alliance Israélite are the Masons, and His Holiness has now decided to start a thorough campaign against all enemies of the Church. And here we come back to you, Simonino, who must seek forgiveness for the trick you played on me with the Piedmontese. After slandering our Society, you owe something in return."

  Hell, these Jesuits were cleverer than Hébuterne, Lagrange and Saint Front. They knew everything about everyone. They needed no help from the secret services because they were a secret service themselves; they had brethren in every part of the world and followed what had been said in every language since the fall of the tower of Babel.

  After the collapse of the Commune, everyone in France, including those against the Church, had become deeply religious. There was even talk of erecting a sanctuary at Montmartre, in public atone ment for that tragedy caused by such godless people. If there was a climate of restoration, it was therefore just as important to work as a good restorer. "All right, Father," Simonini said, "tell me what you want."

  "Let us continue along the same line. First of all, seeing that Goedsche is selling the rabbis' speeches in his own name, we have to produce a version that is more detailed and shocking. Then we have to put Goedsche into such a position that he can no longer continue to circulate his version."

  "How can I stop that cheat?"

  "I'll tell my German brethren to keep an eye on him and, if necessary, to take steps to deal with him. From what we know of him, he can be blackmailed in all sorts of ways. But now you have to turn the rabbis' speeches into another document, with more references to current political events. Look at Joly's satire. You have to bring out — how shall I put it?—the Machiavellian character of the Jews and the plans they have for corrupting governments."

  Bergamaschi added that, in order to make the rabbis' speeches more credible, it would be worth looking again at what Abbé Barruel had written, and above all the letter Simonini's grandfather had sent to him. Perhaps he had kept a copy of it, which could pass as the original sent to Barruel?

  Simonini found the copy of the letter in the bottom of a cupboard, in its original small casket, and agreed on a sum with Father Bergamaschi as payment for such a valuable document. The Jesuits were avaricious, but they were obliged to collaborate. And that was how an issue of Le Contemporain was published in July 1878 containing the recollections of Father Grivel, a one-time confidant of Barruel, with much information that Simonini recognized from another source, and from his grandfather's letter. "The Prague cemetery will follow later," said Father Bergamaschi. "If you break a sensational story all at once, after the first impact people forget it. Instead, you have to parcel it out, and each new piece of news brings the whole story back to mind."As he wrote, Simonini found great satisfaction in this repêchageof his grandfather's letter and, with a tremor of righteousness, convinced himself that what he was doing was in furtherance of a clear obligation.

  * * *

  Bergamaschi added that, in order to make the rabbis' speeches more credible, it would be worth looking again at what Abbé Barruel had written, and above all the letter Simonini's grandfather had sent to him.

  * * *

  He set to work with renewed energy to expand the rabbis' speeches. Rereading Joly, he noticed that his attacks depended less on Eugène Sue than he had imagined on first reading it, and that he had attributed other iniquities to his Machiavelli-Napoleon that seemed ideally suited to the Jews.

  In gathering this material, Simonini realized that it was too rich and too vast. In order to impress Catholics, the rabbis' speeches had to contain lots of references to plans to corrupt public morals, and should perhaps borrow from Gougenot des Mousseaux the idea of the physical superiority of the Jews, or from Brafmann the rules for exploiting Christians through usury. As for republicans, they would be disturbed by references to greater control of the press, while for businesses and small investors, who were increasingly distrustful of the banks (which public opinion already considered the exclusive domain of the Jews), references to the economic plans of international Judaism would touch a raw nerve.

  Thus he gradually developed in his mind an idea that, unbeknown to him, was very Jewish and kabbalistic. Rather than a single scene at the Prague cemetery and a single gathering of rabbis, he had to prepare different speeches, one for the priest, one for the socialist, one for the Russians, another for the French. And he didn't have to fabricate all the speeches. He simply had to produce separate sheets that, when shuffled into a different order, would provide the basis for one or another speech; in this way he could sell the appropriate speech to a particular buyer according to the requirements of each one. In other words, it was as if, like a good notary, he were drawing up different depositions, witness statements or confessions which would then be supplied to the lawyers for them to defend this or that case. He therefore began to draft his notes as Protocols, and was careful not to show everything to Father Bergamaschi, allowing him to look only at those texts of a more specifically religious nature.

  Simonini ends this brief description of his work during those years with a curious note: toward the end of 1878 he learned, to his great relief, that both Goedsche and Joly had died. Goedsche was probably asphyxiated by the beer that had been bloating him more and more each day, and poor Joly, desperate as ever, had shot himself in the head. May he rest in peace; he wasn't a bad fellow.

  Perhaps, in recalling the dear late departed, the diarist had drunk too much. As he wrote, his words become muddled and the page eventually comes to a halt, suggesting that he had fallen asleep.

  The next day, waking when it was almost evening, Simonini found on his diary a note from Abbé Dalla Piccola, who had somehow entered his office that morning, read what his alter ego had written and, in moralistic tones, hastened to set the record straight.

  Saying what? That the deaths of Goedsche and Joly ought not to have come as a surprise to our captain, who, unless he was intentionally trying to forget, was evidently incapable of any clear recollection.

  After his grandfather's letter had appeared in Le Contemporain, Simonini had received a letter from Goedsche, written in a French that was grammatically imperfect but quite explicit. "Dear Captain," the letter said, "I imagine the material appearing in Contemporain is just a taste of other material you propose to publish, and we well know that part of that document belong to me, considering that I can show (Biarritz in hand) that I am author of the whole work and you have nothing to show, not even to have assisted in the tiniest detail. Consequently, I require you first of al
l to desist and agree with me a meeting, preferably in the presence of lawyer (but not of your kind) to decide the ownership of the report on the Prague cemetery. If you fail to do so then I will publish news of your deception. Immediately afterward I will inform a certain Monsieur Joly, who is currently unaware of the matter, that you have robbed him of his literary creation. Unless you have forgotten that Joly is lawyer by profession, you will understand that this will also cause you serious inconvenience."

  Alarmed, Simonini immediately contacted Father Bergamaschi. "You look after Joly," he said, "and we'll deal with Goedsche."

  While he was hesitating over what to do about Joly, Simonini received a note from Father Bergamaschi informing him that poor Herr Goedsche had passed away peacefully in his bed, and urging him to pray for his eternal rest, even though he was a damned Protestant.

  Simonini now understood the meaning of looking after Joly. He didn't like having to do certain things, and he was after all indebted to Joly, but he could hardly compromise the successful outcome of his plans with Bergamaschi out of mere moral scruple, and we have just seen how Simonini wanted to rely heavily on Joly's book, without having to worry about any threat of legal proceedings from its author.

  So he went once again to rue de Lappe, and bought a pistol that was small enough to be kept at home, not very powerful but with the advantage of making less noise. He remembered Joly's address and had noted that the apartment, though small, had fine carpets and wall hangings that would muffle loud sounds. In any event, it was better to act in the morning, when carriages and omnibuses clattered in the street below, coming from the Pont Royal and rue du Bac, or passing up and down the Seine embankment.