The Great Eastern

by Howard Rodman

The following morning, Wednesday 24th May, did not begin auspiciously: the barricades at the square Montholon, at the Bank of France, and at the Louvre, were dispersed at bayonet-point by the troops from Versailles. The Committee for Public Safety took refuge in the city hall of the 11th arrondissement. That afternoon the Hôtel de Ville was set afire. By midnight the communards held only the 11th, 12th, 19th, and 20th arrondissements, and parts of the 3rd, 5th, and 8th.

  The streets deep in the 5th where Céline and Sophie made their home had not yet been penetrated by the Republican onslaught. But the Communards were everywhere in retreat and now the wounded were being brought to the Hôpital Misericorde, just above Sophie’s apartment. The skies were filled with smoke and even here there was no real escape from the battle. The hands of the clock were being turned back and the future would soon no longer exist. Just soldiers, and the government, and the world as it had been.

  The next morning, Thursday 25th May, Céline and Sophie debated whether they could safely make the walk to the Halle aux Vins between the rue St. Victor and the quai St. Bernard. But there were already flames rising from the quai and a woman heading across the rue told them that the Versailles troops had come down the St.-Michel bridge, which the fédérés for lack of ammunition could not hold. Then down the boulevard St.-Michel via the rues Racine and De l’Ecole-de-Médecine, which women had defended. She told them: the Panthéon fell almost without a struggle. She told them: forty prisoners were shot one after the other in the rue St. Jacques, under the eyes and by the orders of a colonel.

  It stood to reason that the Versailles troops would seize the early opportunity to sack the hall of wine. Céline and Sophie instead ventured south, a direction for the moment safe, to the markets they knew. The Versailles troops would, it stood to reason, soon mount an assault on the caserne on the rue de l’Oursine, so it would be best to leave, and return, early.

  Near-all of the shops were shuttered and perhaps three-quarters of the market vendors were dark. The four-seasons vegetable man was there, as well as a few others; but this morning no one was accepting paper. The crowds were thick with women, all of whom wanted to bring home food for their families, none of whom had currency that the merchants would accept.

  There was a knot, and a clamor, at the center of the street. Céline made her way toward it. At its heart was a man, head bent low, who was giving gold coins to all he passed. He was offered currency in return but refused with a polite flex of the wrist, an open raised palm. “No thank you,” he seemed to say though he did not utter a word. It was one of the small mercies of the days of the Commune, of which there were hundreds if not thousands.

  The coins were not French coins but they were gold: undoubtedly and indisputably. Some of the merchants tested the edge of those coins with their teeth and were pleased with the softness of the metal. Gold, near-pure. You could buy vegetables, you could buy meat. The coins bore the face of Carlos II, the jut-jawed Spanish king. When the man who did not speak had given away all he had he disappeared into the crowd. Disappeared, heading north, toward this morning’s barricades.

  The 3rd and 11th arrondissements had fallen and by midnight Céline and Sophie’s 5th as well. In the heart of the 5th the Lycée Henri-IV, at which the young Isambard Kingdom Brunel had matriculated some forty-nine years previous, was taken over as barracks and supply depot for the Republican troops. Friday morning was relatively calm but at noon the forces from Versailles were once again in full attack. Mid-afternoon the Bastille was in Republican hands.

  By nightfall the lines of battle were well-delineated. The Communards were holding a perimeter ascending from Faubourg St.-Antoine, along boulevard Richard-Lenoir, up the canal de l’Ourcq, to the bassin de la Villette. Although history, written by victors, ascribes to the Communards’s compound acts of savagery and bloody slaughter, atrocities beyond compare, it is worth remembering that the number of those killed at the hands of the Commune was at most a hundred, and that the number of those killed by the Versailles troops was, by all accounts, between 20,000 and 30,000. (And this in an era before automatic weaponry.)

  But we are not here to make a case for the relative politesse of the Communards. They were fighting for the future of human relations and for the possibilities of the imagination. The soldiers were fighting, as soldiers largely do, to maintain order. But the order that they strove to maintain was old, corrupt, murderous, and consigned the majority of the populace to lives of scarcity, failure, confinement, futility, and dread.

  On Saturday 27th May, despite fierce resistance in the 19th and 20th, the Place des Fêtes and the church of Belleville were seized and occupied by government troops. The city hall of the 20th defended itself nobly, a resistance organized by Ferré, Varlin, Ranvier, and Jourde. (We cite, here, those names that have not been lost to history; but we acknowledge that there were thousands, or hundreds of thousands, whose deeds were equally valiant, but whose names were not recorded.)

  Yet even while the 20th stood its ground, Marshal MacMahon, commander of the Versailles Republican forces, issued a general proclamation: “To the inhabitants of Paris: the French army has come to save you. Paris is freed! At four o’clock our soldiers took the last insurgent position. Today the fight is over. Order, work, and security will be reborn.”

  Céline did not consult with her family. Her father would, she knew, have counseled caution. But the presence of soldiers in the 5th, in her beloved quartier, seemed wrong beyond compare. She could not live while those bayonets were raised. And so she left for market but did not market; she left to meet Sophie but did not meet Sophie. Rather she made her way down St.-Geneviève and the rue des Postes, turning right on the rue de l’Arbaletre, working her way down and over to the rue d’Enfer, down to where it meets boulevard Saint-Jacques. There is, on that square, a stone kiosk with a wooden door. A sign above that wooden door says, Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la Mort. Stop: here is the empire of death.

  It is the door to the catacombs, where the bones and skulls of countless, nameless men and women are interred, arrayed along the walls in meticulous stacks and patterns, a Braille of remains. It can be reached by a spiral staircase that descends for the longest time. It is not pleasant down here and there is no light. But Céline was hoping to find a realm beneath the dominion of the soldiers from Versailles— And she was hoping, too, that without having to return aboveground, she might find a route beneath the 14th, the 5th, under the Seine, through the 4th, under the Bastille, across the 11th, and up to the 20th, where liberty was still said to exist. She carried a torch of sorts—a rag-wrapped stick that had been dipped in oil—and tried to make her peace with the eyes, or eye sockets, that stared back at her. In life limbs were strewn this way and that. In death they were stacked with the precision of carbon atoms in a diamond.

  Nor was she alone down there. Other Communards, escaping, and Versailles soldiers, pursuing, were attempting the same journey. Up ahead: bones scattered on the floor of the catacombs in wild disarray. She did not have the time to replace them as they had been as she ran, forward, into the progressively confined and lightless passage.

  Then she found herself in a taller, wider room, which—though she could see no source of illumination—seemed to be awash in a faint moonlit glow. Along the left wall was the customary patterned stack of crossed bones, skulls-in-a-row. But along the other side, engraved on the smooth rock of the passage, was a large-scaled image of an Indian palace. The piece was intricate and detailed, in the manner of scrimshaw. A labor of love in the hall of the dead. Who had drawn it, and why had he (or, perhaps, she) spent so much time—weeks, most likely—in this small and dismal space, that stank of death, that offered no comfort or reward?

  She wanted to examine it more closely but there was no time. Then she realized she was not alone in the room. She turned to see the man who had, two days before—two days, and it might as well have been two decades—given away gold coins in the rue Mouffetard. In the dark of the catacombs by the flicker of torchlig
ht she could barely see his face.

  “You may follow me,” he said.

  He warned her that the Versailles soldiers had made their approach from the south of the city, and that a regiment was now working its way up the catacombs from the plain of Montsouris. “Come,” he said.

  He was from— Somewhere. His French was impeccable but his accent bore the trace of another land, far from here. His beard was deep, impenetrable black, the black of India ink. Then—speaking more to himself than to her—he took a backward glance at the meticulously intaglio’d palace. Said, “Orchha.” She was not sure what he’d uttered but was certain that it had meaning to him. But what meaning—even what language—was beyond her ability to fathom.

  He led the way with his torch. She followed for a while but then could not keep up and lost him around a bend in the narrow ossuary. It was dark and damp and quiet.

  Then in the next moment all was different. Ahead of her were soldiers, a line of soldiers, and they were shooting ahead, blindly, clearing the passage of anyone who might be fleeing their dominion. There were perhaps eight of the Versailles soldiers. They would fire, reload, fire again. She turned around and attempted to retrace her steps but the way was blocked with fallen bones. Céline had been searching for those remaining few square miles where dreams had not yet been extinguished, where the future had not yet been recuperated by the past. Céline wanted to find that place, needed to find that place, more than she needed to live. But now that the soldiers were firing at her—were trying to kill her—she understood that she had wanted to be free but that she had not wanted, and did not want, to die.

  There was no light down here save the occasional flash of a soldier’s torch and that provided by the muzzle-flare of their rifles. Bullets would lodge in skulls that had been dead for centuries. (There were six million remains down here, perhaps seven million. The living of Paris did not outnumber the dead.) Now a Republican bullet hit her in the arm. She pulled into a declivity where she hoped the soldiers—shooting blindly now—could not find her.

  “Here,” said a voice, and it was again the voice of the man whose beard was inky black. He saw that she was bleeding and tore a piece of cloth from his blouse and wrapped it around her upper arm, knotted it tight. The soldiers shot off another volley. “Where are you headed?” he asked.

  “To the 20th,” she said. “Where freedom—”

  “The 20th is fallen,” he said. “Belleville. Menilmontant. Fallen. All of it: fallen.”

  “Where—” she began to ask.

  “Nowhere,” said the man. “The fédérés all rounded up. In Père-Lachaise now. Without possibility of rescue or escape.”

  They shared a silent moment in which each considered the import of what was just said, what was just heard. And then he said: “You are wounded. You want to go home.”

  “Here,” he said, and showed her something she’d not noticed: behind a neat stack of bones were rungs of bent iron sunk into the rock. A ladder of sorts. Which could only lead— Above. Away from here. Out from the empire of death. “Here,” he said a third and final time, pressing something into her hand. “It will bring you good.” It was a small object wrapped in cloth. She put it into her pocket.

  The man then lifted her up, helped her find purchase on the rungs of the inset iron ladder. The soldiers fired yet again and by the sound of it from closer range. She climbed up perhaps ten or fifteen feet then looked back, expecting that the man would be following her. He was not. She did not understand why he would help her to escape yet not seize the opportunity for himself. When she looked back down into the darkness of the catacombs she could see, by faintest light, the man’s back as he was quitting the chamber with the small palace. He was heading north. Not toward home, or safety, but toward the cemetery, where the fédérés had already been sentenced and condemned. He was walking, at a steady pace, not away from the firing squad, but into it. Why would a man, Céline thought, walk toward death? And then in an instant she knew. He was walking toward freedom. And if in doing so he had sealed his own fate, that was of lesser consequence.

  It was not a decision she could emulate. But it was one, given the events of the week, she could well understand.

  Aboveground the Versailles soldiers had opened a breach in the wall of Père-Lachaise where some hundreds of Communards had taken refuge. Combat was intimate, with fédérés concealing themselves within catafalques or leaping from behind tombstones to knife those soldiers who strayed from formation. The quarters were too close for rifle work and thus the Versailles soldiers removed their bayonets from their rifles and went in by hand.

  The moon had been new on the 19th and now, on the night of 27 May, was only in its first quarter. With scant light one did not know who was friend, who was combatant, who was ghost. The blood of fédérés soaked into the ground, surrounding with warm fluid the cold dry caskets of those who had died before them.

  By sunrise on the morning of Sunday, 28th May, all combat in Père-Lachaise had ceased. The fédérés who had been there surrounded, the Versailles soldiers who had with gun and bayonet secured the perimeter, all for the moment exhausted, silent, or, in many cases, dead. Throughout the city—in public gardens, in prisons, in streets, in catacombs—thousands of men, women, and children were being executed without charge or trial for the crime of being Parisians. Many of them would soon be brought here, Père-Lachaise, to share a common grave.

  As the sun rose in the sky the Versailles soldiers now rounded up those left within Père-Lachaise. Some 147 of them were lined up against the stone cemetery wall, above the rue de Charonne, near the cemetery’s southeast corner. There were soldiers who had fought with the fédérés and Communards who had brandished no weapons; there were Parisians who were guilty of living in the wrong quartier or of working in undignified occupations; and there were women, too, because any among them might be a pétroleuse.

  And so they were lined up and shot on command. Ready, aim, fire. And then again as necessary, until all those who had been lined up were dead on the ground. Once they were dead, once they were no longer the enemy, the soldiers from Versailles obeyed the basic precepts of civil dignity and placed the bodies in simple wood coffins, one to each. If you were to examine them you would find a man with an untamed red beard covering his mouth and chin; a man with a mustache clutching his own elbow; a clean-shaven man with hands crossed, smiling. Adjacent to him you would find a man with head tilted oddly to the side—had he been strangled?—and next to him, a man with his chin raised, arms beneath him, frozen in a rictus of contempt for those who had shot him.

  They bore, all of them, simple numbers, written on small scraps of paper and placed on their chests. They had no names but the army of Versailles was in need of something to record, to enter in their ledger books before quitting these precincts.

  1. 2. 3. 5. 6. 7. 8. 11. 19. 23. 46. 52. 53. 68. 74. 79. 80. 81. 92. 93. 101. 112. 117. 118. 123. 127. 135. 138. 140. 141. 147.

  Number 93 had a piece of cloth wrapped round his head, a cloth wrapped round his body, but otherwise seemed to be wearing no clothes. Number 1 clutched a wreath. Number 129 had a white cotton cloth loosely draped around each arm so that from above he resembled an angel. Number 20 was a very young man, a child really, and barely filled his coffin. Number 6 had impossibly wide-set eyes, a beard of inky black, and the look of a man who had spent much of his life at sea. He had crossed Paris beneath the ground—a feat impossible, as the catacombs of the left and right banks are not thought to be contiguous, yet he had done it—in order to find freedom, dignity, and now, peace. As he had read, etched into catacomb rock beneath a hand-wrought palace the previous night: Has ultra metas requiescunt beatam spem expectantes. Beyond these limits they rest in the hope of eternal happiness. Unlike the others his eyelids had not been slid shut, and even in death it was clear that he saw everything.

  Though it has at times been a conceit of popular fiction, we cannot examine the eyes of a dead man and find, fixed there, the last image he
was to see before all seeing ceased. Likewise, we do not have the means to know what M. le 6—he of the inky beard, the wide-set eyes—was thinking in those final moments. But we can posit that even as he was in a walled cemetery in a northeast quartier of Paris, he was also elsewhere. When last we met him, if you may recall, he had uttered a single word, at once an escaping breath and an aspiration: Orchha. The palace of his birth and now, of his final dreams.

  * * *

  —

  PÈRE-LACHAISE WAS BUILT in 1804 when the other Parisian cemeteries were at capacity. (Paris has never had adequate space for its permanent residents.) It was called cimetière de l’est to distinguish it from the cemeteries in the south (Montparnasse) and north (Montmartre). The first person buried there was a five-year-old girl. Her name was Adélaïde Pailliard de Villeneuve and she was the daughter of a bell boy. Napoléon, who had been named emperor three days previous, proclaimed, “Every citizen has the right to be buried regardless of race or religion.” The word missing from that sentence is, of course, “class.”

  Père-Lachaise grew slowly, perhaps because of its distance from the nine central arrondissements, perhaps due to the fact that it was not, to the Church, holy ground. In 1806 and 1807 there was at most one burial a week. In 1817 someone wise in what was not yet the art of marketing had the remains of Abelard and Héloïse transferred to Père-Lachaise and placed in an ornate crypt. Lovers flocked to the eastern cemetery and the deceased followed.

  Over the years there were, following Abelard and Heloïse, any number of significant Parisians who made their home there; but in the larger sense, perhaps osmotically influenced by its location in the working-class 20th, Père-Lachaise was to become home to those Parisians who in life had not been emperors or bankers or even shopkeepers. It is a city now of perhaps a million residents. If you were to include the remains stored in the ossuary, called Aux Morts, that census would increase to two or three million. You’ll never be alone in the bone orchard.