Liberty's Fire

by Lydia Syson

  ‘Don’t worry. They’re just tuning up,’ he whispered, seeing her dismay at the low cacophony.

  Silence fell as the conductor appeared, and a few moments later Zéphyrine nearly jumped out of her skin. Crashing cymbals, fast and furious violins. Heads nodding, eyes widening. A sudden blast of brass and everything calmed down. Her nerves calmed too, and she began to enjoy herself, concentrating with all her might on the dancing violin bows – all she could see of the string section – and persuading herself that she could identify Anatole’s. She refused to talk to Jules during the interval, for the orchestra continued to play, and they were both able to catch a glimpse of Anatole’s face, though he didn’t see them. The programme was long, and varied – patriotic poetry, a piano solo, the violin professor from the conservatoire. From time to time the performances were overwhelmed by competition from a National Guard band playing in the room next door, cheered on by the overflow audience.

  The concert came to a climax with the appearance of a star everybody knew. She strolled onto the stage, fleshy arms outstretched, white dress trailing behind her and a scarlet sash at her wide waist. Instantly her name rang out from all around the hall.

  ‘It’s la Bordas! It’s la Bordas!’ Bordas was the revolution, in flesh and blood. She was the voice of France herself. It said so on the posters. The singer smiled and her hair sparkled. Zéphyrine glowed. Bordas was looking at her. Right at her! Then she realised that every man and woman in the room was equally convinced that the singer was gazing directly into their eyes. Having captured the entire audience, Bordas raised a hand, lifted up her eyes and the orchestra began to play. Every heart in the room felt itself beating in time, expecting, knowing exactly what was coming next. By the time Rosa Bordas reached the chorus, all were in song together.

  ‘It’s the rabble – the scum of the earth! Oh well! I’m one of them!’

  ‘C’est la canaille! Eh bien! J’en suis!’

  What spectacle! What an apparition! What glory! And it only got better. Gold braid glistening, a fédéré officer appeared suddenly from the corridor with a huge red flag, which he handed to the singer. Without a break in her song, she seized the pole, slowly unfurled the banner, and enveloped herself in the sign of the Commune. The audience was delirious, intoxicated, ecstatic.

  ‘Bravo! Encore!’

  ‘Isn’t she incredible?’ Zéphyrine turned to Jules.

  Lips firmly pressed together, he replied with a tight nod.

  Into the hopeful silence that followed the applause, the distant sound of cannon fire erupted. The outcasts on the steps of the terrace turned their eyes from the lit windows of the palace to the flashes illuminating the sky beyond the Arc de Triomphe.

  24.

  12th May

  The best part of a week went by before Zéphyrine managed to see Rose again. She came into the canteen for breakfast one morning and explained that she’d been working nights. It was early enough still for most of the tables to be empty. On a nod from the Ladle, Zéphyrine wiped her hands on her apron and slid herself onto the bench beside Rose to keep her company while she ate.

  ‘What’s it like, then?’

  Head lowered over a steaming bowl of milky coffee, Rose nodded vigorously. The ribbon that always tied the long plait up in a loop at the back of her head was drooping. ‘Busy,’ she mumbled through a large mouthful of bread. ‘Very busy.’

  She had dark circles under her eyes, and smelled of sweat and disinfectant rather than soap. There was a splash of blood on the hem of her apron. Either she hadn’t noticed, or there had been no time to wash it out.

  ‘You’d better go straight home and get some sleep,’ said Zéphyrine.

  Rose pushed back her bowl, and braced herself with both hands against the table, looking for the energy to stand.

  ‘I’ll try, but I must get the little ones off to school first. And it’s so busy at the laundry. We’re taking the overflow of linen and bandages from the ambulance station now, and it’s all we can do to keep up. My mother’s depending on me.’

  ‘Tell her I’ll come by when I’m done here.’ If she couldn’t bring herself to tend to the wounded herself, at least she could help look after the nurses. It meant disappointing Anatole but he would have to understand.

  ‘Would you?’ said Rose, giving her a quick hug. ‘That would be a big help.’ She held Zéphyrine at arm’s length and inspected her. ‘Do you know, I thought we were losing you?’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  Rose waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh … all your gallivanting in town. Operas. Concerts. Photographers. More important things to do than help the Commune. You’re getting so grand, aren’t you?’

  Zéphyrine was indignant. ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘I thought you might be leaving us soon, to lead the high life. Isn’t that man – Anatole, or whatever his name is – shouldn’t he be setting you up with an apartment by now? Buying you a little lapdog? A carriage? A diamond necklace?’

  Zéphyrine couldn’t quite tell if she was joking or not. Rose knew Anatole’s name well enough. She flushed lightly, and thought of Minou. She was glad her cap covered her ears and Rose hadn’t noticed her new earrings.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. He’s not like that. And he’s only a musician. He couldn’t afford anything like that even if he – or I – wanted it.’

  ‘So what does he want?’ said Rose more gently, and took Zéphyrine’s hand, making a show of examining it for a ring. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  All the discussions at the club confused Zéphyrine. The speakers she most admired sneered at marriage contracts. (Contracts! Of course they’re called contracts. Just another capitalist financial transaction. Legalised slavery. Women bought and sold, from father to husband. It was time to put an end to marriage.) But what if you thought you did want to be with someone for ever and ever? Did you need to have something to show for a promise like that? And then again, what if you weren’t so sure? She wished she had time to talk to Rose properly about everything. Or even Marie.

  ‘You’re going to have to decide. Everyone needs to know where their loyalties lie.’

  ‘But I do know,’ said Zéphyrine. ‘Of course I know. I want to help the Commune.’ She liked working with the committee – recently they’d been visiting vacant workshops, making a list of buildings that could be turned over to cooperative use. They were going to change things so it would be different for everyone, always. Equal pay for equal work. A proper education for girls, for this life, not the next, which was all the nuns ever seemed to care about. It was hard fighting for all this, and keeping Versailles at bay too. It took commitment. Maybe she wasn’t showing enough commitment. ‘Don’t worry – I’ve not been completely swept off my feet, you know. I’m not an idiot. I know what’s important.’

  ‘I just wish the Commune didn’t make it so difficult. You know they’ve completely banned women from the battlefield now? By order of the Committee of Public Safety.’

  ‘Oh, Rose, but you promised me you weren’t going to go to the front.’

  ‘I’m not. I can’t. I really can’t.’ She looked down and shook her head at her foot. ‘I wouldn’t be able to run away with the men, would I?’

  Zéphyrine gave her a mock punch. There had indeed been a great many chaotic retreats. The National Guard – always resistant to orders – was running out of military commanders. The latest to be appointed was not even an army man, but a journalist.

  ‘Rose. Stop that talk.’

  ‘Really, you don’t know what it’s like. If you saw the state of the men by the time they get back here – so much blood lost, and their wounds stinking. Nothing you can do to stop them dying.’

  Zéphyrine put a hand to her mouth.

  ‘They need help so much sooner than we can give it,’ Rose said. ‘And so often they’ve got separated from the rest of their company – or the rest of them have run away – and nobody even knows who they are. Oh, Zéph –
the coffins! It’s pitiful.’

  ‘But you won’t go, will you, Rose? Promise you won’t? Didn’t you hear?’

  Rose nodded grimly. ‘About the nurse who was raped and killed? By the Versailles soldiers? I know. Horrible. Inhuman.’

  Zéphyrine’s mouth fell open. ‘No, I didn’t mean that … I hadn’t heard,’ she said. ‘I was just talking about our own lot, who seem quite bad enough.’

  Nine brave women had gone out to nurse a few weeks earlier: they were insulted, humiliated and sent back to the city as if they’d come to get in the way, instead of helping.

  ‘Oh yes, it makes your blood boil. I’m sick of these men acting as if they don’t need us. As if we don’t matter, and what we do doesn’t count. And all this stuff about emergency powers. That’s not what they were voted in for. That’s not democratic. It’s one form of tyranny for another.’

  The Ladle was calling Zéphyrine.

  ‘Go on.’ Rose gave her a kiss and a quick push back towards the kitchens. ‘You’d better get back to work.’

  Zéphyrine returned the kiss. ‘And you’d better get some sleep.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  25.

  16th May.

  Four days later, the Commune organised another enthralling distraction from the horror outside the city walls. At the Place Vendôme, the grandest of squares – it was barely a stone’s throw from the Tuileries Palace – Paris gathered for a spectacle that promised to be greater even than the concert. People waited, penned behind barriers in all the surrounding streets, beside themselves with excitement. After weeks of debate, the huge, hated column at the centre of the square was coming down. The statue at the top, the emperor of the First Empire, would be sent crashing to the ground. But what else could be expected to fall?

  The slates were a worry: suppose they came shearing off the roofs to slice the heads beneath? Whole balconies might tumble down with the shock of the demolition. Or the vast column itself could crash right through the road, burying its outdated triumph in the muck of the sewers below. And if the sewers themselves burst, what then? Every window in the square was criss-crossed with paper strips in anticipation, every forehead lined with worry.

  Jules had applied for permission to photograph the event, giving him admission inside the barriers. There he was now, laisser-passer in his coat pocket, Anatole at his side, acting as his assistant for the day. They had even had a private guard to get them and the mobile darkroom into the square early that morning.

  ‘It looks as if they’ve been digging a grave for a giant,’ said Anatole, when they had first arrived. Within a few hours, a long bed of branches lay on top. The fall of the emperor was to be cushioned by an eiderdown of twigs and brushwood, a mattress of sand and dung. All morning men had been stripping off the bronze, and chipping away at the stonework just above the square base.

  ‘Will your camera be safe? Supposing the lens shatters?’ Anatole asked Jules.

  No reply. Jules must have seen some signal, some movement. He had retreated again beneath the black velvet in readiness. So Anatole lifted the edge, and asked the questions again.

  ‘Just have to see,’ came the snappy reply. ‘It should survive. Certainly hope so.’ Jules emerged again, blinking, and looked around. He was less immaculate than usual today. The repeated delays and false starts were fraying his temper as well as his moustache. Might there be some punishment if he failed to capture the occasion to the Commune’s satisfaction? ‘But I wish they’d get on with it.’

  ‘Shall I ask someone what’s happening?’ Anatole gestured towards the trio of Guardsmen who stood a few feet away, protecting Jules’s darkroom. ‘It must be nearly three.’

  Jules consulted his fob watch again and nodded. He ran a finger along the back of his neck, unsticking his stiff collar. Across the square, the conductor of a small brass band raised his baton, sending Jules ducking back beneath the camera hood, and just at that moment the ropes stretching from a wooden windlass and anchor in the square to the emperor’s feet high above began to tauten. Every voice was stilled. Just a faint creaking could be heard. The red flag continued to flutter in the breeze. Then the first few trumpets sounded.

  Five or six members of the Commune leadership were standing in the square holding themselves as taut as the ropes. Anatole glanced at them, then searched the mass of faces being kept back at the rue de la Paix. Somewhere among them was Zéphyrine, who had been given a day off work for the occasion. He couldn’t see her, but he felt an invisible rope tightening between them, something between pain and pleasure.

  The wooden machinery began to groan under the pressure, and the men to grunt. They strained at the bar for several minutes to no effect. A sudden crash, and the ropes hung slack. The capstan, springing back, had catapulted six or seven workers into the air and onto their backs. But the column stood as tall and firm as ever. There was a collective sigh of disappointment. A few murmured treason.

  Anatole did not know what to wish for. He’d learned to hate the glorification of the empire this column stood for. But somebody had made that statue, those reliefs. Couldn’t you dismantle an idea without taking apart everything connected with it?

  ‘At least I didn’t waste a plate on that.’ Jules emerged again, unfolding a gleaming white handkerchief to wipe his face. ‘I suppose it’s back to the waiting game now.’

  ‘It looks as though it will be a while, doesn’t it? Do you think you need me?’ asked Anatole. ‘I could get you a drink? They’ll let me back in with my pass.’

  ‘Go on then. Nothing will happen in a hurry. I can manage alone for a short time.’

  Jules watched as Anatole skirted the mound of earth and branches, his bouncing stride speeding up nearer the half-built barricade. A brief discussion with a sentry – he would charm him, of course – and then he disappeared. Jules had a feeling that Anatole would not remember why he said he had gone. He sighed. He was thirsty, and hungry too, after all these hours of waiting around. But a different kind of emptiness, an unfamiliar void, was settling inside him.

  That was it then. All those months of gently teasing, prodding and tempting Anatole. All the wondering while the silver sunbeam danced a little harder in Jules’s heart, and Anatole had seemed to waver, and Jules had kept patience. The only comfort he had left was his own failure. So many times, on the very brink, he had drawn back, waited and watched, sensing the moment was not right – almost, if he was honest, enjoying the unsaidness of it all. There was a certain pleasure in uncertainty, after all. But he had spun things out for too long.

  At first, Zéphyrine had confused Jules. Analytical as ever, he tried to frame Anatole’s response to her, and looking for parallels he found a few. He knew, after all, that Anatole was already inclined to flirt with the unknown. He had witnessed his joy in plunging into an unfamiliar world, how difference and a certain kind of disobedience excited him. It made a strange kind of sense. Patience, Jules had counselled himself, as he waited and hoped for Anatole’s attention to turn again.

  That day in the Place Vendôme, Jules resigned himself to the fact that it wasn’t going to. Under the light Zéphyrine cast, Jules would go on watching Anatole’s love for her take shape like a heliograph in sunshine. Perhaps, he reflected, perhaps he should take one other consolation. He might have been incompetent in its execution, but when it came to his own feelings, Jules had never before loved longer, nor more deeply.

  He mounted the steps of his portable darkroom and double-checked the developing baths. They were filled to the right level. There was plenty of water in the tank. He had forgotten nothing. But the activity failed to distract him. He sat on the wooden steps and waited, numbly, for something at last to happen. After a few minutes, a movement right at the top of the column caught his eye. An officer had suddenly appeared up there. What was he doing? Madness! No. He was removing the red flag. Nobody wants to see the red flag fall. Symbols were everything. The man climbed slowly down the inner staircase and the column seemed to sw
ay as Jules watched. But still nothing happened.

  Eventually a second winch was rolled into the square. Looking up from his perch, Jules lined the column up against a tall chimney pot, ready to spot the slightest deviation. At half past five he realised the angle between chimney and statue was slowly growing, and he slipped into the darkroom to prepare the first plate. You couldn’t hurry this. The viscous liquid slid gleamingly, at its own pace, in its own time, from edge to edge of the glass, until the whole plate was covered. Outside, little by little at first, then with stronger movements, the whole column started to sway, to and fro, to and fro, the stone shifting with the gentlest of groans. As if it could hardly believe its own demise, the whole vast structure seemed to fall in slow motion, its shadow moving with it. It broke up in the air as it descended, inner organs spewing. Slowly, almost silently, clouds of dust spurted up and outwards, and as the haze thickened to a fog, there came a wild roar of jubilation.

  When Jules emerged, ready to slot the plate quickly in place, the emperor was already lying on his back at the end of a trail of pale and broken boulders. His outstretched arm was broken off, his robes were cracked, and bare toes in Roman sandals pointed delicately skywards. And his laurelled head? It had snapped at the neck and turned aside.

  The crowd streamed into the square. A young sailor got there first, and leapt over the body with a jubilant cry, his foot brushing the emperor’s nose. ‘Long live the Commune!’ he yelled, his words echoing around the square. The statue averted its bronze eyes.

  There were speeches of course. Red flags on the pedestal. Soon they would remember Jules and call for him. They shuffled into lines, jostling to be included in the photographs, sporting top hats and kepis, buttons and boots. So many staring at the lens, so steady and so serious. Everyone wanted their moment with the fallen emperor. Plenty wanted to spit in his stony face.

  It didn’t take long, out in the open, on a sunny day like this. All Jules needed was a few seconds of strong light. But in those few seconds how much could change. There was always a child who suddenly moved. A mother who looked down. An officer who glanced behind him at the wrong moment. It was so hard to get everyone looking in the right direction, doing the right thing, all at once.