Liberty's Fire

by Lydia Syson

  She blinked, and shapes sharpened.

  ‘Are you hurt? Is it your grandmother? How can we help?’

  She shook her head. Her tongue started working better. No, she wasn’t hurt, not much, she said. And though she had bad news about her grandmother, it was old news. She looked down. She had a bowl of coffee now in one hand, and a hunk of bread in the other. Zéphyrine ate and drank and gathered her strength and told her story. Madame Balard began to dress the graze on her leg. Then she led her to the back room, where the drugs were prepared, and she filled the sink with hot water so that Zéphyrine could wash the telltale blackness from her face and arms.

  ‘You’ll stay? A day or two?’ Monsieur Balard put the question, but Zéphyrine glimpsed the horror in his wife’s face, the tightening of her lips and the quick involuntary shake of her head.

  ‘No … no … I must keep going. I – I have a friend … not so far from here … I must …’ Jules would surely not be at the barricades. He would take her in, advise her. For Anatole’s sake. She would be safe with him. He might even know where she could find Anatole.

  ‘But if you cross the lines dressed like that …’

  It was true. Round here was quite bad enough. When she reached the boulevards, she’d stand out like a crab in a barrel of herrings.

  ‘I’ll lend you a dress,’ offered Madame Balard. ‘You can return it when you can.’

  ‘But …’ Zéphyrine didn’t want to seem ungrateful. Her eyes made the long journey from Madame Balard’s high grey chignon to her narrow pointed shoes.

  Luckily, the pharmacist understood immediately. ‘My dear, supposing she has to run for her life?’ Or fight again, thought Zéphyrine. ‘She will trip over your long skirts. Much too long for little Zéphyrine. They’ll be a hazard. I’ve a better idea.’

  He only had to look at the white overall hanging on the door for his wife to understand. ‘Of course. I’ll wake Alphonse immediately. An excellent plan.’

  Fifteen minutes later she was smartly dressed as the pharmacist’s delivery boy, her new uniform complete with freshly starched white shirt and tie, the trousers just a little tight across her hips.

  ‘There is a barber in the next street. Knock on the back door.’

  He wrote a message for her, a kind of laisser-passer she supposed.

  Zéphyrine gave her hair to the barber in payment. Well, it was no use to her any more. At least he could profit from it.

  ‘It’s lovely hair,’ he told her, stroking it sadly. ‘Thank you. And good luck. Vive la Commune!’

  She straightened her tie in the mirror, took out her earrings and put them in her pocket, and stared. What a gaunt-eyed boy she made.

  The day didn’t want to get light. Redness, like dawn, persisted in the sky all morning, but the darkness never quite lifted. Marie didn’t want to look. She kept the shutters bolted, and locked the door, and waited in her room, not even lighting the gas. She knew she should go to the cellar. It was stupid to stay here. But she hated to be underground. And what if her brother came?

  She had run out of wool and did not know how else to pass the time, so she searched her drawers for a garment she could unpick. Anything would do. She was happy to start again. Pulling out a rose-pink muffler, she uncovered her tangled rosary. Silver and coral, carved Pater beads. To her fingertips, it felt like home.

  She should never have put this away. She had cared too much for worldly success; she had wanted too much to be loved. Her ambitions had brought her down. It was her own fault that she was here alone, so tortured by uncertainty.

  It was nearly noon now. Somewhere, surely, the Angelus bell would still be ringing. Pray for us, O holy Mother of God. The voice in her head made her continue aloud: ‘That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.’ She wanted to go out and find a real sanctuary, to confess her sins, to atone. But there was no knowing who you might find in a church these days.

  ‘Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we to whom the Incarnation of Christ, Thy Son, was made known by the message of an Angel, may by His Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of His Resurrection … ’

  She would just have to pray where she was, at the end of her bed, as she used to as a child. Very seriously, just as she’d been taught, but had forgotten. Bare knees on the coloured rug. God would protect her, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he tell her what to do?

  Jules imagined Anatole creeping home wounded, unable to climb the stairs, even collapsing halfway home. He decided to risk a short foot patrol, a kind of reconnoitre. He’d check the whole building first, and then the neighbouring streets, just in case, staying well clear of the friends of order. He wasn’t sure if they’d given up on him or not.

  The maids had deserted the cellar. Jules realised he had the place entirely to himself now, which was a strange, chilling feeling. He inspected the inner courtyard before venturing out of the main door and onto the road, Holding his head high and trying to look satisfied with events, he immediately choked on the smoke. He decided to pay a visit to Monsieur Louvet’s establishment to clear his throat, but also to find out if he had heard anything useful. When he got there, Jules quickly discovered a new word was ricocheting around the cafés and bars and pavements of Paris. Monsieur Louvet was surprised he’d not come across it already. Soon enough it would echo through newspapers around the world.

  Pétroleuses, they called them.

  ‘You need to take care,’ Monsier Louvet warned. ‘Keep your eyes peeled for these women. They’re everywhere now, it seems. Unstoppable.’

  Everyone was talking about the women incendiaries. The evil witches were setting fire to Paris, they said, pouring kerosene into basements and cellars. So cunning too – they disguised their weapons in milk bottles and shopping baskets. It was impossible to know where they might strike next. Just that morning, near the base of the broken column in the place Vendôme, thirteen shots rang out at once. Thirteen women fell to the ground. They were pétroleuses, it seemed. They deserved it of course, these monstrous women, maddened by resentment. Unnatural wives and mothers and daughters. Women who would destroy Paris before they surrendered the city. Of course the arsonists had to be destroyed. The whole Commune had to be exterminated, as fast as possible.

  That’s what everyone said.

  Jules looked at the faces in the café, listening open-mouthed and terror-stricken, and he thought of Zéphyrine. Where was she now? What might Rose be saying to her next – mysterious Rose, always so busy that he and Anatole had still never set eyes on her? Was she half-crazed by now too, dispatching minions to do wicked deeds? But surely even they wouldn’t … she couldn’t …?

  Sometimes you could see the whole length of a street; at others a kiosk twenty metres away was blanketed in gritty fog. Zéphyrine’s eyes itched and oozed, and her face was already filthy again, but she made herself walk at a measured pace. She tried to look straight ahead: purposeful, the way a boy on business should be. She swung her free arm like a boy, and took long, deliberate strides. Her shoes were too big, and they flopped back at the heel with every step, in little gulps. If she needed to run, she’d kick them off, she decided. Her package of dressing, she carried like a talisman, wondering if there was a girl’s way and a boy’s way of carrying things.

  It was hard to look purposeful when the front line was so uncertain. Distorted by hard stone walls, reverberating, whizzing and whining, echoing in strange ways, the noise of firing was hard to locate, and difficult to duck. Unless it was right in front of you, you could never tell where a shot was coming from. She had to rely on luck, and keep moving.

  Once, but only once, she stopped to add a paving stone to a barricade: not to stop would have drawn attention she didn’t need. Otherwise, she kept going, zigzagging her way out of trouble and towards Jules and Anatole’s apartment. If she saw a soldier from either side, she kept her distance. Several times, she glimpsed a ragged band of National Guardsmen roped together, being led away. Some of the men ha
d tried to rip the red stripe from their own trouser legs. There were catcalls from the pavement, well-dressed women jeering, bourgeois manners quite forgotten. ‘Scum!’ they always shouted. ‘Communard scum!’

  In her head, she rehearsed her story. A casualty of crossfire. Doctor’s orders.

  She was nearly there.

  Out of the corner of her eye she noticed something strange. Masons at work, mixing cement. Hammering at knee and ankle level. They were blocking up the air vents for the cellars. But why? Didn’t people need to breathe down there? Something was happening that she didn’t understand at all, something that made her throat hammer too.

  Faster, she urged herself. But not too fast. No, not too fast, not quite yet.

  The final metres she couldn’t help herself and ran. She pulled the bell knob. Behind the heavy outer door she could hear a hollow jangle, but there was no answering shuffle of a concierge’s slippers, and no descending feet.

  Perhaps they were in the cellar, Zéphyrine thought. She turned to check the street again. At the far end, another troop of soldiers was passing, with more prisoners. She rang the bell again, tapped her foot, feigned nonchalance. Nobody was looking. As soon as they were gone, she got back to her knees on the pavement, fists gripping the grating of the vent, still unblocked.

  ‘Anatole?’ she called, not too loud at first. ‘Anatole? Are you in there?’

  Her call was thrown back at her – stony, metallic. No other sound.

  ‘Jules?’

  Scrabbling on the pavement, she sat back and braced herself with both hands on the stones behind her, kicking at the bars across the vent with all her strength. Her body felt the impact, but the iron grating didn’t move. Forward again, desperate now, she screamed into the cellar.

  ‘Anatole! Jules! Are you down there? Help me. I need help! It’s me, Zéphyrine. Please! Isn’t anyone there? Jules!’

  Like a cormorant, her hopes plunged. She slumped against the wall, struggling for air. All she could hear was her own harsh breathing. Where else could she go? Who would protect her in this part of town? Ten minutes’ walk would take her to Marie’s, fifteen or twenty if she kept to the side streets and avoided the arcades. She could keep going for fifteen more minutes, she decided. She had no choice, for she certainly couldn’t stay where she was. Zéphyrine dragged herself upright again, and picked up the parcel. Marie would know what to do.

  High above her head, a shutter quietly closed. In Babylon Jeremiah found palaces but no shelter.

  A few seconds later, Jules opened the shutter again. He had to be quite certain, he told himself. He wasn’t sure. But Zéphyrine was already gone.

  Stupefied by terror and doubt, he had hesitated too long. It was hard to recognise a voice so thinned by despair, but Jules was suddenly convinced it really had been Zéphyrine calling. At the upper window, hardly able to hear or see her, he had just caught enough at first to know that someone was looking for Anatole. Of course it was her. But was she calling to check he wasn’t there, so that she wouldn’t set him alight too? And why was she dressed so strangely? What was that package she carried? Jules could have challenged her if he’d been quick enough. He should have stopped her, reasoned with her. He had taken too long to act when there had been no time to waste. Those few seconds of doubt and confusion could have put the whole building at risk.

  Jules tore down the stairs, flight after flight, and pulled open the cellar door with a crash that brought down more plaster. Pausing on the threshold, he sniffed the air. As before, it was damp, slightly rodenty, dusty. Cool in his nostrils. But there was no smell of petrol. No flare of yellow or orange trickled towards him across the stone floor. Just a rectangle of natural light slanting from above into darkness, sliced by iron bars. A forest of unfashionable furniture, kept by the concierge, just in case. Shelves of cobwebbed bottles and a bin of coal. Nothing burning at all.

  He walked across to check the ventilation shaft, and stood with head surrounded by floating backlit particles, wondering exactly what he’d witnessed.

  He didn’t seem able to think clearly any more. The previous day’s unwanted visitors had removed his last whisper of reason along with the confiscated photograph. For those few crucial moments – as he had listened to the ringing, and the knocking and kicking and the cry of despair – he really had believed a monster was at the door, and that it was Zéphyrine.

  Jules had tried to warn Anatole. He had always had a feeling that she would take things too far, that the revolution was all that mattered to her. Possessed, obsessed. But now that she was gone, and the cellar as cool and quiet as ever, he wondered if his own obsession was to blame, not hers, if this madness had taken over his senses too. What if Zéphyrine simply needed a safe place to hide, and he had sent her to her death?

  But then again, what if Zéphyrine had simply been the advance guard, and she had left something behind her? Monsieur Louvet had warned him of this too. Just a scrap of paper the size of a postage stamp, a circle or a square pasted on the wall of the house as a small marker, and three letters that would condemn him: ‘B.P.B.’ – bon pour brûler. Good for burning. And even now, slinking along the wall, an uncombed hag with rough cheeks rouged by alcohol could be coming towards him, a milk can in her hand, petrol sloshing as she searched for that sign.

  Blacker and thicker with every hour that passed, clouds of smoke unrolled from Notre-Dame’s twin towers, and merged with those unfurling from Saint-Eustache. A vast crash signalled the collapse of the church’s roof, crushing the pulpit from which so many women had raged these past few weeks. At the Théâtre Lyrique, the drama continued. The fire made no distinction between auditorium and stage. Scenery went up in flames. Silk and velvet, satin and furs, music stands and pianos and gilt-painted cherubs, all destroyed in a great roaring rush. Soon half the building was a smoking ruin.

  Far below the curdled skies, something else was on the move: brown fur and scrabbling claws streaming through gutters, a screeching current of fear speeding away from the path of the flames. The rats were evacuating.

  Behind the vast bulkhead of a new barricade, Anatole was probably safer than he’d been for days. A gigantic barracks building protected one flank, a huge department store the other. He felt his courage return, briefly, with the apparent success of their resistance. A boy had given him a kepi, and a woman had swapped his torn and ragged frock coat for a military jacket, in which he could move more easily – there was no mistaking now what he was. Anatole both looked and felt more like a soldier. He had even snatched some sleep the night before, huddled in the crowded square of the Hôtel de Ville, just before the building began to burn.

  Word reached the diminished company that the Commune leaders had moved west and were now installed at a local town hall, not far away. That meant there would be proper orders soon, wouldn’t there? Strategy, and the kind of plan that could be followed. A contagious spirit of elation flickered through what was left of the battalion, hope and hysteria mixed. The tactics that had got them here seemed to be working. An army couldn’t penetrate burning buildings. And now they had arrived, and were dug in, they couldn’t be outflanked again. Anatole caught the mood too.

  ‘Here, give me that …’ He reached for the red embroidered flag. Its wooden pole, polished from being passed from hand to hand for all these months, felt as right in his palm as his violin bow had done a week before. He hoisted himself up with a toe in the grating, keeping the flag low as he climbed, almost overbalancing when he reached the top.

  A jolt of fear was checked by the cry from below.

  ‘Vive la Commune!’ Fumbling with one hand, feeling for a hole in the stones, Anatole found a place he could plant the flag. He hadn’t shown himself to the enemy for more than a few seconds, but four bullets instantly screamed over his head. At least one thudded into the wood, knocking the flag into rakish submission. Anatole jumped away, landing on feet and hands, and they all laughed in terror.

  Nobody there had heard yet that the Latin Quarter ha
d fallen, the Panthéon with it, and seven hundred prisoners taken all at once. They had no idea that at the Opéra, the huntsmen’s costumes, skulls and wolves’ heads laid out ready for Monday night’s grand performance had been seized by soldiers from Versailles, who were dressing up to watch executions in the courtyard. Nor that the Châtelet theatre was now a courtroom, where there were trials, but no justice. None of the men at this barricade, nor the women who were tending to the wounded, nor the children who ferried cartridges and water and wine back and forth, had seen the piles of corpses mounting on the streets of the Left Bank, or the gravediggers at work at the foot of the Tour Saint-Jacques. Anatole thought only of the wall of paving stones protecting him, and he felt grateful to every single citizen who had helped build it.

  The grating rattle of the machine guns continued. Anatole imagined iron teeth, continually grinding, gnashing against each other like a troubled conscience interrupting sleep. This was the kind of noise you would surely meet in hell. But then he did hear news, or overheard it.

  ‘It’s not just the Hôtel de Ville, you know,’ said a boy who had just arrived. He was wearing a National Guard kepi and what might have been his father’s smock, both far too large for his gangly frame. ‘They’ve set light to the theatres too, by the river. The Lyrique is blazing. Word is it’s the women. They call them pétroleuses.’

  ‘Good for them, and good riddance to the rest. That should hold ’em back a bit longer.’

  Another man spat. ‘Bourgeois baloney.’

  Anatole’s mouth opened and shut. So his own theatre was burning too. The knowledge chilled him. He pictured a blazing piano, a harp in flames, a golden inferno of contorted brass. Paint on a backdrop melting and sliding down canvas, wrinkling, blackening and finally turning to ash. He saw statues and mirrors shattering in the heat, while ironwork bent and buckled, flames licked up curtains and ropes, and rigging thundered through burning floorboards. He imagined the fire taking hold in the very loge where Zéphyrine had first dismayed him, remembered her theft and her flight, and in his mind heard the box itself crashing down in pieces into the orchestra pit. He began to doubt everything. Could Zéphyrine really care for him, if she believed destruction like this was worth it? If she thought this was the way to a better future? He wondered, for a moment, if she had bewitched him into throwing in his lot with savages.