by Lydia Syson
‘Calm down, first of all. Because the boat is apparently due to dock here, in London —’ says Jules. Anatole is almost out of the door already. ‘Wait! It’s not due till the morning. Just listen. There’s more.’
Anatole is almost incapable of listening. He lets them sit him down again, but his fists keep drumming on his knees, and his feet drum the floor. Tap, tap, tap, tap.
‘I must get ready. I can’t miss it. What if she’s not expecting me? What if I’m not there on time?’ The worse possibility he pushes away, but it comes back of course. What if she doesn’t want me now?
‘You will be,’ says Marie. ‘But surely you can’t wait at the docks all night. It’s not safe. And I have to warn you again, my information is very good —’ (her blush is almost unnoticeable ) ‘— and I’m sure this boat is coming. But I don’t know exactly who is on it. I can’t promise.’
‘Of course you must go,’ says Jules.
‘I can wait all night. I’ll go and get ready now. I’ll change my trousers. Are you coming?’
‘No, I think you should go by yourself,’ Jules says very slowly, and Anatole remembers.
‘What else? What else were you going to tell me?’
At just this moment Mrs Barton bustles back with a rattling tea tray and her sing-song announcements. ‘Butter! Milk – not for you, dear! Sugar! Strainer! Think it’s all here! And I’ll be off … I’ve laid a cold supper in the sitting room, as I’m out tonight.’
‘Mrs Barton,’ says Marie with enormous charm in her delightful English, looking her straight in the eye. ‘I wonder if you could show me the way to …’
‘Oh yes, certainly … Do follow me, madame.’
Then Jules and Anatole are alone. Neither speaks immediately and Anatole’s dread quickly gathers. Several times Jules walks the short distance from one end of the studio to the other. Finally, he pulls up a footstool next to Anatole’s armchair.
‘Now, I don’t know how to say this. It’s about Marie. You’ve blamed Marie for everything all these years, I know. Ever since you wrote to her from Geneva, and she had the guts and the honesty to write back and tell you what she’d done.’
‘I’d have found out eventually,’ points out Anatole. ‘Almost certainly.’
‘Perhaps. But she had the courage to admit it to you. She wasn’t proud of it. She’s always regretted it. But at least she was prepared to be honest.’
It’s true. And as the exiles have discovered, Marie was hardly the only person that terrible week to save her own skin with such a betrayal. How many years of secret notes had burned with the Palace of Justice, and how many more were written while it still blazed? It was not surprising, perhaps. Born and bred into a police state, Parisians had been trained for years to react like that. Anatole thinks of Marie, and her brother Emile, and their own desperation. He feels he has nurtured his anger for quite long enough. Everything is about to change, after all. There’s a relief in letting go.
‘Yes, you’re right,’ he says. ‘When she comes back, I must say something. And I will. A complete amnesty – that’s the idea now, after all. All sins forgotten and forgiven. A fresh start for everyone, I hope.’
‘Yes,’ says Jules quietly. ‘Forgotten and forgiven indeed. But I haven’t finished.’
Anatole’s cold dread returns. ‘Go on,’ he says.
‘You wouldn’t be needing to forgive Marie if it weren’t for me. She’d never have had the chance to betray Zéphyrine. On the train to Geneva, do you remember that I told you I’d lied about her execution, to try to stop you going after her, to save your life?’
‘Of course I remember,’ Anatole says. His voice is slow and uncertain. ‘Keep going.’
‘It wasn’t all a lie. She did come looking for you, to our apartment. I heard her. I even saw her. She was dressed strangely, and she … she was carrying something. It sounds so stupid now, but I was frightened. Terribly confused and uncertain. You don’t know what it was like there then. Everyone was talking about the pétroleuses. Everyone was terrified, infected by a kind of madness. And she had something in her hands, but I couldn’t see what it was from upstairs. I just didn’t know. I should have checked. I should have gone down right away to make sure. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. I should have been quicker about everything.’
By this time, Jules is leaning on Anatole’s damp knee and weeping. Anatole strokes his hair, and notices a few grey strands. ‘Shhhh … shhhhh …’ he says.
‘I should have let her in. I betrayed you both.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Jules. ‘It really was my fault. You can’t know how sorry I am, how many times I’ve tried to tell you.’
The idea has dawned on Anatole slowly over the years. He’s gone back over their conversations too many times. He knows Jules far too well not to have already begun to guess where truth shaded into fabrication. He hasn’t made it easy for Jules to tell him before now. He could pinpoint the times he had let a conversation swerve. Part of Anatole hadn’t wanted to know.
‘Well. You’ve told me now. I’m glad of that. We can draw a line. And now I’m going to change these blasted trousers. Can I take your thick coat? It’s going to be cold tonight. I can’t wait until the morning. I want to go right now.’
Marie waits for him to get ready, and then they hail a four-wheeler and she accompanies Anatole to the docks. Just before she drives off – he doesn’t ask where she’s going next – she presses his hand, and wishes him luck.
‘Ask for the John Helder, coming from Sydney,’ she reminds him, and then says, ‘So will I see you now in Paris? Soon, perhaps?’
‘Perhaps,’ he replies. ‘We’ll see.’
The rain is beginning to turn to mist, flattening the big square warehouse buildings into a kind of stage set. Anatole walks alone down to the quayside, and gazes out at the forest of masts on the water. How will he ever find the right ship? How does it all work here? A prostitute comes out of the shadows, calling something he doesn’t quite understand, and he turns briskly away, out of the heavily spiced air that makes him think of gingerbread and into the nearest pub, warm and yeasty with ale and tobacco smoke and sawdust.
When the roar of voices begins to separate itself out, Anatole realises that there are other French speakers among them. He sees faces he recognises from meetings around Charlotte Street and Fitzroy Square and Saffron Hill, and one or two from Paris itself. Others have come to meet this ship too, old Communards in exile, and they talk about who might be aboard – the Red Virgin, someone thinks, though others argue – and they invite Anatole to join their party. They’ve already chartered a pleasure launch, and others are arranging fishing boats to meet the deportees.
They share memories and swap stories all night, and by the morning the mist has turned to fog, a thick white fog that smothers everything and is so dense that some of the pilot boats refuse to leave port. Muffled foghorns sound from the stranded vessels in the middle of the Thames. Warehouse owners fret, and dockers stand idle with nothing yet to unload. But the easy-going captain of their own launch is undaunted – he doesn’t want to give back shillings already in his pocket – and off they pitch into the whiteness with lanterns lit, straining their ears and calling out to warn of their presence. Anatole begins to sing. Soon he hears voices joining in from all the other small boats that are bravely heading out with them.
‘Quand nous chanterons le temps des cerises …’
While tiny droplets of water cling to their hair and glisten on their eyebrows, as they tighten the mufflers round their necks, the exiles sing again of the cherry season, and of love, and nightingales and sorrow. Before they reach the end of the third verse, they can make out new voices, still unseen, coming from down the river, singing the same words. Anatole falls silent, and listens, hope rising, for that one familiar voice.
Historical Afterword
Aftermath
Figures for the number of Communards (and suspects) killed during Bloody Week a
nd in the reprisals that followed remain a matter of significant debate, but most historians agree on a figure between 20,000 and 35,000. About 43,000 captives were taken to Versailles, resulting in over 100 death sentences, 13,000 prison sentences and 4,000 deportations to New Caledonia. In the final week of its existence, 55 hostages of the Commune were executed, including the archbishop of Paris, while in the Versailles army 877 were left dead and 6,454 wounded. Paris was under martial law until early 1876. Thousands of French men and women returned from imprisonment and exile after a complete amnesty for Communards in July 1880.
The existence of organised pétroleuses has never been proven.
Ruins
Thomas Cook began organising trips to see the ruins of Paris within weeks of the Commune’s destruction. Within a few years, Paris had been completely rebuilt – including the Vendôme Column, Thiers’s house, the Hôtel de Ville and the Théâtre Lyrique, largely with identical reconstructions – and the Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre was erected on the site of the artillery park where the revolution broke out on 18th March in ‘expiation’ for the crimes of the Commune.
Only the ruins of the Tuileries Palace – much photographed – were kept, as a warning against revolution. These were controversially demolished and cleared in 1883. Pilgrimages to the cemetery of Père Lachaise (where Oscar Wilde is also buried) began in 1880. They reached a peak in 1936, when 600,000 demonstrators gathered at the Mur de Fédérés where 147 Communards were gunned down and buried on the last day of the Commune. The wall was only classified a historical monument in 1983.
Connections
The Paris Commune was of huge symbolic significance to the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), as I discovered while writing A World Between Us. The song that united Republicans and foreign volunteers was ‘The Internationale’, which was written by Eugène Pottier at the fall of the Commune. At least four French battalions were named after either the Commune or significant Communards.
These included Louise Michel, known as the Red Virgin, who never gave up her revolutionary activities and ran an anarchist school in London when she came to Britain in 1890 to escape police harassment in France. Liberty’s Fire began to take shape in my head after I came across Michel’s extraordinary story through my great-great grandmother, N. F. Dryhurst (an anarchist herself and translator of Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution) who volunteered at this school alongside her lover, the war journalist Henry Nevinson. You can read more about all three in Angela V. John’s War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson (2006).
Find out more about the history behind Liberty’s Fire at www.lydiasyson.com
Acknowledgements
You wouldn’t be reading this book if I hadn’t received a grant to write it from Arts Council England, for which I am profoundly grateful. Public investment in arts and culture is currently under serious threat in this country and I hope this won’t be the case for much longer.
I have also benefited hugely from expertise embodied in the following libraries, archives and museums: the British Library; the London Library; the Eugene W Schulkind Paris Commune Collection at The Keep (University of Sussex Special Collections); the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London; the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris; the Musée Carnavalet; the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Saint Denis; the Musée Montmartre; the Musée de l’Opera and the Musée de l’Armée (Paris) and I’m particularly grateful to Laura Gaudenzi and her colleagues at the Musée de l’Histoire Vivante in Montreuil. Les Amies et Amis de la Commune de Paris have also been a superb source of information. My ideas were very much shaped by Delphine Mordey’s invaluable PhD research on music during the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune, and she was generous in sharing this, while Marshall Mateer first alerted me to the significance of photography during and immediately after the Commune.
As always, vast quantities of thanks are also owed to the regular suspects: to Natasha Lehrer, both for putting me up in Paris and putting up with my endless requests for translations, explanations, directions, readers … (pedants of the world unite, and that includes you, Raphael Vock); to Catherine Clarke, always there; to the brilliant Hot Key team, especially Sarah Odedina for believing in Liberty’s Fire in the first place and Naomi Colthurst for taking over the editorial reins with such grace; all my Finsbury Group; Tig Thomas, ever incisive; and finally my whole family (partner, parents, siblings, children), every one of whom has played a vital part. What would I do without you?
Lydia Syson
Lydia Syson is a fifth-generation Londoner who lives in Camberwell. She spent much of her early working life as a World Service radio producer, leaving the BBC after the birth of the first of her four children. She went on to write a PhD about explorers, poets and Timbuktu and then a biography of the eighteenth-century ‘electric’ doctor, James Graham, Doctor of Love, before turning to fiction. Lydia’s first novel, A World Between Us, was longlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award, with a special ‘Highly Commended’ mention from the judges.
Find out more about Lydia at: www.lydiasyson.com or on Twitter: @LydiaSyson
Praise for Lydia Syson
A World Between Us
Nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2014
Longlisted for The Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize 2013
Shortlisted for WeRead Book Award 2013
‘A World Between Us is an outstanding debut novel for teenagers … Thoroughly researched and beautifully written.’
The Guardian
‘A fantastic historical fiction debut set in the Spanish Civil War, featuring a wonderfully passionate and resourceful heroine.‘
The Bookseller, August 2012 (Pick of the Month)
‘Carefully-researched and rich with fascinating period detail, A World Between Us is a compelling story of politics and passion, bravery and love.’
Booktrust
‘A multi-layered story about politics, nationalism and the rose-tinted desire to create a better and more equal world. ’
Books For Keeps
‘Syson brings history alive through careful detail.‘
The Observer
‘A gripping romantic adventure.’
TES Magazine
‘Well crafted and well written, this novel delivers an attractive mix of romance and rebellion.’
Celia Rees in Armadillo
‘Packed full of passion … this is a harrowing, thrilling and romantic account of the Spanish Civil War.’
Julia Eccleshare on Lovereading 4 Kids
That Burning Summer
‘This is only the second novel from an author very much to look out for.’
The Independent (Best Books of 2013)
‘A touching evocation of a desperate wartime romance, which evokes a vanished era of hardship and fortitude.’
The Financial Times
‘Lydia Syson is the kind of writer who lets you know from the outset that you’re in safe hands.’
Armadillo
‘Syson’s beautifully developed characters … make the history come vividly to life.’
We Love This Book
‘Beautifully evoking the atmosphere of a small rural community under threat, it simmers with tension and intensity: readers will be rooting for Peggy and Henryk and captivated by their blossoming romance.’
Booktrust
‘Not once did I want to put the book down … A beautiful, enchanting and memorable book which captured war perfectly and hooked me within its pages.’
The Guardian Children’s Books website
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/> First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Hot Key Books
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Text copyright © Lydia Syson 2015
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All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-1-4714-0368-2
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