Bad currents in the air that night; a chunk of moon like a moldy Camembert. It had been more than a bit of trouble at the place Vendôme—it had been an outright and brutal massacre of the unarmed or barely armed. There had been a pistol or two among the banners of the peaceful “friends” that afternoon, and no one knew who fired the first shot—but sentiment went against the Commune. The boulevards filled with anxious faces, then emptied, so the capital looked once again like it had during the siege; and for the first time since the coup, we felt the heaviness of dread.
Under the Commune’s administration, the streets were clean. Water played in the fountains. The Communards had cleaned up the boulevards, abolished petty fines, remitted rents, allowed reclamations of the tools and cherished items that had been pawned at the Mont. (Even at the rate of thousands of items returned each day, this would take a year, we were told.) They had opened the question of women working for fair wages in the professions, and with these acts they had captured a degree of popular support. Not a murder had been committed in the capital since March 18; and citizens were permitted to walk in the Tuileries.
But. A great deal of fresh air was wanted, to blow out the ghastly memories of winter; and we had only a gust of spring. People felt they were too quick on the trigger, hotheaded, these Communards. As gluttonous for retribution as the empire had been for stuffing itself on foreign wars and the working man’s labor. Public opinion went against them on the darker matters of March 18: the execution of two government generals up on Montmartre. To govern, to win over public sentiment, required reason, nuance, the ability to become attuned to the body politic; to speak with an undivided voice and yet to mediate, to compromise, to negotiate—the Commune faltered here; and a few of them were outlaws or worse. Meanwhile, the assembly at Versailles consorted with the Prussians (so it was said); for them, the menace in Paris was kept at a distance.
But between Paris and Versailles, how was the thing to be settled? . . . When would life as usual resume? What was life as usual; for whom was it usual? So the arguments circled, turned back on themselves, as the cannonade rumbled ominously from the ring of fortifications outside the capital, just beyond the Paris walls.
In my own case, if the Versailles-based government came back to power, I supposed they would reestablish Regulation; the Préfecture would reconstitute itself and my desk would again be covered with offers and enticements, solicitations to business. It seemed as odious as drinking rum or eating horseflesh: a retreat to an impossible past. At present, Chief of Police Rigault’s tolerance of unregulated debauchery was at odds with the Commune’s principled stand against it. The upper echelons of the business had left town and the tolerated houses were officially closed. Stray boulevard girls were periodically rounded up and sent to sew sandbags or pack cartridges, as Sylvie had predicted.
A shifting uneasiness hung over the city like a fog. Day by day, the circle tightened; and once again we lined up to stock our larders. Similarly, people waited for hours at the Préfecture to apply for the laissez-passer—though not males between the ages of seventeen and forty, who were ripe for conscription into the National Guard.
Word came down that the Commune particularly welcomed issuing the exit paper to any girl who carried a carte from the empire’s Préfecture. They did not know what to do with us—never mind that it had been les inscrits who had defended the cannon on Montmartre on March 18 and initiated the mood of “fraternization” with the army. No language existed to credit such girls and women for any of the events that transpired that day.
Henri believed that the Commune’s battle with the Versailles army would be efficient and decisive. He sketched a picture of columns of citizens, a levée en masse, marching out to the fortifications to confront weak and depleted battalions; he was confident in a general who had fought in the American Civil War, for the Union side. Cluseret.
“And Jolie goes to the barricades too?” I asked him.
“Dissuade her if you can. She wants to fight.” He sighed. “For Louise.”
Increasingly militant since Strasbourg, and a Commune hero for rousing Paris at the crucial hour, Louise had practically marshaled a battalion of her own. She went to the former fairgrounds for target practice and made fierce anti-Versailles speeches. Jolie was among her closest allies.
Henri wanted me to obtain the laissez-passer, however, and to leave Paris when the battle began—not to go to the barricades with a rifle. Henri, I was learning, was a man of some principled contradictions.
I did not know what kind of reception I might receive at the Préfecture but took a place in line and toiled my way to the front. The officer issuing the document took one look at the name Rigault, assumed I was some relative of his new chief, and stamped the papers in a hurry, without even checking the Register or asking me to produce my carte. I had to laugh in spite of myself at the look on the poor man’s face as he slid me the laissez-passer. Rigault must be terrible indeed.
“Manille, manille,” chuckled Amélie, when I told her about it later. “Are you going to leave?”
“No, it’s just a precaution, and to stop Henri from worrying. What about you, Amé?
“The women are going—some hundred of us—to the Hôtel de Ville to request protection; then we are going to Versailles to demand a peaceful resolution between the Commune and the assembly. These men must begin to speak sense to one another.” Her eyes shone as she described the delegation of siege housewives from the ration lines, balloon workers, laundresses, factory workers, café keepers. “Our captain is a lacemaker and café singer. Why don’t you come?”
“Maybe I will.”
“If Versailles prevails, they will clap us back into Regulation so they can pay the reparations to Germany off our backs. Or the Commune will take what they want and claim to be pure as Spartans. These men have got to compromise with one another, and we women need to stand our ground. They have made a hash of this; for once, it would do them good to listen.”
Palm Sunday dawned dull and gray as though forces had amassed against spring. Under our windows, little girls were calling up, trying to sell sprigs of boxwood for a sou; but the cannonade boomed out at ten o’clock from the direction of Courbevoie: an utterance so profound it rattled the teacups, or maybe it was my shaking hand that set them shuddering.
“It sounds like thunder,” said Amé shakily.
“It is not thunder; it is civil war,” said La Tigre, who had rushed in, and over to the windows to peer out. “Your ladies’ march will be shipped back through the walls by the cartload to be buried like the casualties,” said our fierce concierge, no sentimentalist. La Tigre had no traffic with the Versaillais, but she was not Communard either. She thought they were rabble, although she liked Henri.
“I’ve got to go out,” I said.
“Now? Are you out of your head? Wait until order is restored, at least,” said La Tigre.
“Order restored by whom?”
No one had an answer.
A ragged energy swelled and gusted, thick in the air, like a cloud of soot, heavy and stinging, as my cab zigzagged through the streets. The soldiers at the checkpoints all wore coats and insignia of the National Guard; they motioned—with the points, not the butts, of their guns—for me to step down. “Stop, in the name of the Commune!” Ragged urchins begged from the passing conveyances during these forced halts. Everywhere, paving stones were piled up, as were barrels, ladders, ropes, carts . . . Posters plastered on any available wall—white, as the Commune had declared it would print now only on white; the older red ones hung in strips underneath. An omnibus had been upended at one corner and become part of a barricade. “Drive on,” a guardsman said, once I showed my laissez-passer, signed by Rigault.
The sky had dulled; it was beginning to rain. We stopped again; my cab’s horses shied this time at the line of cannon pointing outward, and as many mortars, behind piles of cobbles and rubble, and two more soldiers with their tabatières.
“How do you feel toward t
he Commune?” asked an awkward boy, stepping up and peering into the window, which I had pulled down. He was pale, with a two-day beard and weather-roughened skin. Squared shoulders and a cutaway coat with a belt, his tabatière strapped over his shoulder. Scuffed boots that had walked a thousand miles.
“I support the Commune.” I showed my laissez-passer.
“Very well, but—madame—I say only for your well-being, do not go into the center unaccompanied.”
And so we turned around before reaching the Seine. However, my foray had served its purpose. I could see how to do it, now.
After the first assault, a reprieve. We learned that the Versailles troops had pushed into the Neuilly suburbs on the western edge of the city, defeated the National Guard, and taken the bridge. A funeral procession to Père Lachaise was held. Commune caskets were draped in black, with red flags at each corner; drums were muffled and sounded very grave and the marchers kept faces cast down. Relatives and friends of the dead formed a long tail to the procession, and crowds lined the boulevards as they passed. Many shops were closed. At Neuilly the fighting continued, but the Versailles troops did not breach the enceinte.
What we did not know was that the quiet was one of retrenchment. That what would come to be called the second siege would begin, and it would be worse, much worse, than the first.
30. Rue d’Enfer
TWO DAYS AFTER my first attempt, with a deft driver and a red ribbon around my wrist, I made my way again past stripped trees, army canteens, and bivouacs; through interminable traffic and delay and the barricades at Montparnasse. I was clad from heel to crown in widow’s black, an acceptable camouflage these days. Veiled I had entered the capital, and so I would leave it, I thought, fastening the gauzy thing. If it came to that. My stays and the lining of my brocade going-away coat were sewn tight with bills, more fortifying than baleine. A good half of Paris was walking around with their money stuffed and stitched into their clothes.
At the mouth of the rue d’Enfer, fresh cobbles had been pulled up for a barricade, with ranks of sandbags and holes for the muzzles of cannon. Pockmarks, scars, and powder burn from the earlier Prussian assaults showed on the buildings’ stone walls. At the hospice’s entrance, a long line of gray-and-white-clad nourrices twisted up from the steps and around the drive. Some just in from the countryside; others showing siege pallor and thin as rails. A fleet of wagons waited, staves resting on the ground, and as a few straggling old mares were let through the barricade, the women began to organize the children and infants, hitching up their skirts and climbing into the wagons. Inside I could see narrow benches and hammocks, and children, each one in uniform, with a shorn head, teetering like birds on a wire. The air was filled with wails.
The director and his wife had been hailed for staying in Paris through the siege, but now an evacuation was underway. A National Guard on a black horse, uniformed in a blue Zouave jacket belted with the red sash and tall well-shined Hessian boots, inspected the barricade and barked orders. It was Lisbonne, the actor-turned-soldier, the Commune’s brash “d’Artagnan” whom I’d met up on Montmartre with Henri; the two of them had saluted each other. If names were portents, this street might yet justify its designation as the street of hell. But Lisbonne was among the most bold of the Commune’s warriors, Henri said—so perhaps he would save it.
A plain-skirted woman answered the hospice’s private-entrance bell. Her neck was bare of any crucifix and her hair bundled into a swatch of crochet; she hurried ahead on floors that today were less than polished. She knew me as a “friend of the widow Chateaubriand.” She had accepted the friends’ packets during the siege; our blankets and food supplies and little bundles of sticks, what kindling we could find. Over the course of those bitter months, this emissary and I had come to know each other a little. I did not tell her the nature of my mission; she knew enough to hold up her hand when I began to speak of it.
Conditions at the hospice were much changed from before the siege. The Commune had removed the religious from their positions in the hospitals, but here, unlike the military hospitals, few replacements had come. The director was now negotiating with the Commune about the barricades on the rue d’Enfer, as he wanted to ensure the transport of all of his charges to an orphanage outside the enceinte before the fighting began in earnest. The daily running of the place had fallen to madame.
From a ring of keys, my friend lifted one and unlocked the door of the hospice archives; allowed my entrance and hurried off to more pressing concerns. From within, the musty scent of old paper and mildew mingled with the sour metallic and sulfurous odors of the corridor, and my eyes adjusted to the dimness enough to descry banks of wooden cabinets with drawers. My heart began to pound; my palms perspired inside my gloves. But otherwise it was drafty and cold, and my time limited, so I set aside gloves and veil but did not take off my coat.
The files were arranged by year and catalogued by number. The first bank held the hospice’s massive leather-bound record books, marked by the year. Each was lined with entries, one for each child left in its care. The first admitted on New Year’s Day of any given year was given the number one; the year and number also were inscribed on the medallion each child wore from the date of abandonment to that of majority, at age twenty-one. Within this lined record was listed too the name at entry and the new name provided, first and last.
Further on in the archive stood rows of shelves and cabinets. Banks of files and within them, black file boxes and mud-color ones. Jammed together, glued with some unknown substance; some thin and seemingly not touched for years. These, I discovered, contained birth certificates and identifying articles left at the time of abandonment—scraps of linen; misspelled notes and small charms: a thimble, a ring, glass baubles bound with thread. A lock of hair in an embroidered pouch. A tiny padlock with a key; a brass label from a café bottle marked simply VIN. Original birth certificates, copies, or nothing; pleading letters. Requests for children to be taken in and cared for; to be returned to a mother, “made legal,” or simply—stories.
Too much life had been pushed helter-skelter into these files. And all of it retained; locked away, never passed on to the children. These vestiges of their history were, for them, erased. As they themselves were. It was too much to take in, to know; and certainly—too much to sort through in the time I had. I sighed, then breathed in dust. And returned to the ledgers, which appeared to be in some kind of order. From the shelves I selected the record book of 1861.
I understood now that in my earlier ignorance and rage, I had misjudged the directors to some extent. I may not have agreed with their principles, but at least they had applied them with constancy, laboring under every condition of war and peace, strained funds, understaffing, and an overload of cases to record assiduously the abandoned of Paris. The sheer weight of their conviction was impressive. At administration, that strange human ability, they excelled. I could only hope that genuine care for newborn persons had not lagged behind too far.
Even before entering this archive I knew that if abandoned infants survived the hospice and its poxy wet nurses; its filthy biberons, the communal wheat-paste sucking cloths; its stagnant air and close-packed cribs—if they passed through these walls intact, they often perished on the journey to the countryside. Once there, some suffocated by smoke or on smoldering straw mattresses; were burned by a hot brick in a cradle; or wandered too close to a fire. Unwatched and ignored, they fell into rivers and streams; succumbed to diseases of the gut and the lungs; and though precautions were taken against it—the syphilis passed on by their nurses. Inspectors skipped visits due to bad roads and weather and overlooked breaches of conduct; in the worst cases, they trafficked in their own charges. Nourrices, even the honest ones, stretched layettes to cover their own children’s needs; favored home remedies and postponed doctors’ visits for fear of penalties for neglect. The abandonnés were often transferred, and with each move came a new set of hazards. I had read about all of it in newspaper accounts and
from documents to which my solicitors had gained access. Over the course of my years of hospice visits, I had spoken to midwives like Mathilde, wet nurses who worked for the state, knowledgeable mothers, and anyone else who would talk. Thus I had traced many of the possibilities for Berthe’s fate. I was in some way resigned to them.
I paged through 1861 to June, to July. Mortality rates had not been too bad at that time, though the drop-offs at the tour had been high, and turnover to the nourrices rapid. Inspection visits, at least on paper, seemed to be in order. My heart beat faster and my stomach clenched as I paged past August, then September. Impatient, but reluctant too; once this page was turned I would know what I had never known. Even if no entry existed—which seemed possible—this too would alter my course. But at last I did turn to October, and there it was, in a crabbed and faded brownish script, a careful ledger-book hand.
Ledger No. 3568. October 10, 1861.
Mother: Eugénie Louise Rigault.
Father:
The identity of the father had been struck out; written above it, the word Inconnu. But unlike the illegibility of the birth certificate shown to me by the director of L’Assistance Publique, on this document Stephan’s name could still be made out; some administrative hand had failed to efface it entirely.
Name Given: Berthe Sophia Louise Rigault.
Health at Arrival: Fevered but otherwise good.
The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. Page 37