The Downfall

by Эмиль Золя

  It was not until the day following the events just mentioned that Maurice, starting out with his battalion to effect the conquest of Versailles, beheld, amid the throng of misty, feverish memories that rose to his poor wearied brain, Jean's melancholy face as he had seen it last, and seemed to hear the tones of his last mournful au revoir. The military operations of the Versaillese had filled the National Guard with alarm and indignation; three columns, embracing a total strength of fifty thousand men, had gone storming that morning through Bougival and Meudon on their way to seize the monarchical Assembly and Thiers, the murderer. It was the torrential sortie that had been demanded with such insistence during the siege, and Maurice asked himself where he should ever see Jean again unless among the dead lying on the field of battle down yonder. But it was not long before he knew the result; his battalion had barely reached the Plateau des Bergeres, on the road to Reuil, when the shells from Mont-Valerien came tumbling among the ranks. Universal consternation reigned; some had supposed that the fort was held by their comrades of the Guard, while others averred that the commander had promised solemnly to withhold his fire. A wild panic seized upon the men; the battalions broke and rushed back to Paris fast as their legs would let them, while the head of the column, diverted by a flanking movement of General Vinoy, was driven back on Reuil and cut to pieces there.

  Then Maurice, who had escaped unharmed from the slaughter, his nerves still quivering with the fury that had inspired him on the battlefield, was filled with fresh detestation for that so-called government of law and order which always allowed itself to be beaten by the Prussians, and could only muster up a little courage when it came to oppressing Paris. And the German armies were still there, from Saint-Denis to Charenton, watching the shameful spectacle of internecine conflict! Thus, in the fierce longing for vengeance and destruction that animated him, he could not do otherwise than sanction the first measures of communistic violence, the building of barricades in the streets and public squares, the arrest of the archbishop, some priests, and former officeholders, who were to be held as hostages. The atrocities that distinguished either side in that horrible conflict were already beginning to manifest themselves, Versailles shooting the prisoners it made, Paris retaliating with a decree that for each one of its soldiers murdered three hostages should forfeit their life. The horror of it, that fratricidal conflict, that wretched nation completing the work of destruction by devouring its own children! And the little reason that remained to Maurice, in the ruin of all the things he had hitherto held sacred, was quickly dissipated in the whirlwind of blind fury that swept all before it. In his eyes the Commune was to be the avenger of all the wrongs they had suffered, the liberator, coming with fire and sword to purify and punish. He was not quite clear in mind about it all, but remembered having read how great and flourishing the old free cities had become, how wealthy provinces had federated and imposed their law upon the world. If Paris should be victorious he beheld her, crowned with an aureole of glory, building up a new France, where liberty and justice should be the watchwords, organizing a new society, having first swept away the rotten debris of the old. It was true that when the result of the elections became known he was somewhat surprised by the strange mixture of moderates, revolutionists, and socialists of every sect and shade to whom the accomplishment of the great work was intrusted; he was acquainted with several of the men and knew them to be of extremely mediocre abilities. Would not the strongest among them come in collision and neutralize one another amid the clashing ideas which they represented? But on the day when the ceremony of the inauguration of the Commune took place before the Hotel de Ville, amid the thunder of artillery and trophies and red banners floating in the air, his boundless hopes again got the better of his fears and he ceased to doubt. Among the lies of some and the unquestioning faith of others, the illusion started into life again with renewed vigor, in the acute crisis of the malady raised to paroxysmal pitch.

  During the entire month of April Maurice was on duty in the neighborhood of Neuilly. The gentle warmth of the early spring had brought out the blossoms on the lilacs, and the fighting was conducted among the bright verdure of the gardens; the National Guards came into the city at night with bouquets of flowers stuck in their muskets. The troops collected at Versailles were now so numerous as to warrant their formation in two armies, a first line under the orders of Marshal MacMahon and a reserve commanded by General Vinoy. The Commune had nearly a hundred thousand National Guards mobilized and as many more on the rosters who could be called out at short notice, but fifty thousand were as many as they ever brought into the field at one time. Day by day the plan of attack adopted by the Versaillese became more manifest: after occupying Neuilly they had taken possession of the Chateau of Becon and soon after of Asnieres, but these movements were simply to make the investment more complete, for their intention was to enter the city by the Point-du-Jour soon as the converging fire from Mont-Valerien and Fort d'Issy should enable them to carry the rampart there. Mont-Valerien was theirs already, and they were straining every nerve to capture Issy, utilizing the works abandoned by the Germans for the purpose. Since the middle of April the fire of musketry and artillery had been incessant; at Levallois and Neuilly the fighting never ceased, the skirmishers blazing away uninterruptedly, by night as well as by day. Heavy guns, mounted on armored cars, moved to and fro on the Belt Railway, shelling Asnieres over the roofs of Levallois. It was at Vanves and Issy, however, that the cannonade was fiercest; it shook the windows of Paris as the siege had done when it was at its height. And when finally, on the 9th of May, Fort d'Issy was obliged to succumb and fell into the hands of the Versailles army the defeat of the Commune was assured, and in their frenzy of panic the leaders resorted to most detestable measures.

  Maurice favored the creation of a Committee of Public Safety. The warnings of history came to his mind; had not the hour struck for adopting energetic methods if they wished to save the country? There was but one of their barbarities that really pained him, and that was the destruction of the Vendome column; he reproached himself for the feeling as being a childish weakness, but his grandfather's voice still sounded in his ears repeating the old familiar tales of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Wagram, the Moskowa-those epic narratives that thrilled his pulses yet as often as he thought of them. But that they should demolish the house of the murderer Thiers, that they should retain the hostages as a guarantee and a menace, was not that right and just when the Versaillese were unchaining their fury on Paris, bombarding it, destroying its edifices, slaughtering women and children with their shells? As he saw the end of his dream approaching dark thoughts of ruin and destruction filled his mind. If their ideas of justice and retribution were not to prevail, if they were to be crushed out of them with their life-blood, then perish the world, swept away in one of those cosmic upheavals that are the beginning of a new life. Let Paris sink beneath the waves, let it go up in smoke and flame, like a gigantic funeral pyre, sooner than let it be again delivered over to its former state of vice and misery, to that old vicious social system of abominable injustice. And he dreamed another dark, terrible dream, the great city reduced to ashes, naught to be seen on either side the Seine but piles of smoldering ruins, the festering wound purified and healed with fire, a catastrophe without a name, such as had never been before, whence should arise a new race. Wild stories were everywhere circulated, which interested him intensely, of the mines that were driven under all the quarters of the city, the barrels of powder with which the catacombs were stuffed, the monuments and public buildings ready to be blown into the air at a moment's notice; and all were connected by electric wires in such a way that a single spark would suffice to set them off; there were great stores of inflammable substances, too, especially petroleum, with which the streets and avenues were to be converted into seething lakes of flame. The Commune had sworn that should the Versaillese enter the city not one of them would ever get beyond the barricades that closed the ends of the st
reets; the pavements would yawn, the houses would sink in ruins, Paris would go up in flames, and bury assailants and assailed under its ashes.

  And if Maurice solaced himself with these crazy dreams, it was because of his secret discontent with the Commune itself. He had lost all confidence in its members, he felt it was inefficient, drawn this way and that by so many conflicting elements, losing its head and becoming purposeless and driveling as it saw the near approach of the peril with which it was menaced. Of the social reforms it had pledged itself to it had not been able to accomplish a single one, and it was now quite certain that it would leave behind it no great work to perpetuate its name. But what more than all beside was gnawing at its vitals was the rivalries by which it was distracted, the corroding suspicion and distrust in which each of its members lived. For some time past many of them, the more moderate and the timid, had ceased to attend its sessions. The others shaped their course day by day in accordance with events, trembling at the idea of a possible dictatorship; they had reached that point where the factions of revolutionary assemblages exterminate one another by way of saving the country. Cluzeret had become suspected, then Dombrowski, and Rossel was about to share their fate. Delescluze, appointed Civil Delegate at War, could do nothing of his own volition, notwithstanding his great authority. And thus the grand social effort that they had had in view wasted itself in the ever-widening isolation about those men, whose power had become a nullity, whose actions were the result of their despair.

  In Paris there was an increasing feeling of terror. Paris, irritated at first against Versailles, shivering at the recollection of what it had suffered during the siege, was now breaking away from the Commune. The compulsory enrollment, the decree incorporating every man under forty in the National Guard, had angered the more sedate citizens and been the means of bringing about a general exodus: men in disguise and provided with forged papers of Alsatian citizenship made their escape by way of Saint-Denis; others let themselves down into the moat in the darkness of the night with ropes and ladders. The wealthy had long since taken their departure. None of the factories and workshops had opened their doors; trade and commerce there was none; there was no employment for labor; the life of enforced idleness went on amid the alarmed expectancy of the frightful denouement that everyone felt could not be far away. And the people depended for their daily bread on the pay of the National Guards, that dole of thirty sous that was paid from the millions extorted from the Bank of France, the thirty sous for the sake of which alone many men were wearing the uniform, which had been one of the primary causes and the raison d'etre of the insurrection. Whole districts were deserted, the shops closed, the house-fronts lifeless. In the bright May sunshine that flooded the empty streets the few pedestrians beheld nothing moving save the barbaric display of the burial of some federates killed in action, the funeral train where no priest walked, the hearse draped with red flags, followed by a crowd of men and women bearing bouquets of immortelles. The churches were closed and did duty each evening as political club-rooms. The revolutionary journals alone were hawked about the streets; the others had been suppressed. Great Paris was indeed an unhappy city in those days, what with its republican sympathies that made it detest the monarchical Assembly at Versailles and its ever-increasing terror of the Commune, from which it prayed most fervently to be delivered among all the grisly stories that were current, the daily arrests of citizens as hostages, the casks of gunpowder that filled the sewers, where men patrolled by day and night awaiting the signal to apply the torch.

  Maurice, who had never been a drinking man, allowed himself to be seduced by the too prevalent habit of over-indulgence. It had become a thing of frequent occurrence with him now, when he was out on picket duty or had to spend the night in barracks, to take a "pony" of brandy, and if he took a second it was apt to go to his head in the alcohol-laden atmosphere that he was forced to breathe. It had become epidemic, that chronic drunkenness, among those men with whom bread was scarce and who could have all the brandy they wanted by asking for it. Toward evening on Sunday, the 21st of May, Maurice came home drunk, for the first time in his life, to his room in the Rue des Orties, where he was in the habit of sleeping occasionally. He had been at Neuilly again that day, blazing away at the enemy and taking a nip now and then with the comrades, to see if it would not relieve the terrible fatigue from which he was suffering. Then, with a light head and heavy legs, he came and threw himself on the bed in his little chamber; it must have been through force of instinct, for he could never remember how he got there. And it was not until the following morning, when the sun was high in the heavens, that he awoke, aroused by the ringing of the alarm bells, the blare of trumpets and beating of drums. During the night the Versaillese, finding a gate undefended, had effected an unresisted entrance at the Point-du-Jour.

  When he had thrown on his clothes and hastened down into the street, his musket slung across his shoulder by the strap, a band of frightened soldiers whom he fell in with at the mairie of the arrondissement related to him the occurrences of the night, in the midst of a confusion such that at first he had hard work to understand. Fort d'Issy and the great battery at Montretout, seconded by Mont Valerien, for the last ten days had been battering the rampart at the Point-du-Jour, as a consequence of which the Saint-Cloud gate was no longer tenable and an assault had been ordered for the following morning, the 22d; but someone who chanced to pass that way at about five o'clock perceived that the gate was unprotected and immediately notified the guards in the trenches, who were not more than fifty yards away. Two companies of the 37th regiment of regulars were the first to enter the city, and were quickly followed by the entire 4th corps under General Douay. All night long the troops were pouring in in an uninterrupted stream. At seven o'clock Verge's division marched down to the bridge at Grenelle, crossed, and pushed on to the Trocadero. At nine General Clinchamp was master of Passy and la Muette. At three o'clock in the morning the 1st corps had pitched its tents in the Bois de Boulogne, while at about the same hour Bruat's division was passing the Seine to seize the Sevres gate and facilitate the movement of the 2d Corps, General de Cissey's, which occupied the district of Grenelle an hour later. The Versailles army, therefore, on the morning of the 22d, was master of the Trocadero and the Chateau of la Muette on the right bank, and of Grenelle on the left; and great was the rage and consternation that prevailed among the Communists, who were already accusing one another of treason, frantic at the thought of their inevitable defeat.

  When Maurice at last understood the condition of affairs his first thought was that the end had come, that all left him was to go forth and meet his death. But the tocsin was pealing, drums were beating, women and children, even, were working on the barricades, the streets were alive with the stir and bustle of the battalions hurrying to assume the positions assigned them in the coming conflict. By midday it was seen that the Versaillese were remaining quiet in their new positions, and then fresh courage returned to the hearts of the soldiers of the Commune, who were resolved to conquer or die. The enemy's army, which they had feared to see in possession of the Tuileries by that time, profiting by the stern lessons of experience and imitating the prudent tactics of the Prussians, conducted its operations with the utmost caution. The Committee of Public Safety and Delescluze, Delegate at War, directed the defense from their quarters in the Hotel de Ville. It was reported that a last proposal for a peaceable arrangement had been rejected by them with disdain. That served to inspire the men with still more courage, the triumph of Paris was assured, the resistance would be as unyielding as the attack was vindictive, in the implacable hate, swollen by lies and cruelties, that inflamed the heart of either army. And that day was spent by Maurice in the quarters of the Champ de Mars and the Invalides, firing and falling back slowly from street to street. He had not been able to find his battalion; he fought in the ranks with comrades who were strangers to him, accompanying them in their march to the left bank without taking heed whither they were going. Abo
ut four o'clock they had a furious conflict behind a barricade that had been thrown across the Rue de l'Universite, where it comes out on the Esplanade, and it was not until twilight that they abandoned it on learning that Bruat's division, stealing up along the quai, had seized the Corps Legislatif. They had a narrow escape from capture, and it was with great difficulty that they managed to reach the Rue de Lille after a long circuit through the Rue Saint-Dominique and the Rue Bellechasse. At the close of that day the army of Versailles occupied a line which, beginning at the Vanves gate, led past the Corps Legislatif, the Palace of the Elysee, St. Augustine's Church, the Lazare station, and ended at the Asnieres gate.

  The next day, Tuesday, the 23d, was warm and bright, and a terrible day it was for Maurice. The few hundred federates with whom he was, and in whose ranks were men of many different battalions, were charged with the defense of the entire quartier, from the quai to the Rue Saint-Dominique. Most of them had bivouacked in the gardens of the great mansions that line the Rue de Lille; he had had an unbroken night's rest on a grass-plot at one side of the Palace of the Legion of Honor. It was his belief that soon as it was light enough the troops would move out from their shelter behind the Corps Legislatif and force them back upon the strong barricades in the Rue du Bac, but hour after hour passed and there was no sign of an attack. There was only some desultory firing at long range between parties posted at either end of the streets. The Versaillese, who were not desirous of attempting a direct attack on the front of the formidable fortress into which the insurgents had converted the terrace of the Tuileries, developed their plan of action with great circumspection; two strong columns were sent out to right and left that, skirting the ramparts, should first seize Montmartre and the Observatory and then, wheeling inward, swoop down on the central quarters, surrounding them and capturing all they contained, as a shoal of fish is captured in the meshes of a gigantic net. About two o'clock Maurice heard that the tricolor was floating over Montmartre: the great battery of the Moulin de la Galette had succumbed to the combined attack of three army corps, which hurled their battalions simultaneously on the northern and western faces of the butte through the Rues Lepic, des Saules and du Mont-Cenis; then the waves of the victorious troops had poured back on Paris, carrying the Place Saint-Georges, Notre-Dame de Lorette, the mairie in the Rue Drouot and the new Opera House, while on the left bank the turning movement, starting from the cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, had reached the Place d'Enfer and the Horse Market. These tidings of the rapid progress of the hostile army were received by the communards with mingled feelings of rage and terror amounting almost to stupefaction. What, Montmartre carried in two hours; Montmartre, the glorious, the impregnable citadel of the insurrection! Maurice saw that the ranks were thinning about him; trembling soldiers, fearing the fate that was in store for them should they be caught, were slinking furtively away to look for a place where they might wash the powder grime from hands and face and exchange their uniform for a blouse. There was a rumor that the enemy were making ready to attack the Croix-Rouge and take their position in flank. By this time the barricades in the Rues Martignac and Bellechasse had been carried, the red-legs were beginning to make their appearance at the end of the Rue de Lille, and soon all that remained was a little band of fanatics and men with the courage of their opinions, Maurice and some fifty more, who were resolved to sell their lives dearly, killing as many as they could of those Versaillese, who treated the federates like thieves and murderers, dragging away the prisoners they made and shooting them in the rear of the line of battle. Their bitter animosity had broadened and deepened since the days before; it was war to the knife between those rebels dying for an idea and that army, inflamed with reactionary passions and irritated that it was kept so long in the field.