The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (59 page)

Lillie was admitted to Rigault’s office only after being kept waiting a considerable time. When finally she stood before the desk where he sat writing, he neither looked up nor acknowledged her presence. Again she waited, feeling, she said, “like a culprit.” Two uniformed policemen stood immediately behind his chair. Another man, whom she did not recognize, leaned against a small mantelpiece at the other end of the room. He was Pascal Grousset, the Commune’s delegate for external affairs and someone Washburne had had dealings with and liked. Possibly, Washburne
had something to do with Grousset’s presence in the room. Otherwise, one wonders why he would ever have allowed Lillie to face Rigault alone.

Breaking the silence, she told him she had come for a passport and handed him Washburne’s card.

Did she wish to leave Paris? he asked. Yes, she said, and as she later wrote, “He replied, with what he thought was a seductive smile, ‘I should think Paris would be a very attractive place for a pretty woman like yourself!’ ”

Was she an American? Yes, and glad to be so, she answered.

“Does the American minister know you personally?”

“Yes, very well.”

Opening a desk drawer, he took out a blank passport form and began filling it in while asking the standard questions, but in a slow, insinuating way that she found “hateful.” She thought she might faint. It was only when Pascal Grousset stepped forward to intervene and speed things along that the ordeal ended and she was safely out the door.

“No Elsa ever welcomed her Lohengrin coming out of the clouds as I did my Lohengrin coming from the mantelpiece,” she later wrote.

For several days and nights the roar of cannon fire was heard again, exactly as during the siege, except this time it was the French firing on the French.

On April 4, the Commune formally impeached all members of the government at Versailles and confiscated their Paris properties. After dark that night, moving swiftly and with great secrecy, Chief of Police Rigault had the archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Georges Darboy, arrested and jailed, along with twenty other priests. The archbishop had committed no offense, nor was any reason given for the arrest. Like Washburne, he had refused to leave the city, feeling it his duty to face every danger and stay with his people in their time of trial.

News of the arrest spread great alarm and outrage among many. Newspapers reported that the archbishop was taken before Raoul Rigault, who proceeded with “icy coolness” to interrogate the prisoner.

At first M. Darboy attempted his usual clerical attitudes, turning his eyes up and called the persons present, “
Mes enfants!
” Citizen Rigault, however, immediately interrupted him with the remark that he was not speaking to children, but to judges.

As the cannonading grew heavier, the exodus from Paris became a stampede of hundreds of thousands of people, everyone carrying as much money as could be safely concealed. All the gold and silver found in churches had been confiscated by the Commune. Placards on buildings denounced priests as thieves.

By the second week of April, all able-bodied men were forbidden to leave the city. Railroads suspended service. When cannon fire began hitting close to the American minister’s home on the avenue de l’Impératrice—one shell striking within fifty feet—Washburne moved his family to a safer part of town.

“Big firing this morning and shells coming in fast,” he wrote in his diary on April 10.

I started downtown to the Legation. The shells were hissing through the air and exploding in the neighborhood of the Porte Maillot and the Arc de Triomphe. I got within about two hundred yards of the Arc when pop went the weasel—a shell struck [and] burst against the Arc. A piece of shell fell in the street, which a National Guard picked up, all warm and smoking, and sold to me for two francs.

April 17. … The firing is going on all the time … so near it seems almost under the windows. … Every day makes things worse. … The house adjoining ours was entered and sacked the night before last. … I hardly know what to do.

April 19. … All is one great shipwreck in Paris. Fortune, business, public and private credit, industry, labor are all in “the deep bosom of the ocean buried” [from Shakespeare’s
Richard III
]. The physiognomy of the city becomes every day
more sad. All the upper part of the Champs-Élysées is completely deserted in fear of the shells. Immense barricades are going up at the Place de la Concorde. The great manufacturies and workshops are closed. … Where I write, at 75 [avenue de l’Impératrice], always the roar of cannon, the whizzing of shells and rattling of musketry. When I came home at 61/2 this evening the noise was terrific. … Gratiot went to Fontainebleau today to find a place for the family, but was unsuccessful.

When the pope’s nuncio, Monseigneur Chigni, made a strong appeal to the American minister, as the only senior diplomat still in Paris, to intervene on behalf of the imprisoned archbishop, stressing how perilous the situation had become, Washburne agreed to do what he could.

On the morning of Sunday, April 23, accompanied by young McKean, he made an official call on General Gustave-Paul Cluseret, the secretary of war under the Commune, who had the unusual distinction for a French officer of having served in the Union Army during the Civil War. With help from Senator Charles Sumner he had become a Union colonel and commanded troops in the Shenandoah Valley. Washburne had known him at the time, and Cluseret received him now most cordially and expressed his sympathy for the archbishop. But unfortunately, given “the state of feeling in Paris,” he said, “no man would be safe for a moment who proposed his release.”

Like an attorney in court, Washburne “remonstrated” against the “inhumanity and barbarism” of seizing such a man accused of no crime, dragging him to prison, then allowing no one to speak to him. If it was not within Cluseret’s power to release the archbishop, then he, Washburne, must be permitted to visit him in prison.

Cluseret thought it a reasonable request and agreed to go at once with Washburne to see Chief of Police Rigault.

“So we all started off (Mr. McKean was with me) and made our way to the Prefecture,” Washburne recorded. Arriving at about eleven o’clock, they were told Rigault was still in bed. Cluseret went alone to see him
and soon returned with a pass. Washburne and McKean then proceeded directly to the infamous Mazas Prison on the boulevard Mazas, opposite the Gare de Lyon, where the archbishop was being held.

To their surprise they were admitted without delay and ushered to a visitors’ cell. Minutes later the prisoner was led in.

Monseigneur Georges Darboy was fifty-eight years old. Born in Fayl-Billot, in the Haute Marne, he had come to Paris thirty years earlier to serve as inspector of religious instruction at the colleges of the diocese of the city. He became the archbishop in 1863. Washburne, who had never met him, was stunned by his appearance.

With his slender person, his form somewhat bent, his long beard, for he has not been shaved apparently since his confinement, his face haggard with ill health, all could not have failed to have moved the most indifferent.

He was extremely pleased to see them, the archbishop said, for until then he had been permitted to see no one from the outside. Nor had he been allowed even to see a newspaper.

He seemed to appreciate his critical situation, and to be prepared for the worst. He had no word of bitterness or reproach for his persecutors, but on the other hand remarked that the world judged them to be worse than they really were. He was patiently awaiting the logic of events and praying that Providence might find a solution to these terrible troubles without the further shedding of human blood.

He was confined, he told his visitors, to a cell ten by six feet with one small window, a single wooden chair, a small table, and a prison bed. In the same prison forty other priests were now being held. When Washburne offered him any assistance he might want, he said he had no need for anything.

Washburne, a Protestant and
un étranger
, left determined to do everything
possible to have the archbishop released. He would be an agent of freedom still again, as he had been for so many during the siege and in battles at home in Congress against slavery. Two days later he was back at the prison bringing a stack of newspapers for the archbishop and a bottle of old Madeira.

On April 25, Adele and the family, with McKean as their escort, left the city to stay in Vieille-Église, thirty miles from Paris, beyond Versailles. “It is a little French village four hundred years old,” Washburne wrote to a friend in Galena during an overnight visit. “We occupy a cottage near an old château, splendid yard, garden, etc. It is very pleasant and healthy and Mrs. W. and the children are very well, happy, and contented.”

He himself was not so well, however. “I have been so run down and so overwhelmed with care and responsibility. …” What he did not say was that he had lost so much weight his suits hung on him. “The children are growing,” he added, “and they chatter French like birds. …”

Back in Paris an incident involving the elderly Charles Moulton provided a momentary lift of spirits for Washburne, as it did for every American in Paris who heard the story.

For years Moulton had been known for his inability to say almost anything in French as it should be pronounced. After more than twenty years in Paris, he remained the ultimate Yankee mangler of the language, and much to the embarrassment of the rest of his family. He had no trouble reading French, and, seated in his favorite parlor chair, he often insisted on reading aloud to the others from the Paris papers, which, as he keenly appreciated, was enough to send them scurrying from the room.

On the morning of May 9, a mob of Communards descended on the Moulton estate on the rue de Courcelles. As the family well knew, anyone of obvious wealth was by this time in grave risk. “We thought our last day had come,” said Lillie Moulton.

When no one in the house, neither servant nor family member, expressed sufficient courage to step out and face the mob, Moulton decided to go himself—“like the true American he is,” wrote Lillie, who volunteered to go with him.

Small, slight, and bespectacled, he was hardly an imposing figure, and, against the backdrop of the enormous house, he seemed smaller still.

A rough-looking leader of the crowd pushed forward holding a sheet of paper with the official seal of the Comité de Transport and demanded in the name of the Commune every animal on the premises.

Mr. Moulton took the paper [Lillie wrote], deliberately adjusted his spectacles, and … read it very leisurely (I wondered how those fiery creatures had the forbearance to stay quiet, but they did. I think they were hypnotized by my father-in-law’s coolness). …

No sooner did Moulton open his mouth to reply than the crowd began to giggle, his pronunciation working its spell. When, raising his voice to an unusually high pitch, he declared they could have the horse, “
le cheval
,” but not “
le vache
,” using the masculine pronoun
le
for cow, it was more than they could bear.

“The men before us were convulsed with laughter,” wrote Lillie.

Moulton’s French saved the day, she later acknowledged, adding that, rough and threatening as the men in the crowd were, they “could not but admire the plucky old gentleman who stood there looking so calmly at them over his glasses.”

A beloved family horse was led away, but “
le vache
” was permitted to stay. No damage whatever was done to the house or to anyone in it.