Werewolf of Paris (33 page)

Robert's first surprise was to note the crowds on each side of the street. The shouts of anger, the vegetables that came flying, along with kicks and fisticuffs. What was it all about? Why were they shouting: “Death to the hostages!”

“Where are we going?” he asked the monk walking beside him.

“To Golgotha,” the latter answered curtly and resumed his muttered prayers. The coachman, though he had worked for years in Paris, could not recall any place with that name. He wanted more information but was a little shy of interrupting the prayers of the monk a second time.

The guards, fearing that the mob would snatch the prisoners to a sooner death, secured reinforcements from a barricade manned by the 74th battalion. From then on the way was quieter. The column moved up the rue de Paris and turned into the rue Haxo, escorted by an enormous and constantly growing mob.

“No escape for me. Well, another prison, then,” Jean Robert said to himself, and resigned himself with a sigh. Indeed the number of men with guns, the number of escorting boys who had joined with the march, grew every minute. A hundred pairs of eyes were constantly fixed on every prisoner. Jean Robert shrank a little within himself. What if it were to be discovered that he was not supposed to be with this group and he were excluded? Even a change of prison was a novelty to be enjoyed.

At this moment the whole column marched through a long and broad archway into a courtyard and past several small houses, issuing from thence onto what was half an ornamented garden, half a vegetable patch. The prisoners were bunched up against a wall at the higher end. The mob that had poured in continued to howl for the death of the hostages.

Jean Robert's slow mind began to understand. The escort of the National Guard had protected them from the brutal mob only to bring them here to die in more military style. Surprised, he shouted out, “But they are going to shoot us!” Agreat fear clamped itself around his heart with claws of steel. He made a move to run forward.

A guard with a far-off, dreamy expression on his face pushed Robert back roughly to the wall and held him there with the stock of his gun, while he continued to think of something else.

“But I'm not guilty! I'm—” Robert cried,

“None of us are guilty,” said the young monk quietly, and sought to lay a consoling hand on him.

“But—” Robert shouted, and angrily shook off that kind hand that wished to force him gently into death. His eyes were popping out of his head. There was a lump in his throat so big that he couldn't talk without great pain. The saliva drooled from his mouth. “I don't want to die!” he exploded violently.

“Hush,” said the monk. “We must all learn to die.”

“But I don't want to die!” Robert cried again. Sweat was beading his brow from the terrible strain of uttering words.

Below in the garden, the soldiers were disputing about the firing. Some members of the Commune made a vain last effort to stop the crime, but it had gone too far. The public so long urged on by their leaders to shout for blood had become infected with the lust for murder. “Let's get out of here,” the members of the Central Committee whispered to each other. A moment later, when the shooting began, there was not an important official in sight.

The guards left the prisoners to join the firing squad.

“Here!” Robert shouted, and was about to run after his guard who was moving away. “I'm not one of—”

He got no further. The guard, now distinctly annoyed, forced him back with a vicious blow in the pit of the stomach. Robert clasped his hands over his belly, his mouth yawned for a breath which his paralyzed muscles refused to give him. In an agony of pain, he dropped to one knee.

And the guard moved off and out of range.

The monk, seeing Robert kneeling beside him, turned quietly with his fingers raised: “Ego te absolvo ab onmibus…” The formula for conditional absolution.

Robert was still struggling for air when the firing began. Some fruit trees, still half in blossom, were in the way. Soon their pretty spring foliage was torn to shreds, their branches hung broken, their bark scored and burnt. In lulls while the men reloaded, the wind brought snatches of a waltz from a nearby encampment of German occupation soldiers, who were amusing themselves out of doors in the pleasant weather.

When the victims lay in heaps, revolvers were drawn and endless coups de grâce administered. Bayonets were brought into play. Later, autopsies were to reveal bodies with sixty, seventy bullets in them and as many bayonet wounds.
*
Many of the firing party, too, bore wounds, inflicted by their own careless comrades.

When the execution was considered complete, Colonel Gois and Clavier investigated. They had lined up fifty men, but they counted fifty-one bodies.

Gois shrugged his shoulders: “Decidedly there's one too many.”
†

They did not wait to examine into the matter more carefully. There was need for hurry. Step by step, barricade after barricade, the Versailles troops were wresting the city from the Communards.

There were still 315 hostages left at La Grande Roquette prison. On the following day a man named Ferré tried to secure them either for a firing squad or as volunteers for fighting on the barricades. But the fighting in neighboring streets was coming so close that he gave up in the midst of things and left the prison with almost every cell door open. The majority of the inmates thought themselves likely to be safer in jail than outside and for greater security proceeded to barricade themselves within their prison. Some tried to escape, and these bold ones fell into the hands of Communards who executed them at once. The next morning the marines had captured the district and the hostages were liberated.

Then began those terrible moments which were so like cataclysms of nature, like earthquakes and avalanches, that words seem incapable of describing them. The retreating Communards had set fire to various public buildings. Groups of men and some of women went about destroying the best structures in the quarters that had to be evacuated. Among these mad women who were setting fire to the best that Paris contained was Sophie de Blumenberg.

On this, the last day before the end, Sophie had not left the 204th battalion. She had taken a pair of boots from a dead boy. They fitted her small feet. Somewhere, too, she had picked up the overcoat of a Zouave uniform.

Several days before, the 204th had been called to protect the barricades of the 9th ward. The battalion was almost wiped out there, for the Versailles forces seized a barricade in the rear, rue Caumartin, and poured a deadly fire into their unprotected backs. Sixteen of the company, taken prisoners, were executed at once and within sight of the remaining few who had been able to retreat to another barricade.

The few survivors of the 204th were now standing about the mairie on the Place Voltaire, and talking about the event, as they had been ever since it had taken place. Sophie, unashamed of her love, continued to make open inquiries. Now, though no one could remember having seen Bertrand on that morning, they nevertheless added his name to the list of dead. It made the disaster the more impressive and formidable. “Dead along with the others,” they commented briefly and shook their heads. They made no attempt to twit her. Their present great desire was to discover how such a calamity could have overtaken them. It seemed to them impossible that their defeat was a natural result of the chances of war. They suspected treason. And this suspicion, after lighting on any number of people, fell at last on Captain de Montfort, who had ordered them to that position, who had specified the placing of the barricades and who had left the one in the rear insufficiently manned, evidently on purpose.

As soon as the men began to build upon this supposition, they found more and more valid reasons. Three were outstanding. First, Montfort's aristocratic ancestry and demeanor, his love of cantering around on his horse in his blue and gold uniform and shouting down his orders from above, all convincing evidence of relations with Versailles. Second, his natural jealousy of Bertrand, which would be likely to lead him to treachery in an effort to erase his rival. Third, his insistence on that day, during a little altercation among the officers, that the barricades should be here and there and manned thus. Usually he had taken little part in discussions of military strategy.

To this was added a story which was true, and which someone now thought of for the first time. A few days before, Captain de Montfort had come up to the Ministry in the rue Saint-Dominique. He was slightly drunk and in an ugly mood. His wild gestures caused the guard to raise his bayonet and prevent the captain's entry. Montfort was beside himself with fury. He called down curses on the whole guard. And noticing that they were from the 204th battalion, which he knew was Bertrand's, he sneered: “The two-hundred-fourth, huh? You fellows seem to be a rare pack of scoundrels. That's a battalion that needs a good purging.”

Sophie cared little about the decimation of the 204th at the Madeleine, but the fact that Barral had gotten rid of Bertrand in this fashion made her sick with grief. A grief which rapidly boiled over into a wild desire for vengeance.

It was Captain Barral de Montfort's misfortune just then to come riding along on horseback in the direction of the barricade on Boulevard Voltaire. And Sophie, seeing him first, pointed him out with her finger, yelling: “There's the dirty traitor!” He heard her voice and reined in his prancing steed.

With cries of: “Kill him! Kill the traitor!” a dozen soldiers raced up to him, a score of arms seized him and yanked him from his saddle. He was tossed, thrown about, dragged toward the mairie, until his beautiful uniform was a mass of rags, his features lost amid bruised and swollen flesh. Sophie, catching a glimpse of him through the mob that surrounded him, opened her mouth in horror. She wanted to run away but restrained herself: “Serves him right, the traitor!” She had completely forgotten that for several months now she, herself, had been aiding Barral in precisely this sort of treachery.

The mairie was crowded with women sewing sacks to hold earth for the barricades. Ferré and Genton, two officers there, decided that a trial must be held. “It must be regular, men,” they shouted over the tumult. The captain was taken out on the square, which was massed with soldiers and curious spectators. Many did not know what was happening. But they heard the cry of traitor and took it up.

It was slow business plowing through the mob with a prisoner whom everyone wished to injure. Progress was further impeded by a long line of hearses, draped in red flags, which were climbing up the hill to Père-Lachaise. “His turn now!” someone cried. And the impatient mob repeated the phrase in a hundred variations.

Genton and Ferré kept repeating to the men who barred the advance: “It's got to be regular. We must be just. The Commune has decided to bring him up before the court-martial.” This assurance, and the commanding position that Genton seemed to occupy with his scarlet sash about his waist, allowed the escort and their prisoner to finally cross the square and reach the rue Sedaine.

A shop on this street had become the new headquarters of several battalions. A revolutionary tribunal was improvised on a moment's notice. Colonel Gois took charge. Genton and Ferré assumed the rôle of assessors. It was a mere parody of justice. There was not an iota of evidence to implicate Barral de Montfort. He had been vain, yes; imperious, yes; and negligent, perhaps; but of communications with Versailles, of treachery of any kind, nothing.

The judges wished to save Montfort, whom they knew well and whose cousin Edouard Moreau was a member of the Central Committee and one of the big men of the Commune. But in the face of the mob, they did not dare proclaim him innocent. The prisoner himself would not speak, could not perhaps speak. His eyes were closed by puffy bruises; blood ran from the corner of his tightly shut mouth. He sat in impassive silence. Only once he murmured, but so low that his voice scarcely carried to the judges: “I'm innocent. Who dares call me a traitor?”

None of the judges could believe him guilty. They were, in fact, certain of his innocence, and that being the case they ought not only to have said as much, but they ought also to have extended protection to him. They did neither. True, they found him guilty only of negligence, and ordered him merely degraded from his captaincy, but they specified that he should be sent to the nearest barricade and take his share of the fighting. One of the assessors added, as a sop to the mob: “If he shows signs of cowardice, bash in his head.” The hint was sufficient. And the mob saw to it that it was carried out. He was left lying for dead, in a ditch, covered with the mud and phlegm that was thrown and spat on him by the crowd. The crowd. The same crowd that barely eight weeks before had made a bonfire of the guillotine, on this same Place Voltaire, and had welcomed with wild acclamations of joy the news that the legislators of the Commune had abolished capital punishment.

But the odor of blood was in the air. The feel of approaching death roused the worst that hides in man. The Versailles troops had taken the whole left bank. They were beginning to encircle the remainder of the city still in the bands of the Commune, and wherever their assaults carried a barricade, they set up at once their temporary booths of methodic, pitiless, thoroughrepression: court-martial, summary execution. And their revenge was as 50 to 1.

At this crisis of the expiring Commune, it was natural that the most violent members should seize the reins of action, for at such moments the milder men think of retreat or else grow desperate along with the others. The blame for the firing of Paris will never be fixed on any one man, but it can be blamed on the Commune as a whole, and excused, if such actions demand excuse, by the strain of the moment. It was wrong to burn the treasures of Paris, valuable libraries, irreplaceable archives. It was wrong, not because these things have half the value that is placed on them, but because the burning was the mere gesture of a beaten man taking a spiteful blow at his opponent's children. Yes, if the burning of libraries, museums, archives, would abolish poverty, I'd call the exchange cheap. But this had no symbolic meaning, nor any real value.