The Downfall

“What, sister, you, brave little woman that you are! You weep because I am about to die – ”

She interrupted him, protesting:

“But you are not going to die!”

“Yes, yes; it is better it should be so; it must be so. Ah, I shall be no great loss to anyone. Up to the time the war broke out I was a source of anxiety to you, I cost you dearly in heart and purse. All the folly and the madness I was guilty of, and which would have landed me, who knows where? in prison, in the gutter – ”

Again she took the words from his mouth, exclaiming hotly:

“Hush! be silent! – you have atoned for all.”

He reflected a moment. “Yes, perhaps I shall have atoned, when I am dead. Ah, Jean, old fellow, you didn’t know what a service you were rendering us all when you gave me that bayonet thrust.”

But the other protested, his eyes swimming with tears:

“Don’t, I entreat you, say such things! do you wish to make me go and dash out my brains against a wall?”

Maurice pursued his train of thought, speaking in hurried, eager tones.

“Remember what you said to me the day after Sedan, that it was not such a bad thing, now and then, to receive a good drubbing. And you added that if a man had gangrene in his system, if he saw one of his limbs wasting from mortification, it would be better to take an ax and chop off that limb than to die from the contamination of the poison. I have many a time thought of those words since I have been here, without a friend, immured in this city of distress and madness. And I am the diseased limb, and it is you who have lopped it off – ” He went on with increasing vehemence, regardless of the supplications of his terrified auditors, in a fervid tirade that abounded with symbols and striking images. It was the untainted, the reasoning, the substantial portion of France, the peasantry, the tillers of the soil, those who had always kept close contact with their mother Earth, that was suppressing the outbreak of the crazed, exasperated part, the part that had been vitiated by the Empire and led astray by vain illusions and empty dreams; and in the performance of its duty it had had to cut deep into the living flesh, without being fully aware of what it was doing. But the baptism of blood, French blood, was necessary; the abominable holocaust, the living sacrifice, in the midst of the purifying flames. Now they had mounted the steps of the Calvary and known their bitterest agony; the crucified nation had expiated its faults and would be born again. “Jean, old friend, you and those like you are strong in your simplicity and honesty. Go, take up the spade and the trowel, turn the sod in the abandoned field, rebuild the house! As for me, you did well to lop me off, since I was the ulcer that was eating away your strength!”

After that his language became more and more incoherent; he insisted on rising and going to sit by the window. “Paris burns, Paris burns; not a stone of it will be left standing. Ah! the fire that I invoked, it destroys, but it heals; yes, the work it does is good. Let me go down there; let me help to finish the work of humanity and liberty – ”

Jean had the utmost difficulty in getting him back to bed, while Henriette tearfully recalled memories of their childhood, and entreated him, for the sake of the love they bore each other, to be calm. Over the immensity of Paris the fiery glow deepened and widened; the sea of flame seemed to be invading the remotest quarters of the horizon; the heavens were like the vaults of a colossal oven, heated to red heat. And athwart the red light of the conflagrations the dense black smoke-clouds from the Ministry of Finance, which had been burning three days and given forth no blaze, continued to pour in unbroken, slow procession.

The following, Saturday, morning brought with it a decided improvement in Maurice’s condition: he was much calmer, the fever had subsided, and it afforded Jean inexpressible delight to behold a smile on Henriette’s face once more, as the young woman fondly reverted to her cherished dream, a pact of reciprocal affection between the three of them, that should unite them in a future that might yet be one of happiness, under conditions that she did not care to formulate even to herself. Would destiny be merciful? Would it save them all from an eternal farewell by saving her brother? Her nights were spent in watching him; she never stirred outside that chamber, where her noiseless activity and gentle ministrations were like a never-ceasing caress. And Jean, that evening, while sitting with his friends, forgot his great sorrow in a delight that astonished him and made him tremble. The troops had carried Belleville and the Buttes-Chaumont that day; the only remaining point where there was any resistance now was the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, which had been converted into a fortified camp. It seemed to him that the insurrection was ended; he even declared that the troops had ceased to shoot their prisoners, who were being collected in droves and sent on to Versailles. He told of one of those bands that he had seen that morning on the quai, made up of men of every class, from the most respectable to the lowest, and of women of all ages and conditions, wrinkled old bags and young girls, mere children, not yet out of their teens; pitiful aggregation of misery and revolt, driven like cattle by the soldiers along the street in the bright sunshine, and that the people of Versailles, so it was said, received with revilings and blows.

But Sunday was to Jean a day of terror. It rounded out and fitly ended that accursed week. With the triumphant rising of the sun on that bright, warm Sabbath morning he shudderingly heard the news that was the culmination of all preceding horrors. It was only at that late day that the public was informed of the murder of the hostages; the archbishop, the cure of the Madeleine and others, shot at la Roquette on Wednesday, the Dominicans of Arcueil coursed like hares on Thursday, more priests and gendarmes, to the number of forty-seven in all, massacred in cold blood in the Rue Haxo on Friday; and a furious cry went up for vengeance, the soldiers bunched the last prisoners they made and shot them in mass. All day long on that magnificent Sunday the volleys of musketry rang out in the courtyard of the Lobau barracks, that were filled with blood and smoke and the groans of the dying. At la Roquette two hundred and twenty-seven miserable wretches, gathered in here and there by the drag-net of the police, were collected in a huddle, and the soldiers fired volley after volley into the mass of human beings until there was no further sign of life. At Pere-Lachaise, which had been shelled continuously for four days and was finally carried by a hand-to-hand conflict among the graves, a hundred and forty-eight of the insurgents were drawn up in line before a wall, and when the firing ceased the stones were weeping great tears of blood; and three of them, despite their wounds, having succeeded in making their escape, they were retaken and despatched. Among the twelve thousand victims of the Commune, who shall say how many innocent people suffered for every malefactor who met his deserts! An order to stop the executions had been issued from Versailles, so it was said, but none the less the slaughter still went on; Thiers, while hailed as the savior of his country, was to bear the stigma of having been the Jack Ketch of Paris, and Marshal MacMahon, the vanquished of Froeschwiller, whose proclamation announcing the triumph of law and order was to be seen on every wall, was to receive the credit of the victory of Pere-Lachaise. And in the pleasant sunshine Paris, attired in holiday garb, appeared to be en fete; the reconquered streets were filled with an enormous crowd; men and women, glad to breathe the air of heaven once more, strolled leisurely from spot to spot to view the smoking ruins; mothers, holding their little children by the hand, stopped for a moment and listened with an air of interest to the deadened crash of musketry from the Lobau barracks.

When Jean ascended the dark staircase of the house in the Rue des Orties, in the gathering obscurity of that Sunday evening, his heart was oppressed by a chill sense of impending evil. He entered the room, and saw at once that the inevitable end was come; Maurice lay dead on the little bed; the hemorrhage predicted by Bouroche had done its work. The red light of the setting sun streamed through the open window and rested on the wall as if in a last farewell; two tapers were burning on a table beside the bed. And Henriette, alone with her dead, in her widow’s weeds that she had not laid aside, was weeping silently.

At the noise of footsteps she raised her head, and shuddered on beholding Jean. He, in his wild despair, was about to hurry toward her and seize her hands, mingle his grief with hers in a sympathetic clasp, but he saw the little hands were trembling, he felt as by instinct the repulsion that pervaded all her being and was to part them for evermore. Was not all ended between them now? Maurice’s grave would be there, a yawning chasm, to part them as long as they should live. And he could only fall to his knees by the bedside of his dead friend, sobbing softly. After the silence had lasted some moments, however, Henriette spoke:

“I had turned my back and was preparing a cup of bouillon, when he gave a cry. I hastened to his side, but had barely time to reach the bed before he expired, with my name upon his lips, and yours as well, amid an outgush of blood – ”

Her Maurice, her twin brother, whom she might almost be said to have loved in the prenatal state, her other self, whom she had watched over and saved! sole object of her affection since at Bazeilles she had seen her poor Weiss set against a wall and shot to death! And now cruel war had done its worst by her, had crushed her bleeding heart; henceforth her way through life was to be a solitary one, widowed and forsaken as she was, with no one upon whom to bestow her love.

“Ah, bon sang!” cried Jean, amid his sobs, “behold my work! My poor little one, for whom I would have laid down my life, and whom I murdered, brute that I am! What is to become of us? Can you ever forgive me?”

At that moment their glances met, and they were stricken with consternation at what they read in each other’s eyes. The past rose before them, the secluded chamber at Remilly, where they had spent so many melancholy yet happy days. His dream returned to him, that dream of which at first he had been barely conscious and which even at a later period could not be said to have assumed definite shape: life down there in the pleasant country by the Meuse, marriage, a little house, a little field to till whose produce should suffice for the needs of two people whose ideas were not extravagant. Now the dream was become an eager longing, a penetrating conviction that, with a wife as loving and industrious as she, existence would be a veritable earthly paradise. And she, the tranquillity of whose mind had never in those days been ruffled by thoughts of that nature, in the chaste and unconscious bestowal of her heart, now saw clearly and understood the true condition of her feelings. That marriage, of which she had not admitted to herself the possibility, had been, unknown to her, the object of her desire. The seed that had germinated had pushed its way in silence and in darkness; it was love, not sisterly affection, that she bore toward that young man whose company had at first been to her nothing more than a source of comfort and consolation. And that was what their eyes told each other, and the love thus openly expressed could have no other fruition than an eternal farewell. It needed but that frightful sacrifice, the rending of their heart-strings by that supreme parting, the prospect of their life’s happiness wrecked amid all the other ruins, swept away by the crimson tide that ended their brother’s life.

With a slow and painful effort Jean rose from his knees.

“Farewell!”

Henriette stood motionless in her place.

“Farewell!”

But Jean could not tear himself away thus. Advancing to the bedside he sorrowfully scanned the dead man’s face, with its lofty forehead that seemed loftier still in death, its wasted features, its dull eyes, whence the wild look that had occasionally been seen there in life had vanished. He longed to give a parting kiss to his little one, as he had called him so many times, but dared not. It seemed to him that his hands were stained with his friend’s blood; he shrank from the horror of the ordeal. Ah, what a death to die, amid the crashing ruins of a sinking world! On the last day, among the shattered fragments of the dying Commune, might not this last victim have been spared? He had gone from life, hungering for justice, possessed by the dream that haunted him, the sublime and unattainable conception of the destruction of the old society, of Paris chastened by fire, of the field dug up anew, that from the soil thus renewed and purified might spring the idyl of another golden age.

His heart overflowing with bitter anguish, Jean turned and looked out on Paris. The setting sun lay on the edge of the horizon, and its level rays bathed the city in a flood of vividly red light. The windows in thousands of houses flamed as if lighted by fierce fires within; the roofs glowed like beds of live coals; bits of gray wall and tall, sober-hued monuments flashed in the evening air with the sparkle of a brisk fire of brushwood. It was like the show-piece that is reserved for the conclusion of a fete, the huge bouquet of gold and crimson, as if Paris were burning like a forest of old oaks and soaring heavenward in a rutilant cloud of sparks and flame. The fires were burning still; volumes of reddish smoke continued to rise into the air; a confused murmur in the distance sounded on the ear, perhaps the last groans of the dying Communists at the Lobau barracks, or it may have been the happy laughter of women and children, ending their pleasant afternoon by dining in the open air at the doors of the wine-shops. And in the midst of all the splendor of that royal sunset, while a large part of Paris was crumbling away in ashes, from plundered houses and gutted palaces, from the torn-up streets, from the depths of all that ruin and suffering, came sounds of life.

Then Jean had a strange experience. It seemed to him that in the slowly fading daylight, above the roofs of that flaming city, he beheld the dawning of another day. And yet the situation might well be considered irretrievable. Destiny appeared to have pursued them with her utmost fury; the successive disasters they had sustained were such as no nation in history had ever known before; defeat treading on the heels of defeat, their provinces torn from them, an indemnity of milliards to be raised, a most horrible civil war that had been quenched in blood, their streets cumbered with ruins and unburied corpses, without money, their honor gone, and order to be re-established out of chaos! His share of the universal ruin was a heart lacerated by the loss of Maurice and Henriette, the prospect of a happy future swept away in the furious storm! And still, beyond the flames of that furnace whose fiery glow had not subsided yet, Hope, the eternal, sat enthroned in the limpid serenity of the tranquil heavens. It was the certain assurance of the resurrection of perennial nature, of imperishable humanity; the harvest that is promised to him who sows and waits; the tree throwing out a new and vigorous shoot to replace the rotten limb that has been lopped away, which was blighting the young leaves with its vitiated sap.

“Farewell!” Jean repeated with a sob.

“Farewell!” murmured Henriette, her bowed face hidden in her hands.

The neglected field was overgrown with brambles, the roof-tree of the ruined house lay on the ground; and Jean, bearing his heavy burden of affliction with humble resignation, went his way, his face set resolutely toward the future, toward the glorious and arduous task that lay before him and his countrymen, to create a new France.

THE END