Complete Works of Emile Zola (1226 page)

And that epidemic of suspicion Maurice, who had always hitherto been so liberal and fair-minded, now began to feel the influence of in the altered views he was commencing to entertain concerning men and things. He had ceased to give way to despair, as he had done after the rout at Chatillon, when he doubted whether the French army would ever muster up sufficient manhood to fight again: the sortie of the 30th of September on l’Hay and Chevilly, that of the 13th of October, in which the mobiles gained possession of Bagneux, and finally that of October 21, when his regiment captured and held for some time the park of la Malmaison, had restored to him all his confidence, that flame of hope that a spark sufficed to light and was extinguished as quickly. It was true the Prussians had repulsed them in every direction, but for all that the troops had fought bravely; they might yet be victorious in the end. It was Paris now that was responsible for the young man’s gloomy forebodings, that great fickle city that at one moment was cheered by bright illusions and the next was sunk in deepest despair, ever haunted by the fear of treason in its thirst for victory. Did it not seem as if Trochu and Ducrot were treading in the footsteps of the Emperor and Marshal MacMahon and about to prove themselves incompetent leaders, the unconscious instruments of their country’s ruin? The same movement that had swept away the Empire was now threatening the Government of National Defense, a fierce longing of the extremists to place themselves in control in order that they might save France by the methods of ‘92; even now Jules Favre and his co-members were more unpopular than the old ministers of Napoleon III. had ever been. Since they would not fight the Prussians, they would do well to make way for others, for those revolutionists who saw an assurance of victory in decreeing the
levee en masse
, in lending an ear to those visionaries who proposed to mine the earth beneath the Prussians’ feet, or annihilate them all by means of a new fashioned Greek fire.

Just previous to the 31st of October Maurice was more than usually a victim to this malady of distrust and barren speculation. He listened now approvingly to crude fancies that would formerly have brought a smile of contempt to his lips. Why should he not? Were not imbecility and crime abroad in the land? Was it unreasonable to look for the miraculous when his world was falling in ruins about him? Ever since the time he first heard the tidings of Froeschwiller, down there in front of Mulhausen, he had harbored a deep-seated feeling of rancor in his breast; he suffered from Sedan as from a raw sore, that bled afresh with every new reverse; the memory of their defeats, with all the anguish they entailed, was ever present to his mind; body and mind enfeebled by long marches, sleepless nights, and lack of food, inducing a mental torpor that left them doubtful even if they were alive; and the thought that so much suffering was to end in another and an irremediable disaster maddened him, made of that cultured man an unreflecting being, scarce higher in the scale than a very little child, swayed by each passing impulse of the moment. Anything, everything, destruction, extermination, rather than pay a penny of French money or yield an inch of French soil! The revolution that since the first reverse had been at work within him, sweeping away the legend of Napoleonic glory, the sentimental Bonapartism that he owed to the epic narratives of his grandfather, was now complete. He had ceased to be a believer in Republicanism, pure and simple, considering the remedy not drastic enough; he had begun to dabble in the theories of the extremists, he was a believer in the necessity of the Terror as the only means of ridding them of the traitors and imbeciles who were about to slay the country. And so it was that he was heart and soul with the insurgents when, on the 31st of October, tidings of disaster came pouring in on them in quick succession: the loss of Bourget, that had been captured from the enemy only a few days before by a dashing surprise; M. Thiers’ return to Versailles from his visit to the European capitals, prepared to treat for peace, so it was said, in the name of Napoleon III.; and finally the capitulation of Metz, rumors of which had previously been current and which was now confirmed, the last blow of the bludgeon, another Sedan, only attended by circumstances of blacker infamy. And when he learned next day the occurrences at the Hotel de Ville — how the insurgents had been for a brief time successful, how the members of the Government of National Defense had been made prisoners and held until four o’clock in the morning, how finally the fickle populace, swayed at one moment by detestation for the ministers and at the next terrified by the prospect of a successful revolution, had released them — he was filled with regret at the miscarriage of the attempt, at the non-success of the Commune, which might have been their salvation, calling the people to arms, warning them of the country’s danger, arousing the cherished memories of a nation that wills it will not perish. Thiers did not dare even to set his foot in Paris, where there was some attempt at illumination to celebrate the failure of the negotiations.

The month of November was to Maurice a period of feverish expectancy. There were some conflicts of no great importance, in which he had no share. His regiment was in cantonments at the time in the vicinity of Saint-Ouen, whence he made his escape as often as he could to satisfy his craving for news. Paris, like him, was awaiting the issue of events in eager suspense. The election of municipal officers seemed to have appeased political passion for the time being, but a circumstance that boded no good for the future was that those elected were rabid adherents of one or another party. And what Paris was watching and praying for in that interval of repose was the grand sortie that was to bring them victory and deliverance. As it had always been, so it was now; confidence reigned everywhere: they would drive the Prussians from their position, would pulverize them, annihilate them. Great preparations were being made in the peninsula of Gennevilliers, the point where there was most likelihood of the operation being attended with success. Then one morning came the joyful tidings of the victory at Coulmiers; Orleans was recaptured, the army of the Loire was marching to the relief of Paris, was even then, so it was reported, in camp at Etampes. The aspect of affairs was entirely changed: all they had to do now was to go and effect a junction with it beyond the Marne. There had been a general reorganization of the forces; three armies had been created, one composed of the battalions of National Guards and commanded by General Clement Thomas, another, comprising the 13th and 14th corps, to which were added a few reliable regiments, selected indiscriminately wherever they could be found, was to form the main column of attack under the lead of General Ducrot, while the third, intended to act as a reserve, was made up entirely of mobiles and turned over to General Vinoy. And when Maurice laid him down to sleep in the wood of Vincennes on the night of the 28th of November, with his comrades of the 115th, he was without a doubt of their success. The three corps of the second army were all there, and it was common talk that their junction with the army of the Loire had been fixed for the following day at Fontainebleau. Then ensued a series of mischances, the usual blunders arising from want of foresight; a sudden rising of the river, which prevented the engineers from laying the pontoon bridge; conflicting orders, which delayed the movement of the troops. The 115th was among the first regiments to pass the river on the following night, and in the neighborhood of ten o’clock, with Maurice in its ranks, it entered Champigny under a destructive fire. The young man was wild with excitement; he fired so rapidly that his chassepot burned his fingers, notwithstanding the intense cold. His sole thought was to push onward, ever onward, surmounting every obstacle until they should join their brothers from the provinces over there across the river. But in front of Champigny and Bry the army fell up against the park walls of Coeuilly and Villiers, that the Prussians had converted into impregnable fortresses, more than a quarter of a mile in length. The men’s courage faltered, and after that the action went on in a half-hearted way; the 3d corps was slow in getting up, the 1st and 2d, unable to advance, continued for two days longer to hold Champigny, which they finally abandoned on the night of December 2, after their barren victory. The whole army retired to the wood of Vincennes, where the men’s only shelter was the snow-laden branches of the trees, and Maurice, whose feet were frost-bitten, laid his head upon the cold ground and cried.

The gloom and dejection that reigned in the city, after the failure of that supreme effort, beggars the powers of description. The great sortie that had been so long in preparation, the irresistible eruption that was to be the deliverance of Paris, had ended in disappointment, and three days later came a communication from General von Moltke under a flag of truce, announcing that the army of the Loire had been defeated and that the German flag again waved over Orleans. The girdle was being drawn tighter and tighter about the doomed city all whose struggles were henceforth powerless to burst its iron fetters. But Paris seemed to accumulate fresh powers of resistance in the delirium of its despair. It was certain that ere long they would have to count famine among the number of their foes. As early as October the people had been restricted in their consumption of butcher’s meat, and in December, of all the immense herds of beeves and flocks of sheep that had been turned loose in the Bois de Boulogne, there was not a single creature left alive, and horses were being slaughtered for food. The stock of flour and wheat, with what was subsequently taken for the public use by forced sale, it was estimated would keep the city supplied with bread for four months. When the flour was all consumed mills were erected in the railway stations to grind the grain. The supply of coal, too, was giving out; it was reserved to bake the bread and for use in the mills and arms factories. And Paris, her streets without gas and lighted by petroleum lamps at infrequent intervals; Paris, shivering under her icy mantle; Paris, to whom the authorities doled out her scanty daily ration of black bread and horse flesh, continued to hope — in spite of all, talking of Faidherbe in the north, of Chanzy on the Loire, of Bourbaki in the east, as if their victorious armies were already beneath the walls. The men and women who stood waiting, their feet in snow and slush, in interminable lines before the bakers’ and butchers’ shops, brightened up a bit at times at the news of some imaginary success of the army. After the discouragement of each defeat the unquenchable flame of their illusion would burst out and blaze more brightly than ever among those wretched people, whom starvation and every kind of suffering had rendered almost delirious. A soldier on the Place du Chateau d’Eau having spoken of surrender, the by-standers mobbed and were near killing him. While the army, its endurance exhausted, feeling the end was near, called for peace, the populace clamored still for the sortie
en masse
, the torrential sortie, in which the entire population of the capital, men, women, and children, even, should take part, rushing upon the Prussians like water from a broken dyke and overwhelming them by sheer force of numbers.

And Maurice kept himself apart from his comrades, with an ever-increasing disgust for the life and duties of a soldier, that condemned him to inactivity and uselessness behind the ramparts of Mont-Valerien. He grasped every occasion to get away and hasten to Paris, where his heart was. It was in the midst of the great city’s thronging masses alone that he found rest and peace of mind; he tried to force himself to hope as they hoped. He often went to witness the departure of the balloons, which were sent up every other day from the station of the Northern Railway with a freight of despatches and carrier pigeons. They rose when the ropes were cast loose and soon were lost to sight in the cheerless wintry sky, and all hearts were filled with anguish when the wind wafted them in the direction of the German frontier. Many of them were never heard of more. He had himself twice written to his sister Henriette, without ever learning if she had received his letters. The memory of his sister and of Jean, living as they did in that outer, shadowy world from which no tidings ever reached him now, was become so blurred and faint that he thought of them but seldom, as of affections that he had left behind him in some previous existence. The incessant conflict of despair and hope in which he lived occupied all the faculties of his being too fully to leave room for mere human feelings. Then, too, in the early days of January he was goaded to the verge of frenzy by the action of the enemy in shelling the district on the left bank of the river. He had come to credit the Prussians with reasons of humanity for their abstention, which was in fact due simply to the difficulties they experienced in bringing up their guns and getting them in position. Now that a shell had killed two little girls at the Val-de-Grace, his scorn and hatred knew no bounds for those barbarous ruffians who murdered little children and threatened to burn the libraries and museums. After the first days of terror, however, Paris had resumed its life of dogged, unfaltering heroism.

Since the reverse of Champigny there had been but one other attempt, ending in disaster like the rest, in the direction of Bourget; and the evening when the plateau of Avron was evacuated, under the fire of the heavy siege artillery battering away at the forts, Maurice was a sharer in the rage and exasperation that possessed the entire city. The growing unpopularity that threatened to hurl from power General Trochu and the Government of National Defense was so augmented by this additional repulse that they were compelled to attempt a supreme and hopeless effort. What, did they refuse the services of the three hundred thousand National Guards, who from the beginning had been demanding their share in the peril and in the victory! This time it was to be the torrential sortie that had all along been the object of the popular clamor; Paris was to throw open its dikes and drown the Prussians beneath the on-pouring waves of its children. Notwithstanding the certainty of a fresh defeat, there was no way of avoiding a demand that had its origin in such patriotic motives; but in order to limit the slaughter as far as possible, the chiefs determined to employ, in connection with the regular army, only the fifty-nine mobilized battalions of the National Guard. The day preceding the 19th of January resembled some great public holiday; an immense crowd gathered on the boulevards and in the Champs-Elysees to witness the departing regiments, which marched proudly by, preceded by their bands, the men thundering out patriotic airs. Women and children followed them along the sidewalk, men climbed on the benches to wish them Godspeed. The next morning the entire population of the city hurried out to the Arc de Triomphe, and it was almost frantic with delight when at an early hour news came of the capture of Montretout; the tales that were told of the gallant behavior of the National Guard sounded like epics; the Prussians had been beaten all along the line, the French would occupy Versailles before night. As a natural result the consternation was proportionately great when, at nightfall, the inevitable defeat became known. While the left wing was seizing Montretout the center, which had succeeded in carrying the outer wall of Buzanval Park, had encountered a second inner wall, before which it broke. A thaw had set in, the roads were heavy from the effects of a fine, drizzling rain, and the guns, those guns that had been cast by popular subscription and were to the Parisians as the apple of their eye, could not get up. On the right General Ducrot’s column was tardy in getting into action and saw nothing of the fight. Further effort was useless, and General Trochu was compelled to order a retreat. Montretout was abandoned, and Saint-Cloud as well, which the Prussians burned, and when it became fully dark the horizon of Paris was illuminated by the conflagration.