The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (52 page)

“I have never before so much realized the want of your society and the presence of the darling children,” Washburne wrote to Adele. “But I find enough to do every day to take up my time and so I am not idle.” This, she knew, was a large understatement.

To his brother Israel in Maine, Washburne stressed that the French had 500,000 troops in the city, counting the National Guard, and that their spirits were high, the defenses strong. All approaches to Paris were defended by a wall thirty feet high, a moat, and sixteen fortresses that made up a sixty-mile circle around the city. But there also seemed little likelihood that the French could ever succeed in breaking out through the formidable German lines.

On the morning of September 30, after unusually heavy cannonading, French troops made an all-out sortie against two German positions with
what Washburne described as “great courage and spirit,” but against immense odds. Their losses were heavy—500 killed, 1,500 wounded—and nothing was gained.

The morning crowds at the door of the legation had diminished considerably, but the desire of Americans to get out of the city by almost any means was greater than ever and thus far there seemed little Washburne could do to help. In early October the American arms salesman Charles May, thinking he had come up with the perfect solution, asked Washburne to arrange a German passport for him. Washburne said he could not. But when, on the morning of October 7, Léon Gambetta, the French minister of the interior, made a sensational escape from Paris by balloon, the enterprising May and his business associate Reynolds went, too, as Gambetta’s guests in an accompanying balloon.

They took off from the summit of Montmartre, to the cheers of a huge crowd. Gambetta, wrapped in a fur cape and looking extremely pale and apprehensive, waved from the wicker basket swinging beneath a great yellow balloon. The balloon bearing the two Americans was snow-white.

Other Americans in Paris over the years had had a considerable variety of adventures, but until now none had ever escaped by balloon.

It was another perfect day and “a beautiful sight it was to see our friends there, waving hats and handkerchiefs as we gradually ascended,” Charles May would write.

The air was clear and the sky cloudless. A fair even temperature, quite mild, with just enough wind to float us on.

Gambetta’s balloon was just over us a little to the northwest, and soon we were passing the suburbs of Paris near St.-Denis, when I heard the horses galloping below, saw German artillery exercising, and crack, bang went the guns and we realized their eyes were on us, and they meant to bring us down if possible. The firing became more and more frequent, the balls whistled around us, still we kept rising.

One of Gambetta’s crew cupped his hands at his mouth and shouted, “
Dépêchez-vous! Dépêchez-vous!
” (“Hurry! Hurry!”)

So we opened the sand bag [May continued], which quickened our rising and away we floated, and after twenty minutes the firing ceased and we had the heavens for our way without anything to molest or make us afraid.

“There was no sense of motion, no noise, no friction, no jarring—the perfection of traveling,” May recounted. He had thought to bring a basket of crackers, chocolate, canned oysters, and wine. “So we had a very agreeable time.”

The two balloons were filled with coal gas. It would have taken only a few stray shots to have turned them into balls of flame. As it was, Gambetta eventually landed safely beyond the German lines near Tours, 150 miles to the south. May and Reynolds came down at Roye, 70 miles north of Paris.

The following day it rained for the first time in a month, a “blue dull” rain, as Washburne recorded. It was the twenty-fourth day of the siege, and the problem of food could no longer be ignored. “The days go and the provisions go,” he wrote. The government began rationing meat and set the price. Ration cards were issued. Soldiers stood posted at the
boucheries
, the butcher shops, to check the cards. Washburne, as he reported to his family, had earlier “laid by” his own sufficient stock of food.

His reputation for energetic, levelheaded attention to problems spread rapidly in Europe and at home. “Were it not for Mr. Washburne, who was brought up in the rough-and-ready life of the Far West, instead of serving an apprenticeship in courts and government offices, those who are still here would be perfectly helpless,” wrote a correspondent for London’s
Daily News
, Henry Labouchère. “He is worth more than all his colleagues put together.” During an afternoon at the American Legation, Labouchère was amazed to see Washburne walking about “cheerily shaking everyone by the hand, and telling them to make themselves at home.”

How different American diplomats are to the prim old women who represent us abroad, with a staff of a half dozen dandies helping each other to do nothing, who have been taught to regard all who are not of their craft as their natural enemies.

“The world cannot fail to admire the firm purpose which keeps him at his post in the midst of danger,” wrote the
Chicago Journal
.

In mid-October, Washburne was struck ill by what he called his “old Galena ague,” great dizziness and violent vomiting. Two days later, on October 15, he was still “suffering … so sore I can hardly move … cold feet and ague pains in my limbs …” But he refused to give in. On October 17 he was back at his office “quite early” and “busy all day.”

Many people called. At noon went to the prison [of Saint-Lazare] to see the poor German women. I found seventy-four of them imprisoned for no offense except being Germans. … I have made arrangements to have them all released tomorrow and shall have them cared for till the siege is over.

Pressure on him to get people out of Paris grew greater. Under the new government of Paris, the Government of National Defense, General Louis Trochu was at its head, and Jules Favre served as minister of foreign affairs. Trochu refused to permit anyone to leave the city for any reason for fear of a demoralizing effect on the army.

“But Washburne,” wrote Wickham Hoffman, “was not a man to sit down quietly under a refusal in a matter like this.” He went directly to Trochu’s headquarters at the Louvre and after an “interminable gabble” of three hours, in which Jules Favre also took part, Trochu relented. So on October 27 a caravan of nineteen carriages piled high with baggage departed from the city under military escort carrying forty-eight Americans—men, women, and children—and twenty-one others with passes provided by Minister Washburne.

He had wanted to ride with them as far as the German lines and see them safely delivered, but was suffering “the ague” still and, he had to confess, “a little depression of spirits” from so long a separation from his family. Instead, he sent Hoffman and his son Gratiot.

“We drove to the French outposts, and thence sent forward the flag with an officer of Trochu’s staff,” wrote Hoffman.

While we waited, a German picket of six men advanced toward us, dodging behind the trees, muskets cocked, and fingers
on trigger. I confess I was not much impressed with this specimen of German scouting. It looked too much like playing at North American Indian. … The necessary arrangements having been made, we proceeded to the German outposts. Here the Prussian officers verified the list, calling the roll name by name, and taking every precaution to identify the individuals. I heard afterward, however, that a Frenchman of some prominence had escaped disguised as a coachman.

The Americans now remaining in Paris numbered no more than 150.

On October 31, Trochu’s army launched another attack on the Germans, this time at the village of Le Bourget, in an attempt to enlarge the perimeter of Paris. The attack seemed to have succeeded at first and in Paris was immediately proclaimed a resounding victory. But then it turned out to be a horrendous failure.

That same day, to compound the shock of disappointment, came official word that at the French stronghold of Metz, east of Paris, which had been holding out until now, a French army of over 170,000 men had surrendered. To make matters inconceivably worse, rumors spread that at the Hôtel de Ville that morning Trochu and his Government of National Defense were secretly discussing the surrender of Paris.

It was Halloween, and as Washburne wrote in his diary, events “marched with gigantic strides.”

A shouting crowd of workers and citizen soldiers marched on the Hôtel de Ville—angry over any talk of an armistice and determined to save Paris. Washburne was busy all day at the legation, but his friend Nathan Sheppard joined the throngs who converged to see what was happening. “People, and people, and people hurrying to the Hôtel de Ville,” Sheppard wrote, “… ten thousand, fifteen thousand … packing all the vast open space before the palace, and all the streets emptying into it.”

Women with big feet and ankles of prodigious circumference; maidservants in their clean white caps; boys as frolicsome as
only boys can be, playing hide-and-seek among the forest of legs, followed by small dogs in full bark; old men, who totter as they hasten. … Mobiles and Nationals in half uniform and full uniform, full-armed and half-armed—in they pour and here they gather, and shout, and squeeze, and sway. …

Placards and banners proclaimed
NO ARMISTICE! RESISTANCE TO DEATH! VIVE LA RéPUBLIQUE, VIVE LA COMMUNE.

A tall well-bred-looking gentleman, in officer’s undress uniform, ventures to deplore such factious behavior, and looks down haughtily on the ruffians who hustle up around him with menacing faces and fingers. But he folds his arms and continues to look formidable to his tormentors, who gradually skulk before his cool disdainful eye. …

Delegations wedge their way through to the iron gates [of the Hôtel]. … The clock over the entrance chimes the quarter-hour. The pleasant melody is sadly out of keeping with the angry and vindictive shouts. … The gates come open. The crowd pours in. … There is a parley with the sentinels, who give way. Shots are fired, by whom, at whom, no one knows. … Ten thousand people run hither and thither crying, “To arms! To arms! They are attacking the Government. They are firing on the people.” Now a spectacle of panic, stampede, and lunacy such as only Paris can furnish.

Inside the Hôtel de Ville, the insurgent “Red Paris” seized control of the government. On hearing what was happening, Washburne left the legation and reached the Hôtel de Ville at about six o’clock. Forcing his way through the crowd, he succeeded in getting inside the Hôtel only to find mostly National Guard soldiers wandering about carrying their muskets upside down, the sign of peace. “They all seemed to regard the revolution as an accomplished fact, which was only to be ratified by a vote of the people of Paris.” So Washburne departed, thinking “a genuine Red
Republic” was a
fait accompli.
“God only knows what is yet in store for this unhappy country,” he wrote that night in his diary.

But the uprising melted away as rapidly as it began. By the next day Trochu and the Government of National Defense were back in place. “What a city!” concluded Washburne. “One moment revolution, and the next the most profound calm!”

To add to his troubles, more and more British citizens were descending on him, “perfectly raving” to have learned that through his efforts so many Americans had slipped out of Paris while they were left behind. But by this time Bismarck had informed Washburne there would be no further passports granted to anyone. The exit door was closed.

The rumble of distant cannon remained an everyday presence. Wounded soldiers kept arriving at the city’s hospitals and the American Ambulance, a field hospital. There was much talk of holding out at all costs and “dying to the last man”; still, overall the adjustment of the populace remained surprisingly, admirably smooth.

The great majority of the people believed the defenses of the city were impregnable, and in Washburne’s opinion, they had reason to feel secure. He had made several tours of miles of the outer defenses, and was amazed. He had seen many forts and immense earthworks during the Civil War, but these were “a prodigy of strength and wonder,” he recorded. “Indeed, the defenses all round the city present a spectacle without parallel in the whole world.” The entire defense circle was manned by troops of the regular army, and by French sailors who were in charge of the cannon. Washburne could conceive of nothing “so complete.” “I do not see for the life of me, how the city can be taken by assault.”

Though all private building construction had been halted in the city in order to concentrate on defenses, there was no shortage of work. Small shops were busier than ever making war materials. Department stores, theaters, hotels, and public buildings had been turned into hospitals. Flags of the Red Cross flew from the rooftops of the Grand Hôtel, the
Comédie Française, the Palais Royal, and the Palais de Justice. Architect Charles Garnier’s still-uncompleted Opera House served as a military supply depot. The Orléans railroad station had been converted into a balloon factory.