The Debacle - Emile Zola [258]
Two more weeks went by. Maurice had given up trying to know how his life was carrying on under the shadow of the indefinable, monstrous thing he felt was coming. Peace was officially concluded, and the Assembly was to meet in Versailles on 20 March, and still for him nothing was yet over, and some dreadful vengeance was about to begin. On the 18th, as he was getting up, he had a letter from Henriette once again begging him to join her at Remilly, affectionately threatening to set out herself if he took too long to give her that great joy. She went on to news about Jean, how after leaving her at the end of December to join the army in the north he had been taken ill with some sort of fever in a Belgian hospital, and only the previous week he had written that although he still felt very weak he was off to Paris where he was determined to re-enlist. Henriette ended by asking her brother to tell her everything about Jean as soon as he saw him. With the letter open in front of him Maurice fell into a sentimental daydream. Henriette and Jean, his beloved sister and his brother in suffering and compassion, how far removed those dear souls had been from his everyday thoughts since the tempest had dwelt within him! But as his sister told him she had not been able to give Jean the rue des Orties address, he promised himself that he would run him to earth that very day by inquiring at the army offices. But scarcely had he gone down and was crossing the rue Saint-Honoré, when two comrades from his battalion told him of the events of the night and morning in Montmartre. And all three dashed off in a frenzy.
What a day that 18 March was, and how it lifted his heart into a fateful elation! He could never remember later exactly what he had said and done. First he recalled that he had rushed off in a furious rage at the surprise action the military had attempted before daylight, to disarm Paris by getting the guns away again from Montmartre. It was obvious that Thiers, who had returned from Bordeaux, had been planning this coup so that the Assembly could safely proclaim a monarchy at Versailles. His next recollection was that he was in Montmartre himself at about nine in the morning, inflamed by the tales of victory he was told – the furtive arrival of the troops, the fortunate hold-up in the arrival of the drag-ropes which had given time for the National Guards to get their arms, and the soldiers not daring to shoot women and children, but holding their rifles upside down and fraternizing with the people. Then he saw himself hurrying through Paris, realizing by midday that Paris belonged to the Commune without there having been a fight, that Thiers and his cabinet were in flight from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where they had been assembled, in fact that the whole government was running away to Versailles and the thirty thousand soldiers were being hastily withdrawn, leaving over five thousand of their number lying in the streets. Then again, at half past five, he saw himself at a bend in the outer boulevards in the middle of a group of hotheads, listening without any indignation to the horrible story of the murder of Generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas. Oh well, what are generals? He recalled them at Sedan, a comfort-loving, incompetent lot, one more or less didn’t make much difference! The rest of that day went on in the same state of frenzied excitement that distorted everything, an insurrection that the very paving-stones seemed to have willed and which, unforeseen yet inevitable, grew and at a stroke found it had the mastery, eventually handing the Hôtel de Ville over to the members of the Central Committee, who were astonished to find themselves there.
Yet there was one memory that stayed quite clear in