The Debacle - Emile Zola [262]
When Maurice threw himself into this mad dream he was really doing so out of a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction with the Commune itself. He was losing all faith in mankind, and he felt that the Commune was impotent, being torn asunder by too many contradictory elements, getting more frenzied, incoherent and stupid as it was increasingly threatened. It had not been able to carry out a single one of all the social reforms it had promised, and it was already certain that it would leave no lasting achievement behind. But its great weakness came especially from the rivalries that tore it apart, and the corrosive suspicion in which every one of its members lived. Already many of them, the moderate and those who were worried, were absenting themselves from meetings. Others acted under the lash of events, trembled at the prospect of a possible dictatorship and were reaching the stage at which groups in revolutionary assemblies exterminate each other to save the country. After Cluseret and Dombrowski, Rossel was going to be suspected. Delescluze, nominated civil delegate to the fighting forces, could do nothing on his own in spite of his great authority. The great social effort that had been envisaged was being frittered away and coming to nought in the isolation, increasing hour by hour, of these men, paralysed and reduced to desperate measures.
Inside Paris the terror was mounting. Paris, at first angry with Versailles and resenting the sufferings of the siege, was now turning against the Commune itself. Compulsory enrolment, the decree calling up all men under forty, had annoyed peaceloving people and provoked a mass exodus – they got away via Saint-Denis in disguise or with forged Alsatian papers, they let themselves down with ropes and ladders into the moat beyond the fortifications on dark nights. Well-to-do bourgeois had gone long ago. No factory or works had reopened its doors. No commerce, no work, and the idle existence went on in anxious expectation of the inevitable dénouement. People still had nothing to live on beyond their pay as National Guards, the one-franc-fifty now being paid out of the millions confiscated from the Bank of France, the one-franc-fifty for which alone many were now fighting, in fact one of the basic causes and the raison d’être of the insurrection. Whole neighbourhoods were empty, shops were shut, houses dead. In the beautiful sunshine of this wonderful month of May nothing could now be seen in the deserted streets but funerals of Federals killed in action, processions with no priest, coffins covered with red flags followed by crowds holding bunches of everlasting flowers. Closed churches were being turned every evening into clubrooms. Only revolutionary newspapers appeared – all the others had been banned. In fact Paris was destroyed, that great, unhappy Paris that retained the feeling of revulsion of a traditionally republican capital for the Assembly, but in which the Communist terror was now growing, a terror it was impatient to be free of amidst all the terrible stories going round of daily arrests of hostages and of barrels of explosive lowered into the sewers where, it was said, men were always ready with torches, waiting for the signal.
Then Maurice, who had never been a drinker, found himself drawn into the general outbreak of drunkenness and lost in it. Now, when he was on duty at some advanced position or spending the night in the guard-room, he would accept a tot of brandy. If he had a second one he would get worked up in the alcoholic mists