The Debacle - Emile Zola [264]
The next day, the 23rd, a springlike Tuesday with bright, warm sun, was a terrible one for Maurice. The few hundred Federals to whom he was attached, among whom were men from several battalions, were still occupying all the area between the river and the rue Saint-Dominique. But most of them had bivouacked in the rue de Lille, in the gardens of the great private mansions in that neighbourhood. He had slept soundly on a lawn at the side of the Palace of the Legion of Honour. First thing in the morning he thought that the troops would sally forth from the Legislative Assembly and push them back behind the strong barricades of the rue du Bac. But hours went by and no attack came. Only a few random shots were exchanged between one end of the street and the other. This was the Versailles plan being developed in a prudent progression: a clear determination not to run head on into the formidable fortress that the insurgents had made out of the terrace of the Tuileries, but to adopt a double thrust to left and right, following the fortifications, so as to take first Montmartre and the Observatory and then turn back and enmesh the central area in an enormous net. At about two Maurice heard that the tricolour flag
was flying over Montmartre: the great battery of the Moulin de la Galette had been attacked by three army corps at once, who had flung their battalions at the hill from the north and west via the rue Lepic, rue des Saules and rue du Mont-Cenis, and then the victors had turned down into Paris, carrying by storm the Place Saint-Georges, Notre-Dame de Lorette, the town hall in the rue Drouot and the new Opera House, while on the left bank a wheeling movement from the Montparnasse cemetery reached the Place d’Enfer and the Marché aux Chevaux. The news of such a rapid advance of the army filled them with bewilderment, rage and fear. What! Montmartre taken in two hours, Montmartre, the glorious, impregnable citadel of the insurrection! Maurice noticed that the ranks were thinning, trembling comrades were quietly slipping away to wash their hands and put on their overalls, in terror of reprisals. It was being said that they would be taken in the rear via La Croix-Rouge, where an attack was being prepared. Already the barricades in the rue Martignac and the rue de Bellechasse had fallen, and red
trousers were being seen at the end of the rue de Lille. Soon the only ones left were the convinced diehards, Maurice and some fifty others, who were determined to die after killing as many as possible of this Versailles lot who treated the Federals as bandits and shot prisoners behind the battle-line. Since the previous day the implacable hatred had intensified, and it was now a matter of extermination between these insurgents dying for their vision and this army in a white heat of reactionary passion and exasperated at still having to fight.
By five, as Maurice and his comrades were definitely withdrawing behind the barricades in the rue du Bac, going down the rue de Lille from doorway to doorway firing the while, he suddenly saw a lot of black smoke coming out of a window of the Palace of the Legion of Honour. It was the first case of incendiarism in Paris, and in his state of wild rage it filled him with fierce joy. The hour had struck, let the whole city go up in flames like a huge bonfire,