The Debacle - Emile Zola [267]
‘All out, train stops here… Paris on fire, Paris on fire…’
Distracted, Henriette rushed along with her little case, asking for information. Fighting had been going on inside Paris for two days, the railway was cut, and the Prussians were keeping the situation under observation. But still she wanted to get through, and noticing on the platform the officer in command of the company occupying the station, she ran up to him.
‘Sir, I am joining my brother and I am terribly worried about him. Do please help me to continue my journey.’
Then she stopped in amazement, recognizing the captain whose face was lit up by the gas-lamp.
‘Otto, it’s you!… Oh, do be kind to me now that chance has once again brought us face to face.’
Otto Gunther, Weiss’s cousin, was still smartly dressed in the tight-fitting uniform of a captain in the Prussian Guard, with the tight-lipped air of a fine, well-groomed officer. He did not recognize this thin, delicate-looking woman with her fair hair and pretty, sweet face under the widow’s veil. It was only her clear serious eyes that made him remember her. He merely made a little gesture.
‘You know I have a brother who is a soldier,’ Henriette hurriedly went on. ‘He has stayed in Paris and I’m afraid he has got caught up in all this horrible fighting… Otto, I beg of you, help me to continue my journey.’
Only then did he speak.
‘But I assure you there is nothing I can do… The trains have not been running since yesterday and I think they’ve taken up the rails near the ramparts. And I haven’t a carriage or a horse or a man to take you.’
She stared at him and in her bitterness at finding him so callous and determined not to come to her aid she could only find disconnected words:
‘Oh God, you won’t do anything… Oh God, who can I ask?’
These Prussians, who were the absolute masters, who at a single word could have turned the place upside down, commandeered a hundred vehicles, got a thousand horses out of stables! And he was refusing with the haughty air of a conqueror whose principle was never to interfere with the affairs of the beaten natives, no doubt considering them unclean and likely to soil his nice new glory!
‘Anyhow,’ she went on, trying to recover her self-control, ‘you must at least know what is going on, and surely you can tell me.’
He smiled a thin, almost imperceptible smile.
‘Paris is burning… come here and have a look, you can see plainly.’
He walked in front of her, out of the station and along the track for about a hundred metres, as far as an iron footbridge across the line. When they had climbed up the narrow steps and were on the top and leaning over the handrail, the vast level plain could be seen beyond an embankment.
‘You can see, Paris is burning.’
It must have been about half past nine. The red glow in the sky was still spreading. In the east the flight of little bloodstained clouds had gone and the vault was simply a wall of ink on which distant flames were reflected. Now the whole line of the horizon was ablaze, but in certain places more intense fires could be seen, bright red fountains playing continuously against the dark background of the great billows of smoke. It looked as though the fires themselves were on the move like some gigantic forest with the flames leaping from tree to tree, or as though the earth itself was about to flare up, kindled by the colossal