The Debacle - Emile Zola [268]
‘Look,’ Otto pointed out, ‘that black hump standing out against the red background is Montmartre… On the left there’s nothing burning so far at La Villette or Belleville. The fire must have been started in the rich neighbourhoods, and it’s gaining ground, gaining ground… Just look over there to the right, that’s a new fire being started! You can see the flames, a fountain of flames with fiery smoke rising… And others, still others, everywhere!’
He was not shouting or getting excited, but the outrageousness of his quiet joy terrified Henriette. Oh, these Prussians who could watch this! She felt the insult of his calm, faint smile, as though he had foreseen this unparalleled disaster and had been waiting for it for a long time. At last Paris was burning down, Paris where German shells had only succeeded in knocking off a few gutters. All his rancour was satisfied and he seemed avenged for the endless siege, the terrible cold and the ever renewed difficulties which still rankled with Germany. In the triumph of their pride the conquered provinces, the indemnity of five milliards, none of it was as good as this spectacle of Paris destroyed, gone raving mad and setting fire to herself and going up in smoke on this clear spring night.
‘Oh, it was bound to come!’ he went on almost in a whisper. ‘A grand piece of work!’
As she took in the immensity of the disaster Henriette felt more and more sick at heart until the pain was unbearable. For a few minutes her own misfortunes vanished, carried away in this expiation of a whole nation. The thought of fire devouring human lives, the sight of this blazing city on the horizon, throwing up the hellish glare of cities accursed and destroyed, made her cry out in spite of herself. She clasped her hands together and asked:
‘What have we done, oh God, to be punished like this?’
But Otto at once raised his arm as though delivering a reproof. He was about to speak with the vehemence of that cold, hard, militaristic Protestantism that can always quote verses of the Bible. But he caught the young woman’s beautiful, clear and reasonable eyes, and one glance stopped him. In any case his gesture had been enough, it had expressed his racial hatred and his conviction that he was in France as a judge sent by the Lord of Hosts to chastise a perverse people. Paris was burning as a punishment for centuries of wickedness, for the long tale of its crimes and debauches. Once again the Germanic tribes would save the world and sweep away the last remains of Latin corruption.
He dropped his arm and merely said:
‘It’s all over… Another district is catching fire, see, that fire over there, further to the left… You can see that big streak spreading like a river of glowing embers.’
They said no more, and there was a terrified silence. And indeed sudden new bursts of flame were continually rising, filling the sky like a furnace overflowing. Every minute the sea of fire went on broadening to infinity like an incandescent tide from which there were now going up columns of smoke that gathered together above the city into an immense dark copper-coloured cloud. A light wind must be blowing it, for it was slowly moving away through the black night, filling the vault of heaven with its foul rain of ash and soot.
With a jerk Henriette seemed to come back out of a nightmare and, overcome once more with anguish at the thought of her brother, she implored him yet again.
‘So you can’t do anything for him, and won’t help me to get into Paris?’
Once again Otto seemed to sweep the horizon with a wave of the arm.
‘What’s the use, because by tomorrow there won’t be anything left but rubble?’
That was all, and she walked down from the footbridge without even saying good-bye, and ran off, holding her little case. But he stayed up there a long time, slender and motionless, tightly buttoned in his uniform, lost in the night and letting his eyes drink their fill of this monstrous spectacle of Babylon in flames.
As Henriette was leaving the station she was lucky enough to come upon a heavily-built lady bargaining