The Debacle - Emile Zola [272]
Maurice, now in the delirium of fever, gave vent to the cackle of a madman.
‘Lovely party going on at the Conseil d’Etat and the Tuileries… the outside all illuminated, lustres all glittering, women dancing… Go on, dance in your smoking petticoats and flaming hair!’
With his good arm he sketched visions of the galas in Sodom and Gomorrah, with music, flowers and unnatural orgies, palaces bursting with such debaucheries, the disgusting nudities illuminated with such a riot of candles that they themselves were set on fire. Then there was a fearful crash. The fire in the Tuileries had worked its way along from both ends and reached the Salle des Maréchaux. The barrels of gunpowder had caught and the Pavillon de l’Horloge went up like an exploding magazine. An immense fountain of fire rose like a plume and filled the black sky – the final set-piece of the gruesome fête.
‘Hurrah for the dance!’ screamed Maurice, as though at the end of a show when everything falls back into darkness.
Jean was almost speechless and in disjointed words begged him to stop. No, no, one mustn’t wish for evil! If it meant total destruction wouldn’t they perish as well? He had only one urgent job, to land and get away from this awful sight. All the same he was prudent enough to go past the Concorde bridge so as not to leave the boat until the towpath below the Quai de la Conférence, beyond the bend in the Seine. Yet at that critical moment, instead of just letting the boat drift away he lost several minutes mooring it safely, with his instinctive respect for other people’s property. His plan was to reach the rue des Orties by way of the Place de la Concorde and the rue Saint-Honoré. Having sat Maurice down on the towpath he went up the steps to the roadway alone, and once again he was very worried when he realized what difficulty they would have in getting past the obstacles piled up there. For this was the impregnable fortress of the Commune, the Tuileries terrace fortified with guns and the rue Royale, rue Saint-Florentin and rue de Rivoli blocked by high barricades strongly constructed. This explained the tactics of the Versailles army, whose lines that night formed a huge concave angle with its apex at the Place de la Concorde and one extremity, the one on the right bank, at the goods yard of the Northern Railway and the other, on the left bank, at a bastion of the fortifications near the Arcueil gate. But it would soon be daybreak, the Communards had evacuated the Tuileries and the barricades, and the troops had just taken over the area, amid still more fires – twelve more houses that had been burning since nine at the intersection of the rue Saint-Honoré and the rue Royale.
When Jean came down again from the embankment he found Maurice dozing as though he had relapsed into lethargy after the crisis of over-excitement.
‘It’s not going to be easy… Anyway, can you walk a bit further, kid?’
‘Yes, yes, don’t you worry. I shall get there somehow, dead or alive.’
His worst trouble was to climb the stone steps. Once up on the embankment he moved along slowly on Jean’s arm, like a sleepwalker. Although the day was not yet dawning the light from the fires near-by threw a livid dawn over the huge square. They crossed its empty spaces, their hearts aching at this dreary devastation. At the two extremities, beyond the bridge and at the further end of the rue Royale, they could just make out the phantom shapes of the Palais-Bourbon and the Madeleine, damaged by gunfire. The terrace of the Tuileries, which had been battered in forcing