The Debacle - Emile Zola [276]
Giving in to his nervous excitement Maurice kept questioning Jean and trying to find out things. Jean did not tell him everything, avoiding the blind hatred rising against the expiring Commune now that Paris was free again. It was already Wednesday. Since Sunday evening, that is for two whole days, the residents had been living in cellars sweating with terror, and on the Wednesday morning when they had been able to venture out, the sight of dug-up streets, ruins, blood and above all the terrible fires, had filled them with a terrible lust for vengeance. The reprisals were going to be tremendous. Houses were being searched and crowds of men and women suspects were being chucked in front of summary firing squads. By six in the evening of that day the Versailles army was in control of half Paris, from the Montsouris park to the Gare du Nord, including the main arteries. The last members of the Commune, a score or so of them, had had to take refuge in the town hall of the XIth arrondissement in the Boulevard Voltaire.
There was a silence, and then Maurice, gazing at the distant city through the window thrown open on that warm night, murmured:
‘Well, it’s still going on, Paris is burning!’
It was true; the flames had returned with the end of daylight, and once again the sky was glowing with a murderous, bloody light. That afternoon, when the powder magazine at the Luxembourg had blown up with a terrible noise, it had been rumoured that the Pantheon had collapsed into the crypt. All day long the previous day’s fires in the Conseil d’Etat and the Tuileries had gone on burning, and the Finance Ministry still belched forth thick black smoke. Ten times she had had to shut the window because of the threat of a swarm of black butterflies, bits of burnt paper incessantly flying about, having been lifted high into the air by the heat of the fire, whence they came down like gentle rain. The whole of Paris was covered with them and some were picked up even in Normandy, twenty leagues away. And now it was not only the western and southern districts that were burning – the buildings in the rue Royale, the Croix-Rouge crossroads and the rue Notre-Dame des Champs. All the east of the city seemed to be in flames, and the immense furnace of the Hôtel de Ville filled the horizon with one gigantic blaze. In that direction too, like flaming torches, were the Théâtre Lyrique and the town hall of the IVth arrondissement, more than thirty houses in adjoining streets, to say nothing of the Porte-Saint-Martin theatre further north, glowing red in isolation like a haystack in the middle of black fields. Private revenges were being carried out, and perhaps also criminal elements calculated that by persisting they could destroy certain dossiers. It was no longer a matter of self-defence or holding up victorious troops by fire. Hysteria reigned supreme, and the Palais de Justice, the Hôtel-Dieu, the cathedral of Notre-Dame had only been saved by sheer chance. It was destruction for destruction’s sake so as to bury the ancient, rotten human society beneath the ashes of the world in the hope that a new society would spring up, happy and innocent, in the earthly paradise of primitive legends!
‘Oh war, vile war!’ whispered Henriette, looking at this city of ruin, destruction and death.
Wasn’t this in fact the final, inevitable act, the blood-lust that had come into being in the disastrous fields of Sedan and Metz, the epidemic of destruction born in the siege of Paris, the final paroxysm of a nation in danger of death amidst all this slaughter and wreckage?
But Maurice, still gazing at the areas burning out there, said haltingly and with difficulty:
‘No, no, don’t curse war… War is a good thing, it is doing its work…’
Jean cut him short with a cry of hatred and remorse.
‘Oh my God, when I see you there, and it is all my fault… Don’t defend war, it’s a vile thing.’
The sick man vaguely waved his hand.