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By Root 2019 0

stopped in the courtyard of the Lobau barracks, which was full of death-cries, blood and smoke. At La Roquette two hundred and twenty-seven wretched creatures, rounded up more or less at random, were machine-gunned in a heap, riddled with bullets. In Père-Lachaise, which had been bombarded for four days and finally captured grave by grave, one hundred and forty-eight were thrown against a wall, and the plaster dripped great red tears. Three of them, who were only wounded and escaping, were recaptured and finished off. Of the twelve thousand poor creatures who had lost their lives through the Commune how many harmless people were there for each rogue! It was said that an order to stop the executions had come from Versailles. But the killing went on just the same. Thiers, for all his pure glory as the liberator of the country, was to go down for ever as the legendary butcher of Paris, while Marshal MacMahon, the defeated soldier of Froeschwiller, whose proclamations of victory covered the walls, was henceforward to be nothing but the conqueror of Père-Lachaise. Paris, in the sunshine, was dressed in her Sunday best and in holiday mood, an enormous crowd thronged the recaptured streets, people out for a walk went like jolly sightseers to have a look at the smoking ruins, mothers holding laughing children by the hand paused for a moment and listened with interest to the distant firing in the Lobau barracks.

As Jean went up the dark stairs of the house in the rue des Orties in the evening twilight on that Sunday he felt sick with awful foreboding. He went in and at once saw the inevitable end, Maurice dead on the little bed, choked by the haemorrhage that Bouroche had feared. The sun’s red farewell stole in through the open window and two candles were already burning on the table beside the bed. Henriette, in her widow’s weeds, was on her knees, quietly weeping.

Hearing a noise she looked up and seeing Jean enter shuddered visibly. He, distraught with grief, was on the point of rushing forward and taking her hands to unite his sorrow and hers in an embrace. But he felt her little trembling hands, her whole being chilled and repelled, recoiling, snatching herself away for ever. Was it not all over between them now? Maurice’s grave separated them for ever, like a bottomless abyss. All he too could do was fall on his knees, quietly sobbing.

But after a pause Henriette spoke.

‘My back was turned, and I had a cup of broth in my hand when he cried out… I didn’t even have time to run across the room, he died calling for me and calling for you, too, as he vomited blood…’

Her brother, oh God, her Maurice whom she had worshipped even from their mother’s womb, who was her second self, whom she had brought up and saved! Her only love since she had seen her poor Weiss’s body riddled with bullets against a wall in Bazeilles! So the war was taking her whole heart, and she would be left alone in the world, a lonely widow with no one to love her.

‘Oh my God!’ Jean said in tears. ‘It’s my fault!… My dearest boy, for whom I would have given my life, and I have to slaughter him like some animal… What will become of us? Will you ever forgive me?’

At that moment they looked into each other’s eyes, and they were heartbroken at what at last they could clearly read in them. The past came to life, the secluded room at Remilly in which they had lived such sad, sweet days together. It brought him back to his daydream, unconscious at first and even later never clearly formulated, life down there, marriage, a little house and work on a plot of land that would suffice to keep a family of honest, humble folk. But now it had become a passionate longing, a painful certainty that with a woman like her, so tender, so active, so brave, life might have become a real paradise. She too, who formerly had not even been touched by this dream, though unconsciously giving her heart in perfect purity, now saw plainly and suddenly understood. This eventual marriage was what she herself had wanted, without realizing it. The seed had quickened and imperceptibly grown