The Downfall Part 61

Otto raised his arm in an oratorical att.i.tude. He was on the point of speaking, with the stern, cold-blooded vehemence of the military bigot who has ever a quotation from Holy Writ at his tongue's end, but glancing at the young woman, the look he encountered from her candid, gentle eyes checked him. Besides, his gesture had spoken for him; it told his hatred for the nation, his conviction that he was in France to mete out justice, delegated by the G.o.d of Armies, to chastise a perverse and stiff-necked generation. Paris was burning off there on the horizon in expiation of its centuries of dissolute life, of its heaped-up measure of crime and l.u.s.t. Once again the German race were to be the saviors of the world, were to purge Europe of the remnant of Latin corruption. He let his arm fall to his side and simply said:

"It is the end of all. There is another quartier doomed, for see, a fresh fire has broken out there to the right. In that direction, that line of flame that creeps onward like a stream of lava--"

Neither spoke for a long time; an awed silence rested on them. The great waves of flame continued to ascend, sending up streamers and ribbons of vivid light high into the heavens. Beneath the sea of fire was every moment extending its boundaries, a tossing, stormy, burning ocean, whence now arose dense clouds of smoke that collected over the city in a huge pall of a somber coppery hue, which was wafted slowly athwart the blackness of the night, streaking the vault of heaven with its accursed rain of ashes and of soot.

Henriette started as if awaking from an evil dream, and, the thought of her brother flowing in again upon her mind, once more became a supplicant.

"Can you do nothing for me? won't you a.s.sist me to get to Paris?"

With his former air of unconcern Otto again raised his eyes to the horizon, smiling vaguely.

"What would be the use? since to-morrow morning the city will be a pile of ruins!"

And that was all; she left the bridge, without even bidding him good-by, flying, she knew not whither, with her little satchel, while he remained yet a long time at his post of observation, a motionless figure, rigid and erect, lost in the darkness of the night, feasting his eyes on the spectacle of that Babylon in flames.

Almost the first person that Henriette encountered on emerging from the station was a stout lady who was chaffering with a hackman over his charge for driving her to the Rue Richelieu in Paris, and the young woman pleaded so touchingly, with tears in her eyes, that finally the lady consented to let her occupy a seat in the carriage. The driver, a little swarthy man, whipped up his horse and did not open his lips once during the ride, but the stout lady was extremely loquacious, telling how she had left the city the day but one before after tightly locking and bolting her shop, but had been so imprudent as to leave some valuable papers behind, hidden in a hole in the wall; hence her mind had been occupied by one engrossing thought for the two hours that the city had been burning, how she might return and s.n.a.t.c.h her property from the flames. The sleepy guards at the barrier allowed the carriage to pa.s.s without much difficulty, the worthy lady allaying their scruples with a fib, telling them she was bringing back her niece with her to Paris to a.s.sist in nursing her husband, who had been wounded by the Versaillese.

It was not until they commenced to make their way along the paved streets that they encountered serious obstacles; they were obliged at every moment to turn out in order to avoid the barricades that were erected across the roadway, and when at last they reached the boulevard Poissoniere the driver declared he would go no further. The two women were therefore forced to continue their way on foot, through the Rue du Sentier, the Rue des Jeuneurs, and all the circ.u.mscribing region of the Bourse. As they approached the fortifications the blazing sky had made their way as bright before them as if it had been broad day; now they were surprised by the deserted and tranquil condition of the streets, where the only sound that disturbed the stillness was a dull, distant roar. In the vicinity of the Bourse, however, they were alarmed by the sound of musketry; they slipped along with great caution, hugging the walls. On reaching the Rue Richelieu and finding her shop had not been disturbed, the stout lady was so overjoyed that she insisted on seeing her traveling companion safely housed; they struck through the Rue du Hazard, the Rue Saint-Anne, and finally reached the Rue des Orties.

Some federates, whose battalion was still holding the Rue Saint-Anne, attempted to prevent them from pa.s.sing. It was four o'clock and already quite light when Henriette, exhausted by the fatigue of her long day and the stress of her emotions, reached the old house in the Rue des Orties and found the door standing open. Climbing the dark, narrow staircase, she turned to the left and discovered behind a door a ladder that led upward toward the roof.

Maurice, meantime, behind the barricade in the Rue du Bac, had succeeded in raising himself to his knees, and Jean's heart throbbed with a wild, tumultuous hope, for he believed he had pinned his friend to the earth.

"Oh, my little one, are you alive still? is that great happiness in store for me, brute that I am? Wait a moment, let me see."

He examined the wound with great tenderness by the light of the burning buildings. The bayonet had gone through the right arm near the shoulder, but a more serious part of the business was that it had afterward entered the body between two of the ribs and probably touched the lung.

Still, the wounded man breathed without much apparent difficulty, but the right arm hung useless at his side.

"Poor old boy, don't grieve! We shall have time to say good-by to each other, and it is better thus, you see; I am glad to have done with it all. You have done enough for me to make up for this, for I should have died long ago in some ditch, even as I am dying now, had it not been for you."

But Jean, hearing him speak thus, again gave way to an outburst of violent grief.

"Hush, hus.h.!.+ Twice you saved me from the clutches of the Prussians. We were quits; it was my turn to devote my life, and instead of that I have slain you. Ah, _tonnerre de Dieu!_ I must have been drunk not to recognize you; yes, drunk as a hog from glutting myself with blood."

Tears streamed from his eyes at the recollection of their last parting, down there, at Remilly, when they embraced, asking themselves if they should ever meet again, and how, under what circ.u.mstances of sorrow or of gladness. It was nothing, then, that they had pa.s.sed toilsome days and sleepless nights together, with death staring them in the face? It was to bring them to this abominable thing, to this senseless, atrocious fratricide, that their hearts had been fused in the crucible of those weeks of suffering endured in common? No, no, it could not be; he turned in horror from the thought.

"Let's see what I can do, little one; I must save you."

The first thing to be done was to remove him to a place of safety, for the troops dispatched the wounded Communists wherever they found them.

They were alone, fortunately; there was not a minute to lose. He first ripped the sleeve from wrist to shoulder with his knife, then took off the uniform coat. Some blood flowed; he made haste to bandage the arm securely with strips that he tore from the lining of the garment for the purpose. After that he staunched as well as he could the wound in the side and fastened the injured arm over it, He luckily had a bit of cord in his pocket, which he knotted tightly around the primitive dressing, thus a.s.suring the immobility of the injured parts and preventing hemorrhage.

"Can you walk?"

"Yes, I think so."

But he did not dare to take him through the streets thus, in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves. Remembering to have seen a dead soldier lying in an adjacent street, he hurried off and presently came back with a capote and a _kepi_. He threw the greatcoat over his friend's shoulders and a.s.sisted him to slip his uninjured arm into the left sleeve. Then, when he had put the _kepi_ on his head:

"There, now you are one of us--where are we to go?"

That was the question. His reviving hope and courage were suddenly damped by a horrible uncertainty. Where were they to look for a shelter that gave promise of security? the troops were searching the houses, were shooting every Communist they took with arms in his hands. And in addition to that, neither of them knew a soul in that portion of the city to whom they might apply for succor and refuge; not a place where they might hide their heads.

"The best thing to do would be to go home where I live," said Maurice.

"The house is out of the way; no one will ever think of visiting it. But it is in the Rue des Orties, on the other side of the river."

Jean gave vent to a muttered oath in his irresolution and despair.

"_Nom de Dieu!_ What are we to do?"

It was useless to think of attempting to pa.s.s the Pont Royal, which could not have been more brilliantly illuminated if the noonday sun had been s.h.i.+ning on it. At every moment shots were heard coming from either bank of the river. Besides that, the blazing Tuileries lay directly in their path, and the Louvre, guarded and barricaded, would be an insurmountable obstacle.

"That ends it, then; there's no way open," said Jean, who had spent six months in Paris on his return from the Italian campaign.

An idea suddenly flashed across his brain. There had formerly been a place a little below the Pont Royal where small boats were kept for hire; if the boats were there still they would make the venture.

The route was a long and dangerous one, but they had no choice, and, further, they must act with decision.

"See here, little one, we're going to clear out from here; the locality isn't healthy. I'll manufacture an excuse for my lieutenant; I'll tell him the communards took me prisoner and I got away."

Taking his unhurt arm he sustained him for the short distance they had to traverse along the Rue du Bac, where the tall houses on either hand were now ablaze from cellar to garret, like huge torches. The burning cinders fell on them in showers, the heat was so intense that the hair on their head and face was singed, and when they came out on the _quai_ they stood for a moment dazed and blinded by the terrific light of the conflagrations, rearing their tall crests heavenward, on either side the Seine.

"One wouldn't need a candle to go to bed by here," grumbled Jean, with whose plans the illumination promised to interfere. And it was only when he had helped Maurice down the steps to the left and a little way down stream from the bridge that he felt somewhat easy in mind. There was a clump of tall trees standing on the bank of the stream, whose shadow gave them a measure of security. For near a quarter of an hour the dark forms moving to and fro on the opposite _quai_ kept them in a fever of apprehension. There was firing, a scream was heard, succeeded by a loud splash, and the bosom of the river was disturbed. The bridge was evidently guarded.

"Suppose we pa.s.s the night in that shed?" suggested Maurice, pointing to the wooden structure that served the boatman as an office.

"Yes, and get pinched to-morrow morning!"

Jean was still harboring his idea. He had found quite a flotilla of small boats there, but they were all securely fastened with chains; how was he to get one loose and secure a pair of oars? At last he discovered two oars that had been thrown aside as useless; he succeeded in forcing a padlock, and when he had stowed Maurice away in the bow, shoved off and allowed the boat to drift with the current, cautiously hugging the sh.o.r.e and keeping in the shadow of the bathing-houses. Neither of them spoke a word, horror-stricken as they were by the baleful spectacle that presented itself to their vision. As they floated down the stream and their horizon widened the enormity of the terrible sight increased, and when they reached the bridge of Solferino a single glance sufficed to embrace both the blazing _quais_.

On their left the palace of the Tuileries was burning. It was not yet dark when the Communists had fired the two extremities of the structure, the Pavilion de Flore and the Pavilion de Marsan, and with rapid strides the flames had gained the Pavilion de l'Horloge in the central portion, beneath which, in the Salle des Marechaux, a mine had been prepared by stacking up casks of powder. At that moment the intervening buildings were belching from their shattered windows dense volumes of reddish smoke, streaked with long ribbons of blue flame. The roofs, yawning as does the earth in regions where volcanic agencies prevail, were seamed with great cracks through which the raging sea of fire beneath was visible. But the grandest, saddest spectacle of all was that afforded by the Pavilion de Flore, to which the torch had been earliest applied and which was ablaze from its foundation to its lofty summit, burning with a deep, fierce roar that could be heard far away. The petroleum with which the floors and hangings had been soaked gave the flames an intensity such that the ironwork of the balconies was seen to twist and writhe in the convolutions of a serpent, and the tall monumental chimneys, with their elaborate carvings, glowed with the fervor of live coals.

Then, still on their left, were, first, the Chancellerie of the Legion of Honor, which was fired at five o'clock in the afternoon and had been burning nearly seven hours, and next, the Palace of the Council of State, a huge rectangular structure of stone, which was spouting torrents of fire from every orifice in each of its two colonnaded stories. The four structures surrounding the great central court had all caught at the same moment, and the petroleum, which here also had been distributed by the barrelful, had poured down the four grand staircases at the four corners of the building in rivers of h.e.l.lfire. On the facade that faced the river the black line of the mansard was profiled distinctly against the ruddy sky, amid the red tongues that rose to lick its base, while colonnades, entablatures, friezes, carvings, all stood out with startling vividness in the blinding, s.h.i.+mmering glow. So great was the energy of the fire, so terrible its propulsive force, that the colossal structure was in some sort raised bodily from the earth, trembling and rumbling on its foundations, preserving intact only its four ma.s.sive walls, in the fierce eruption that hurled its heavy zinc roof high in air. Then, close at one side were the d'Orsay barracks, which burned with a flame that seemed to pierce the heavens, so purely white and so unwavering that it was like a tower of light. And finally, back from the river, were still other fires, the seven houses in the Rue du Bac, the twenty-two houses in the Rue de Lille, helping to tinge the sky a deeper crimson, profiling their flames on other flames, in a blood-red ocean that seemed to have no end.

Jean murmured in awed tone:

"Did ever mortal man look on the like of this! the very river is on fire."

Their boat seemed to be sailing on the bosom of an incandescent stream.

As the dancing lights of the mighty conflagrations were caught by the ripples of the current the Seine seemed to be pouring down torrents of living coals; flashes of intensest crimson played fitfully across its surface, the blazing brands fell in showers into the water and were extinguished with a hiss. And ever they floated downward with the tide on the bosom of that blood-red stream, between the blazing palaces on either hand, like wayfarers in some accursed city, doomed to destruction and burning on the banks of a river of molten lava.

"Ah!" exclaimed Maurice, with a fresh access of madness at the sight of the havoc he had longed for, "let it burn, let it all go up in smoke!"

But Jean silenced him with a terrified gesture, as if he feared such blasphemy might bring them evil. Where could a young man whom he loved so fondly, so delicately nurtured, so well informed, have picked up such ideas? And he applied himself more vigorously to the oars, for they had now pa.s.sed the bridge of Solferino and were come out into a wide open s.p.a.ce of water. The light was so intense that the river was illuminated as by the noonday sun when it stands vertically above men's heads and casts no shadow. The most minute objects, such as the eddies in the stream, the stones piled on the banks, the small trees along the _quais_, stood out before their vision with wonderful distinctness. The bridges, too, were particularly noticeable in their dazzling whiteness, and so clearly defined that they could have counted every stone; they had the appearance of narrow gangways thrown across the fiery stream to connect one conflagration with the other. Amid the roar of the flames and the general clamor a loud crash occasionally announced the fall of some stately edifice. Dense clouds of soot hung in the air and settled everywhere, the wind brought odors of pestilence on its wings. And another horror was that Paris, those more distant quarters of the city that lay back from the banks of the Seine, had ceased to exist for them. To right and left of the conflagration that raged with such fierce resplendency was an unfathomable gulf of blackness; all that presented itself to their strained gaze was a vast waste of shadow, an empty void, as if the devouring element had reached the utmost limits of the city and all Paris were swallowed up in everlasting night. And the heavens, too, were dead and lifeless; the flames rose so high that they extinguished the stars.

Maurice, who was becoming delirious, laughed wildly.

"High carnival at the Consoil d'Etat and at the Tuileries to-night! They have illuminated the facades, women are dancing beneath the sparkling chandeliers. Ah, dance, dance and be merry, in your smoking petticoats, with your chignons ablaze--"

And he drew a picture of the feasts of Sodom and Gomorrah, the music, the lights, the flowers, the unmentionable orgies of l.u.s.t and drunkenness, until the candles on the walls blushed at the shamelessness of the display and fired the palaces that sheltered such depravity.

Suddenly there was a terrific explosion. The fire, approaching from either extremity of the Tuileries, had reached the Salle des Marechaux, the casks of powder caught, the Pavilion de l'Horloge was blown into the air with the violence of a powder mill. A column of flame mounted high in the heavens, and spreading, expanded in a great fiery plume on the inky blackness of the sky, the crowning display of the horrid _fete_.

"Bravo!" exclaimed Maurice, as at the end of the play, when the lights are extinguished and darkness settles on the stage.