Werewolf of Paris (34 page)

Nevertheless, the burning was carried out with a certain amount of planning. Since the men were needed at the barricades, women were enlisted for the job. They were provided with petroleum and with torches that were formerly part of the equipment of the policemen. The job was a dangerous one, but many volunteered for it, some attracted by the ten francs a day which was the pay allotted. Of such was Épouse Jean Robert, wife of the coachman Jean Robert, who worked in the company of her two little children (two left of five), whom she could not well leave behind. Now that she was earning money, her children each held a fat cut of cervelat and nibbled on it. They had starved for months and now for once they were no longer hungry. And though their bellies rebelled against more food, they couldn't keep their teeth from wanting the feel of food again and again, as if to reassure themselves that this was true.

Others joined because they were enraged at Versailles. Their husbands had been killed, or some other great loss had struck them, and they were anxious now to deal a blow no matter how or where, but preferably against the rich, their permanent oppressors. “These things we can never have, these great mansions, these halls of fine furniture,” they said, “let us burn them! They shan't have them either!”

And Sophie? She joined because she wanted to die. She joined because she itched to go mad. She joinedbecause those of Versailles, whom she had so often aided by her information, had betrayed her Bertrand and killed him on the barricades; yes, and if only she could have been fully certain that he was dead, if she could have seen his body, she would have killed herself at once, too.

Aymar, during these terrible days, kept as much to his rooms as possible. Still he could not restrain himself at times from going out to have a look at things. He used to go up the Boulevard des Batignolles to a place where one could get a good look at Paris. A number of people used to meet there. They would watch the great fires which in the twilight changed from black and white photographs to colored lithographs. The dun smoke first took on red and orange glows and then, when night was complete, disappeared completely and one saw only flames and sparks.

The people would guess what was burning. From the distance it was hard to say. The Tuileries, the Louvre, the Palace of Justice, the Hall of Accounts, the palace of the Legion of Honor, the Palais-Royal, etc., etc. The heat of the conflagration was such that it reached out to quarters that were still being defended. There was fire at the Chateau d'Eau, fire at the Boulevard Voltaire, fire at the Grenier d'Abondance. The Seine, already red with blood, rolled through Paris like a dragon with fiery reflecting scales. Straws from the granary, papers from the records, flew burning through the air.

As the soldiers of Versailles took new positions, they organized fire squads and were assisted by the fire department which the Communards had prevented from functioning as long as they remained in charge of these districts.

While the great bulk of the city was soon in the hands of the Versaillists, the Communards still held on to a number of positions, the town hall of the 11th ward, Belleville, the Buttes Chaumont, etc.

During the night of May 27-28, the last fierce fighting took place. A terrible guerrilla retreat of the Fédérés, from tombstone to tombstone in Pére-Lachaise. Finally, a last remnant of 128 of the Communards were forced against a wall and shot. When the sun rose on the 28th, Pentecostal Sunday, the civil war was over, except for a house here and there from which still came stray shots fired haphazardly, and except for a single barricade on rue Romponneau where a lone Communard planted a red flag, and defended his position for a short time. He fled; the red flag was torn down and the tricolor hoisted.

On the other side, the side of the Versaillists who by their victory became the legitimists, the cruelty had not been any less; on the contrary, though lightly passed over by historians, their deeds were vastly more impressive.

Why drag eighty wounded men out of their beds in the hospital improvised at Saint-Sulpice and shoot them to a death which many were headed for anyhow? Why shoot the attendant doctor, Faneau, along with them, his only guilt the crime of staying to care for them?

Line them up and shoot them! At the market of Place Maubert, in the courtyard of Cluny at rue Charonne, at rue Brézin. The corpses thrown into ditches, not in small numbers, at the most fifty, as the Communards had done. That was picayune. No, in hundreds.

Then order was introduced. The rule went out: no more killings. Prisoners must be court-martialed. And they were court-martialed. The speed of killing was slightly reduced. For the courts at least took the formality of marking down names. But few escaped. For the interrogatory was brisk. No witnesses, no defense. A couple of questions and off went another group of wretches to a convenient wall.

Mistakes? Well, of course, considering the haste. Vuillaume was shot by two different squads; actually he escaped to write his famous books. Who were the two shot in his stead? Délion wrote: “I saw him perish. His demeanor was most cowardly. He could scarcely talk for rage.” How well one can understand that cowardice and that rage. Courbet, one reads elsewhere, was shot after identification. Who was that? And what was the nature of the identification?

The paper
Gaulois
came out with the story. “They arrested Billioray at Grenelle. He defended himself, writhed on the ground, begged for mercy. He was done to death where he lay.” In another district, someone cried: “There goes Billioray.” At once the man in question was arrested. He denied his identity vigorously. Brought before Captain Garcin, he still persisted in his denial, but a dozen witnesses were ready to swear to it. Captain Garcin asked: “Do you still deny—”

“Yes, yes!” the man screamed wildly. The whole matter was done so quickly that only a few seconds passed before the fellow was lying mortally wounded in a pool of blood. It was then, albeit a little late, that someone searched his pockets. Letters showed that he was a draper's assistant named Constant, who had had nothing to do with the Commune. But he was so badly wounded then that it was deemed advisable to finish him off.

Who was the man at Point-du-Jour who was also executed as Billioray? The real Billioray was arrested a week later and subsequently condemned to prison for life.

A Dutch traveler, unable to express himself well in French, was brought before the court-martial established at Le Châtelet. The large sums of money on his person were considered proof that he was an important Communard about to escape beyond the frontier. He was executed at the caserne of Lobau.

Varlin was executed on that Pentecostal Sunday. Arrested and tried and shot in as many minutes. So great was the crowd that the firing squad was unable to handle their rifles properly. The man remained standing. A second volley. He fell. And the crowd clapped their hands.

Aymar made no effort to escape. He walked about and saw and felt a strange exultation. “Burn!” he cried within himself at the fiery flames that leaped to the sky. “Kill!” he shouted to himself when the men lined up in front of a wall dropped to the rattle of musketry.

“I was not so wrong,” he thought, and derived a curious joy from the violence raging about him. He wanted it worse. He wanted the whole world to go up in flames and blood. It wasn't worthy of being anyhow. “Rise up! Danton! Marat! Robespierre! Why aren't you here to see that the job is done right?”

Aymar soon discovered that he was talking nonsense. The Commune shot fifty-seven from the prison of La Roquette. Versailles retaliated with nineteen hundred. To that comparison add this one. The whole famons Reign of Terror in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists executed 20,000 before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficiency of guillotine and modern rifle, or the comparative cruelty of upper and lower class mobs?

Bertrand, it now seemed to Aymar, was but a mild case. What was a werewolf who had killed a couple of prostitutes, who had dug up a few corpses, compared with these bands of tigers slashing at each other with daily increasing ferocity! “And there'll be worse,” he said, and again he had that marvelous rising of the heart. Instead of thousands, future ages will kill millions. It will go on, the figures will rise and the process will accelerate! Hurrah for the race of werewolves!

He was thinking such things and exulting one day as he walked through the streets of the city. The executions were now over. Only arrests were being made. Bands of soldiers and police were systematically ransacking every home. Every suspect was arrested at once. The least suspicion was enough. A mailman denounced a family because it received more than its usual mail. The grocer denounced another because it bought an extra sausage. So-and-so was taken in because he didn't answer quickly enough. Another because he walked too fast, or else too slow. No reason was too insane to provoke an arrest. No excuse too slight for suspicion. In three weeks the police received 379,523 anonymous letters of denunciation.

Such events, such sights and thoughts, raised not only pity in Aymar's heart, but also a wild sense of satisfaction. The grand and delightful balm of “I told you so.” This was, after all, the proof of the pudding. See those soldiers busy clearing the streets of cadavers? See those corpses being tossed into a foundation that had been prepared for the erection of a school? Or perhaps for a church, or for the building of a house in which more families of werewolves were to breed?

The police service was still unorganized, but squads of soldiers saw that bodies were placed discreetly out of sight, that is to say, they were laid side by side, off the main thoroughfares, and some spades of earth thrown over them in order to conceal blood-stiffened clothes. A little earth and a little time was enough. And the race of werewolves would forget.

Homo economicus
rose up amid the smoldering ruins and began to flourish again. One man went up and down street after street with a handcart. At the sight of a body, he would stop, uncover himself piously and mutter a brief prayer. Then he would wave his hat before he put it on again in order to chase away the flies, and with a rapid and practiced hand, he would strip the corpse of its footgear and throw boots or shoes into his cart. The harvest was plentiful.

Some suspicious people stopped him, questioned him. He replied politely, “For official identification,” and went about his business. Aymar, seeing him, said briefly: “Eighteens, eh?” and enjoyed the startled expression on the man's face.
*
“A minor werewolf,” he thought, and laughed to himself.

Altogether these were enjoyable days for Aymar. He saw a priest going down one street and whistled. Under the soutane and the cross, Aymar had recognized Colonel Gois, the terrible slayer of the hostages, for whom everybody was on the lookout. “I'll give him a scare, the wolf in sheep's clothing,” Aymar thought, and approached him with a Latin phrase:

“Pax vobiscum! If it isn't our old pastor fidus Gois.”

Gois shivered: “For God's sake, Galliez!” he pleaded in a trembling voice.

But Aymar couldn't control at least one joke: “You'd have shot yourself on sight in the old days! Well—”

Yes, these were enjoyable days for Aymar, enjoyable until he was arrested. And even to that there was some enjoyment. In groups of a hundred fifty to two hundred, tied hand to handor elbow to elbow in rows of four, the prisoners were marched out of the cellars of the Luxembourg to the ramparts, and from there down the long road to Versailles. Day after day, until some 40,000 had made the journey.

Side by side marched old fighters, some in uniform, others in sketchy workman's costumes, hastily donned. Their faces were lined and feverish, and they all looked like drunkards, as men always do when they are unshaven. Old men stumbled along, linked to weeping children, or to girls in fantastic uniforms, who had snatched up a rifle to defend the barricades, or to gray-haired matrons, preserving their dignity with difficulty as they walked beside servants in calico and aprons, all somehow caught up in the rebellion, or by mistake numbered among the prisoners. And here and there a figure in redingote, erect, sober, a man with the face of a scholar or an artist, who had added his beautiful dreams of Utopia to the sad fiasco of the Commune.

This column of rags and remnants moved slowly along the dusty roads, beneath the fierce heat of the June sun. The guards rode on horseback, loaded guns across their knees, like gauchos conducting cattle to the slaughterhouse. Short halts were made at Sevres and again at Viroflay. And then the troops entered Versailles through the gate of Paris.

Now came the most terrible part of the journey. The march through the regal city of Versailles, between lanes of closely packed people, a fanatic multitude, void of all sense of balance, void of pity and of intelligence. The city of the rich here demonstrated that it, too, could form mobs as mad as those of the poorest quarters of Paris. Not bare, dirty or calloused fists were shaken at the cohort, but neatly gloved hands, hands of demi-mondaines in lace gauntlets, and hands of bankers in yellow kidskin. And voices that spoke correct French howled: “No prisoners! Death, to the bandits!” and the fine-clothes rushed the line, broke through the protecting file of horsemen. And the snobs and the elegant ladies, seizing the opportunity to strike a blow without fear of retaliation, lashed out. The men prodded with their canes and the women swung their pretty parasols, or removed one glove to let their sharp nails leave furrows across the face of a young girl. “Pétrolouse!” they shouted. For though only a handful of women had actually done incendiary work, all the thousand and more women arrested were suspected of having burnt a palace or two. Even the six hundred fifty children seemed demons.

And Aymar chuckled. “More werewolves!” he exulted, oblivious to the blows that rained upon him. “The world is full of them. How is it that I once thought they were rare? I was once one myself—and didn't know it.”