The fact that Parisians have enjoyed building barricades for at least a century, and then taking them down at the first cannon shot, seems quite irrelevant: barricades are built out of a feeling of heroism, though I’d like to see how many of those who build them stay there up to the right moment. They’ll follow my example, and only the stupidest ones will be left to defend them, and will be shot where they stand.
The only way to understand how events were proceeding in Paris would have been to observe them from a dirigible balloon. Some rumors suggested that the École Militaire, where the cannon of the National Guard were kept, had been occupied, others that there was fighting at place Clichy, while others claimed that the Germans were allowing the government forces to enter from the north. Montmartre was seized on the Tuesday, and forty men, three women and four children were taken to the place where the Communards had shot Lecomte and Thomas, made to kneel, and were shot one by one.
On the Wednesday I saw many public buildings in flames, including the Tuileries Palace. Some said the garden had been set ablaze by the Communards to stop the advance of the government troops, and indeed there were mad Jacobins, les petroleuses, who went around with a bucket of kerosene to start fires; others swore they had been caused by government howitzers; yet others blamed old Bonapartists who were taking advantage of the situation to destroy compromising archives. At first I thought that was what I would have done if I had been in Lagrange’s position, but then it occurred to me that a good secret service agent hides information but never destroys it, since it may come in handy one day against someone.
Out of an excess of scruples, and with much fear of finding myself in the midst of fighting, I went for the last time to the pigeon loft, where I found a message from Lagrange. He told me I need no longer communicate by pigeon, and gave me an address at the Louvre, which had been occupied by now, and a password to get me through the government roadblocks.
At the same time I heard that government forces had reached Montparnasse. I remembered how at Montparnasse I had been taken to visit a vintner’s cellar. From there you entered an underground passageway that followed rue d’Assas as far as rue du Cherche-Midi and then emerged in an abandoned storeroom in a building at carrefour de la Croix-Rouge, a crossroads still heavily occupied by Communards. Seeing that my underground investigations had so far been of no benefit, and that I had to obtain some results in order to earn my pay, I went to see Lagrange.
It wasn’t difficult to reach the Louvre from the Île de la Cité, but behind Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois I saw a scene that, I confess, made quite an impression on me. A man and woman with a child were passing by, and they didn’t seem to be running away from a stormed barricade; but there was a squad of drunken brassardiers who were obviously celebrating the capture of the Louvre, and they tried to pull the man from the arms of his wife, who was holding on to him, crying, and the brassardiers pushed all three against the wall and riddled them with bullets.
I made sure I passed only through the lines of regular soldiers to whom I could give my password, and was then led to a room where several people were marking a large map of the city with colored pins. I couldn’t see Lagrange, and asked for him. A middle-aged man with an excessively normal face (by which I mean that if I had to describe him I could point out no salient feature) turned and greeted me courteously, not extending his hand.
«Captain Simonini, I presume. My name is Hébuterne. From now on, whatever you had to do with Monsieur Lagrange you will do with me. You are aware that change is necessary, even in state services, especially at the end of a war. Monsieur Lagrange deserved an honorable retirement, and perhaps he is right now fishing à la ligne somewhere or other, away from this disagreeable confusion.»
A middle-aged man with an excessively normal face… turned and greeted me… «Captain Simonini, I presume. My name is Hébuterne.»
This wasn’t the moment to ask questions. I told him about the underground passage from rue d’Assas to the Croix-Rouge, and Hébuterne commented that an operation at the Croix-Rouge would be extremely useful, as he had received news that the Communards were amassing large numbers of troops there, awaiting the arrival of government forces from the south. He therefore ordered me to go to the vintner’s shop, whose address I had given, and to wait there for a squad of brassardiers.
I was thinking of taking it slowly from the Seine to Montparnasse, to allow enough time for Hébuterne’s messenger to arrive before me, when I saw, there on the pavement on the right bank, twenty corpses laid out in a line. They must have just been shot, and seemed to be of various ages and social classes. There was a young man who looked like a laborer, his mouth gaping open. Next to him was an older, more respectable man with curly hair and a well-groomed mustache, with hands crossed over a slightly rumpled frock coat. Beside him was someone with the face of an artist, and another whose features were almost unrecognizable, with a black hole where his left eye should have been and a towel tied around his head, as if some pious soul, or some ruthless renegade, had sought to bind up his head, which had been blown apart by who knows how many bullets. There was also a woman who had perhaps once been pretty.
The bodies lay in the late May sun, the first flies of the season buzzing around them, attracted by the feast. They looked as if they had been taken at random and shot just to set an example, and had been lined up on the pavement to clear the street for a platoon of government soldiers who were passing at that very moment, pulling a cannon behind them. What struck me about those faces was…I find it difficult to write down…was their casualness: in their sleep they seemed to show an acceptance of their common destiny.
Having reached the end of the row, I was shocked to see the corpse of the last executed man, slightly apart from the others, as if it had been added to the group later. Part of the face was caked with blood, but I had no difficulty in recognizing Lagrange. Changes certainly were under way in the secret service.
I have no womanish sensitivity, and had been perfectly capable of dragging a priest’s corpse down into the sewers, but this sight disturbed me. Not out of pity, but because I realized it could have happened to me. All that was needed was to meet someone on the way to Montparnasse who recognized me as one of Lagrange’s men—it could just as well have been a Versaillais or a Communard. Both sides had reason to distrust me—and distrust, in those days, meant death.
I decided to cross the Seine and follow the whole of rue du Bac above ground as far as the Croix-Rouge, assuming that in those areas where buildings were still on fire I’d be unlikely to find any Communards, and that the government forces would not yet be on patrol. From there I could go straight into the abandoned storeroom and take the rest of the route below ground.
I feared that the defenses at the Croix-Rouge would have prevented me from reaching the building, but they didn’t.
Armed groups stood at the entrances of various houses, awaiting orders. Conflicting information was circulating—it wasn’t clear from which direction the government forces would arrive, and someone was laboriously building and dismantling barricades, changing the entrance of the road according to the latest rumor. A larger contingent of National Guardsmen was arriving, and many of the people living in that respectable district tried to persuade the soldiers not to attempt useless acts of heroism. After all, they said, the men from Versailles were compatriots and, what is more, republicans, and Thiers had promised an amnesty for all Communards who surrendered.
I found the door of my building ajar, went inside and closed it firmly behind me, climbed down to the storeroom, then down to the underground passageway, and found my way to Montparnasse without difficulty. There I met thirty or so brassardiers who followed me back along the same route. From the storeroom, the men went up to various top-floor apartments, ready to overpower the occupants, but were welcomed with relief by well-dressed people who pointed out the windows commanding the best positions over the crossroads. At that moment, an officer arrived on horseback from rue du Dragon, carrying an order of alert. The order was obviously for them to prepare for an attack from rue de Sèvres or rue du Cherche-Midi, and at the corner of the two streets the Communards were pulling up paving slabs to build a new barricade.
While the brassardiers were readying themselves at the windows of the occupied apartments, I did not think it fit to remain in a place where Communard bullets would, sooner or later, be flying, and so returned downstairs while there was still plenty of
