Most of the Communards had stacked their weapons in a pile while they worked away, so when the shooting started from the windows they were caught unprepared. And even when they had retrieved them, they had no idea where the shots were coming from and began firing toward the corner of rue de Grenelle and rue du Four—I had to move back, fearing that the shots would also reach rue du Vieux Colombier. Finally, someone realized their enemy was shooting from above, and there was an exchange of fire between the crossroads and the windows of the houses, except that while the government soldiers could clearly see whom they were shooting at, and fired into the mob, the Communards were still unsure which windows to aim for. In short, it was an easy massacre. Meanwhile, someone at the crossroads was shouting that they’d been betrayed. It’s always the same. When you fail at something, you try to blame someone else for your incompetence. But what betrayal? I thought—you simply have no idea how to fight. And you call this a revolution!
Someone eventually managed to work out which building was occupied by the government troops, and the survivors tried to break down the door. I imagined that by then the brassardiers had already returned into the underground tunnel and the Communards had found the house empty, but I decided not to wait around to find out. As I later discovered, the government forces were indeed approaching from rue du Cherche-Midi, and in large numbers, so the last defenders of the Croix-Rouge must have been easily wiped out.
I returned to my own alleyway by the back streets, avoiding those directions from which I could hear the rattle of gunshots. Along the walls I saw notices, freshly pasted up, from the Committee for Public Safety, urging citizens to make a last stand: «Aux barricades! L’ennemi est dans nos murs. Pas d’hésitations!»
In a brasserie in place Maubert I received the latest news: seven hundred Communards had been shot in rue Saint-Jacques, the powder keg went up at the Luxembourg, and in revenge the Communards had taken hostages from the prison of La Roquette, including the archbishop of Paris, and lined them up against the wall. The execution of the archbishop marked the point of no return. There had to be a complete bloodbath for things to return to normal.
Just as these events were being described to me, several women arrived to shouts of jubilation from the other customers. They were les femmes returning to their brasserie! The prostitutes banned by the Commune had been brought back from Versailles by the government forces, who allowed them once again to circulate in the city, as if to show that all was returning to normal.
I couldn’t stay there in the midst of that mob. They were undoing the one good thing the Commune had achieved.
In the next few days the Commune came to an end with the last hand-to-hand combat in Père-Lachaise cemetery. It was said that 147 survivors were captured and executed on the spot.
That way, they learned not to stick their noses into other people’s affairs.
18. The Protocols
From the diary for 10th and 11th April 1897
With the war over, Simonini resumed his normal work. Fortunately, with all the deaths, problems of inheritance were an everyday occurrence. Large numbers of those killed on or in front of the barricades were young and hadn’t yet thought about making a will, and Simonini was inundated with work—and handsome profits. How wonderful it was to have peace, even if there had first been a sacrificial purification.
His diary makes little mention of the legal routine of the following years and refers only to his hope, which during that period he had never abandoned, of finding new contacts for the sale of his document on the Prague cemetery. He had no idea what Goedsche had been up to in the meantime, but had to keep ahead of him, not least because the Jews seemed to have curiously disappeared during almost the whole time of the Commune. Were they inveterate conspirators, secretly pulling strings in the Commune? Or were they, on the contrary, accumulators of capital hiding at Versailles waiting for the war to finish? But they were behind the Freemasons, and the Paris Freemasons had sided with the Commune, and the Communards had shot an archbishop. The Jews had to be involved in some way. They killed children, so killing archbishops was hardly a problem.
One day in 1876, while Simonini was pondering this question, he heard the bell downstairs. At the door was an elderly man in a cassock. He thought at first it was the usual satanist priest come to sell consecrated hosts, but then, studying him more closely, under that mass of gray but still curly hair, he recognized Father Bergamaschi. It had been almost thirty years since he’d last seen him.
For the Jesuit it was more difficult to be sure that the person in front of him was indeed the Simonini he had known as an adolescent, mainly because of the beard (which, after the return of peace, had become black again, with a touch of gray, as befitted a man in his mid-forties). Then his eyes brightened, and he said, with a smile, «But of course. Simonino, it’s you, my boy, isn’t it? Why keep me at the door?»
He was smiling, though we would hardly venture to say it was the smile of a tiger, but rather that of a cat. Simonini invited him upstairs and asked, «How did you manage to find me?»
«Ah, my boy,» said Bergamaschi, «didn’t you know we Jesuits are always one step ahead of the devil? Even though the Piedmontese had driven us out of Turin, I managed to maintain a good circle of contacts. I discovered, first of all, that you were working at a notary’s office and forging wills, and then, alas, that you had sent a report to the Piedmont secret service in which I appeared as adviser to Napoleon III, and was supposed to be plotting against France and the Kingdom of Piedmont at the Prague cemetery. A fine invention, there’s no denying it, but then I realized you’d copied the whole thing from that heathen Sue.
I tried to find you but was told you were in Sicily with Garibaldi and then that you’d left Italy. General Negri di Saint Front is still on friendly terms with the Society and directed me to Paris, where my brethren had good connections with the imperial secret service. That was how I discovered you were in touch with the Russians and that your report about us at the Prague cemetery had become a report on the Jews. But at the same time I learned you’d been spying on a certain Joly. I was able secretly to obtain a copy of his book, left in the office of someone called Lacroix, who had died heroically in an armed encounter with Carbonaro bombers, and I could see that, though Joly had taken his ideas from Sue, you had copied from Joly. Finally my German brethren informed me that a certain Goedsche had written about a ceremony, once again at the Prague cemetery, where the Jews said more or less the same things you had written in your report to the Russians. Except that I knew the first version, involving us Jesuits, was yours, and predated Goedsche’s potboiler by many years.»
«At last someone who gives me my due!»
«Let me finish. After that, what with war, siege and the days of the Commune, Paris was better avoided by a man of the cloth like me. I decided to come and search you out because that same story about the Jews at the Prague cemetery appeared in a booklet published in St. Petersburg. But it was presented as a passage from a novel based on true facts, and therefore originated with Goedsche. And now, this year, more or less the same text has appeared in a pamphlet in Moscow. In short, up there (or down there, however you wish to put it) the whole question of the Jews is turning into a state matter. They’re becoming a threat, but they’re also a threat to us. Hidden behind this Alliance Israélite are the Masons, and His Holiness has now decided to start a thorough campaign against all enemies of the Church. And here we come back to you, Simonino, who must seek forgiveness for the trick you played on me with the Piedmontese. After slandering our Society, you owe something in return.»
Hell, these Jesuits were cleverer than Hébuterne, Lagrange and Saint Front. They knew everything about everyone. They needed no help from the secret services because they were a secret service themselves; they had brethren in every part of the world and followed what had been said in every language since the fall of the tower of Babel.
After the collapse of the Commune, everyone in France, including those against the Church, had become deeply religious. There was even talk of erecting a sanctuary at Montmartre, in public atonement for that tragedy caused by such godless people. If there was a climate of restoration, it was therefore just as important to work as a good restorer. «All right, Father,» Simonini said, «tell me what you want.»
«Let us continue along the same line. First of all, seeing that Goedsche is
