The Parisians — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (best novels ever txt) 📕

“I had the honour to hear M. Gustave the other night at the club de la Vengeance.”

“Bon Dieu! do you frequent those tragic reunions?” asked De Breze.

“They are not at all tragic: they are the only comedies left us, as one must amuse one’s self somewhere, and the club de la Vengeance is the prettiest thing of the sort going. I quite understand why it should fascinate a poet like your son, M. Rameau. It is held in a salle de cafe chantant—style Louis Quinze—decorated with a pastoral scene from Watteau. I and my dog Fox drop in. We hear your son haranguing. In what poetical sentences he despaired of the Republic! The Government (he called them les charlatans de l’Hotel de Ville) were imbeciles. They pretended to inaugurate a revolution, and did not employ the most obvious of revolutionary means. There Fox and I pricked up our ears: what were those means? Your son proceeded to explain: ‘All mankind were to be appealed to against individual interests. The commerce of luxury was to be abolished. Clearly luxury was not at the command of all mankind. Cafes and theatres were to be closed for ever—all mankind could not go to cafes and theatres. It was idle to expect the masses to combine for anything in which the masses had not an interest in common. The masses had no interest in any property that did not belong to the masses. Programmes of the society to be founded, called the Ligue Cosmopolite Democratique, should be sent at once into all the States of the civilised world—how? by balloons. Money corrupts the world as now composed: but the money at the command of the masses could buy all the monarchs and courtiers and priests of the universe.’ At that sentiment, vehemently delivered, the applauses were frantic, and Fox in his excitement began to bark. At the sound of his bark one man cried out, ‘That’s a Prussian!’ another, ‘Down with the spy!’ another, ‘There’s an aristo present—he keeps alive a dog which would be a week’s meal for a family!’ I snatch up Fox at the last cry, and clasp him to a bosom protected by the uniform of the National Guard.

“When the hubbub had subsided, your son, M. Rameau, proceeded, quitting mankind in general, and arriving at the question in particular most interesting to his audience—the mobilisation of the National Guard; that is, the call upon men who like talking and hate fighting to talk less and fight more. ‘It was the sheerest tyranny to select a certain number of free citizens to be butchered. If the fight was for the mass, there ought to be la levee en masse. If one did not compel everybody to fight, why should anybody fight?’ Here the applause again became vehement, and Fox again became indiscreet. I subdued Fox’s bark into a squeak by pulling his ears. ‘What!’ cries your poet-son, ‘la levee en masse gives us fifteen millions of soldiers, with which we could crush, not Prussia alone, but the whole of Europe. (Immense sensation.) Let us, then, resolve that the charlatans of the Hotel de Ville are incapable of delivering us from the Prussians; that they are deposed; that the Ligue of the Democratie Cosmopolite is installed; that meanwhile the Commune shall be voted the Provisional Government, and shall order the Prussians to retire within three days from the soil of Paris.’

“Pardon me this long description, my dear M. Rameau, but I trust I have satisfactorily explained why victory obtained in the teeth of his eloquent opinions, if gratifying to him as a Frenchman, must be mortifying to him as a politician.”

The old Rameau sighed, hung his head, and crept away. While, amid this holiday illumination, the Parisians enjoyed the panorama before them, the Freres Chretiens and the attendants of the various ambulances were moving along the battle-plains; the first in their large-brimmed hats and sable garbs, the last in strange motley costume, many of them in glittering uniform—all alike in their serene indifference to danger; often pausing to pick up among the dead their own brethren who had been slaughtered in the midst of their task. Now and then they came on sinister forms apparently engaged in the same duty of tending the wounded and dead, but in truth murderous plunderers, to whom the dead and the dying were equal harvests. Did the wounded man attempt to resist the foul hands searching for their spoil, they added another wound more immediately mortal, grinning as they completed on the dead the robbery they had commenced on the dying.

Raoul de Vandemar had been all the earlier part of the day with the assistants of the ambulance over which he presided, attached to the battalions of the National Guard in a quarter remote from that in which his brother had fought and fallen. When those troops, later in the day, were driven from the Montmedy plateau, which they had at first carried, Raoul repassed towards the plateau at Villiers, on which the dead lay thickest. On the way he heard a vague report of the panic which had dispersed the Mobiles of whom Enguerrand was in command, and of Enguerrand’s vain attempt to inspirit them. But his fate was not known. There, at midnight, Raoul is still searching among the ghastly heaps and pools of blood, lighted from afar by the blaze from the observatory of Montmartre, and more near at hand by the bivouac fires extended along the banks to the left of the Marne, while everywhere about the field flitted the lanterns of the Frere Chretiens. Suddenly, in the dimness of a spot cast into shadow by an incompleted earthwork, he observed a small sinister figure perched on the breast of some wounded soldier, evidently not to succour. He sprang forward and seized a hideous-looking urchin, scarcely twelve years old, who held in one hand a small crystal locket, set in filigree gold, torn from the soldier’s breast, and lifted high in the other a long case-knife. At a glance Raoul recognised the holy relic he had given to Enguerrand, and, flinging the precocious murderer to be seized by his assistants, he cast himself beside his brother. Enguerrand still breathed, and his languid eyes brightened as he knew the dear familiar face. He tried to speak, but his voice failed, and he shook his head sadly, but still with a faint smile on his lips. They lifted him tenderly, and placed him on a litter. The movement, gentle as it was, brought back pain, and with the pain strength to mutter, “My mother—-I would see her once more.”

As at daybreak the loungers on Montmartre and the ramparts descended into the streets—most windows in which were open, as they had been all night, with anxious female faces peering palely down-they saw the conveyances of the ambulances coming dismally along, and many an eye turned wistfully towards the litter on which lay the idol of the pleasure-loving Paris, with the dark, bareheaded figure walking beside it,—onwards, onwards, till it reached the Hotel de Vandemar, and a woman’s cry was heard at the entrance—the mother’s cry, “My son! my son!”