Part 5 — Chapter 42 The Coup d’État—The Procureur of the late Republic—The Voice of the Cow in the Wilderness—Banishment of the Procureur—Order and Civilisation Triumphant

‘Vive la mort, friends! And a happy new year! Now we shall be consistent, now we shall not be false to our own ideas, shall not be terrified at the realisation of what we have foreseen, shall not abjure the knowledge we have reached by the path of tribulation. Now we shall be strong and stand up for our convictions.

‘We saw death approaching long ago; we may grieve, we may feel sympathy, but we cannot be surprised, we cannot be despairing or downcast. Quite the contrary, we ought to lift up our heads, we are justified. We have been called birds of ill omen invoking disaster, we have been reproached for heresy, for ignorance of the people, for proud isolation, for childish resentment, while we have only been guilty of seeing the truth and speaking it openly. Our words, which are still the same, are now the consolation, the encouragement of those who are terrified by the events in Paris.’—(‘Letters from France and Italy,’ No. 14. Nice, December 31, 1851.)

One morning (I remember it was the 4th of December) our cook, Pasquale Rocca, came in to me, and with a look of pleasure announced that flysheets were being sold in the streets with the news that ‘Buonaparte has dismissed the Assembly and appointed a red government.’ Who were the zealous servants of Napoleon who spread such rumours among the people even outside France (Nice was at that time Italian), I do not know; but what numbers there must have been of agents of all sorts, political stokers, whipping the public up end raising the temperature, since there were enough of them even for Nice!

An hour later Vogt, Hoetsky, Mathieu, and others turned up: all were surprised ... Mathieu, a typical specimen of a French revolutionary, was beside himself.

Bald, with a skull the shape of a walnut—that is, a typically Gallic skull, not spacious but obstinate—with a big, dark, unkempt beard, a rather good-natured expression, and little eyes, Mathieu was like a prophet, like a crazy saint, like an augur, and like his bird. He was a lawyer, and in the happy days of the February republic had been a procureur or a deputy procureur somewhere. He was a revolutionary to the tips of his finger-nails; he gave himself up to the revolution as people give themselves up to religion, with implicit faith, never dared either to understand or to doubt or to be over-subtle, but loved and believed, called Ledru-Rollin ‘Ledru,’ and Louis Blanc simply ‘Blanc,’ used the word citoyen whenever he could, and was perpetually conspiring.

On receiving the news of the 2nd of December he disappeared, and returned two days later completely convinced that France was rising, que cela chauffe, and especially in the south, in the department of Var near Draguignan. The great thing to be done was to enter into relations with the leaders of the insurrection.... He had seen some of them, and had settled with them overnight, passing through Var, to collect trustworthy and important persons together at a certain spot, for consultation.... But that the gendarmes might not get wind of it, it was settled on both sides to give as a signal the moo of a cow. If things went well, Orsini meant to bring all his friends, and, though not quite confident that Mathieu’s view of the position was correct, he set off with him to cross the frontier. Orsini came back shaking his head, though, true to his revolutionary and somewhat condottieri temperament, he proceeded to prepare his comrades and collect arms. Mathieu vanished.

Twenty-four hours later, Rocca woke me at four o’clock in the morning: ‘Two gentlemen just arrived from a journey; they urgently want to see you, they say. One of them gave me this note.’ ‘Citoyen, for God’s sake give bearer three or four hundred francs at once, if possible; urgently necessary.—Mathieu.’

I snatched up the money and went downstairs: two remarkable individuals were sitting in the half-dark by the window; accustomed as I am to all the uniforms of revolution, I was yet struck by the appearance of my visitors. Both were covered with mud and clay to their knees; one was wearing a thick red woollen scarf; both had shabby overcoats, a sash round their waistcoats, and big pistols in the sash; and the rest was as usual—unkempt shocks of hair, big beards, and tiny pipes. One of them, beginning with the word citoyen, delivered a speech in which he touched upon my civic virtues and the money expected by Mathieu. I gave him the money. ‘Is he in safety?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ answered his ambassador; ‘we’re going to join him at once on the other side of the Var. He is buying a boat.’

‘A boat! what for?’

‘Citoyen Mathieu has the whole plan for landing—the infamous coward of a boatman would not let us have the boat on credit....’

‘What, a landing in France ... with one boat...?’

‘It is a secret, citoyen, for the time.’

‘Comme de raison.’

‘Would you like a receipt?’

‘Oh, no need of that!’

Next day Mathieu himself appeared, also muddy to the ears, and worn out with fatigue; he had been mooing like a cow all night, had several times fancied he heard an answer, went towards it, and found a real bull or a cow. Orsini, who had been waiting somewhere for him for ten hours at a stretch, also came back. The difference between them was that Orsini, washed, and as always, dressed neatly and tastefully, looked like a man who had just walked out of his bedroom; while Mathieu bore all the outward signs of destroying the peace of the state, and attempting to raise a rebellion. Then the boat question had to be considered. Trouble is never far off, and he might easily ruin half a dozen of his own countrymen and half a dozen of the Italians. To stop or dissuade him was impossible. The leaders who had come to me in the night appeared with him; one might be certain that he would compromise not only the French but all of us in Nice. Hoetsky undertook to manage him, and did so like an artist.

Hoetsky’s window, with a little balcony, looked straight out on the sea-shore. In the morning he saw Mathieu wandering with a mysterious air along the beach.... Hoetsky began making signs to him; Mathieu saw them and signed that he would come to him presently; but Hoetsky, assuming an air of the most terrible alarm, telegraphed to him with his fingers that danger was imminent, and insisted on his coming up to the balcony at once. Mathieu, looking round him, stole up on tiptoe. ‘You don’t know?’ Hoetsky asked him. ‘What?’ ‘A squadron of French gendarmes has come into Nice.’ ‘You don’t say so!’

‘Sh—sh—sh.... They are looking for you and your friends. They mean to make a house-to-house search among us—you will be caught at once; don’t go out into the street.’

‘Violation du territoire ... I shall protest.’

‘Of course; only, now you must escape.’

‘I will go to Ste. Hélène, to Herzen’s.’

‘You must be mad! That’s simply giving yourself up to them. His villa is on the frontier, with a huge garden, and no one will even know that you have been arrested—besides, Rocca saw two gendarmes at the gate, even yesterday.’

Mathieu sank into thought.

‘Go by sea to Vogt’s, hide there for the time, and he, by the way, will give you the best advice.’

Mathieu went by the sea-coast—that is, twice as far round—to Vogt’s, and began telling him word for word his conversation with Hoetsky. Vogt instantly grasped the position and observed to him: ‘The great thing, dear Mathieu, is not to lose one instant. Within two hours you must go to Turin: the diligence passes the other side of the hill; I will take a seat, and take you there by the path.’

‘I’ll run home for my things ...’ and the procureur of the republic was a little flustered.

‘That’s even worse than going to Herzen’s. Why, you must be crazy—gendarmes, agents, spies, I don’t know what, are after you ... and you want to run home to kiss your fat Provençale! What a Celadon!⁠[89] Porter!’ shouted Vogt (his house-porter was a minute German, a killing person, very much like a coffee-pot that had not been washed for months, and absolutely devoted to Vogt). ‘Make haste and write that you want a shirt, handkerchiefs, clothes; he’ll fetch them, and if you like bring your Dulcinea too so that you may kiss and weep to your heart’s content.’

Mathieu was so overcome with feeling that he embraced Vogt.

Hoetsky arrived. ‘Make haste, make haste!’ he said with an ominous air.

Meanwhile the porter came back, his Dulcinea came also—they had only to wait for the diligence to come into sight beyond the hill. The seat had been taken.

‘I suppose you are cutting up rotten dogs or rabbits again?’ Hoetsky asked Vogt; ‘quel chien de métier...!’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Upon my soul, the stench in your room is like the catacombs at Naples.’

‘I notice it myself, but I can’t make it out; it comes from the corner.... There must be a dead rat under the floor—it’s an awful stink,’ and he picked up Mathieu’s overcoat lying on a chair. It appeared that the smell came from the overcoat.

‘What the devil have you got in your overcoat?’ Vogt asked him.

‘Nothing!’

‘Oh, it must be my fault,’ observed Dulcinea, blushing, ‘I put a pound of Limburg cheese, un peu trop fait, in his pocket for the journey.’

‘I congratulate your neighbours in the diligence,’ shouted Vogt, laughing as no one else in the world can laugh.

‘Well, it’s time to start—march!’

And Hoetsky and Vogt saw the agitator off on his way to Turin.

In Turin Mathieu presented himself before the Minister of the Interior with a protest. The latter received him with irritation and laughter. ‘How could you imagine that French gendarmes could arrest people in the kingdom of Sardinia? You must be unwell.’

Mathieu referred to the testimony of Vogt and Hoetsky.

‘Your friends,’ said the Minister, ‘have been having a joke at your expense.’

Mathieu wrote to Vogt; he reeled off a string of nonsense, I do not know what, in answer. But Mathieu was offended, particularly with Hoetsky, and a few weeks later wrote a letter to me in which, among other things, he said: ‘You, citoyen, alone among these gentlemen, took no part in this treacherous intrigue against me....’

What adds to the characteristic oddity of the affair is that there was a very serious rising in Var, that masses of the population really did revolt, and that the rising was suppressed with the habitual French bloodthirstiness. How was it Mathieu and his bodyguard, for all their zeal and their mooing, did not know how to get in contact with the rebels? No one suspects him or his comrades of intentionally going to mess about in the mud and not wanting to go where there was danger—far from it. That is not in the spirit of the French, of whom Delphine Gay said that ‘they are afraid of everything except bullets,’ and still less in the spirit de la démocratie militante and the red republic.... Why did Mathieu go to the right when the revolting peasants were on the left?

A few days later—like yellow leaves driven before the wind—the luckless victims of the suppressed rising began streaming into Nice. There were so many of them that the Piedmont government allowed them to remain for a time in a sort of bivouac or gypsy camp near the town. How many ruined fortunes and privations have we seen in these camps!—that is the horrible side behind the scenes of civil wars; usually concealed behind the big framework and gay scene-painting of such events as the 2nd of December.

Here were simple peasants, gloomily pining for home, for their land, and naïvely saying: ‘We are not rebels at all—and not “partageux”; we tried to defend public order as good citizens: ce sont ces coquins who called us out’ (i.e. the officials, mayors, and gendarmes)—‘they were false to their oath and their duty, and must we now die of hunger in a foreign land or face a court-martial?... Where’s the justice in that?’

And indeed, a coup d’état like the 2nd of December destroys more than men: it destroys all morality, every conception of good and evil in a whole population; it is a lesson of corruption which cannot pass without effect. Among them were soldiers too, troupiers, in a permanent state of wonder at finding themselves, contrary to all discipline and their captains’ orders, on a different side from their flag and their regiment. The number of these was not great, however. There were also simple bourgeois of humble means, who never make the same repulsive impression on me as the more pretentious—pitiful, narrow-minded people, they had somehow, in the midst of the petty cheating of trade, laboriously assimilated two or three notions or half-notions of their duties, and they had risen in defence of them when they saw their holy things trampled upon.

‘It is the triumph of egoism,’ they said; ‘yes, yes, of egoism, and where there is egoism there is vice; every one ought to do his duty without egoism.’

There were, too, of course, town workmen, the real genuine element of revolution, striving to obtain la sociale by decree—and to pay out the bourgeois and the aristocrat as they paid them out.

Of course, among them there were wounded, terribly wounded, too. I remember two middle-aged peasants who had crawled, leaving a track of blood, from the frontier to a suburb where the inhabitants picked them up half dead. A gendarme had been chasing them, and, seeing the frontier was not far off, he fired at one and shattered his shoulder.... The wounded man still ran on.... The gendarme fired once more, the wounded man fell; then he galloped after the other and overtook him, first with a bullet and then himself. The second wounded man surrendered; the gendarme tied him in haste to his horse, and all at once missed the first man ... he had crawled to a copse and started running.... To overtake him on horseback was difficult, especially with the other wounded man; to leave the horse behind impossible.... The gendarme shot his prisoner ‘à bout portant’ from the top of his head downwards; the man fell unconscious: the bullet tore open the whole right side of his face, splintering the bones. When he came to himself there was no one there; he made his way along familiar paths trodden by the smugglers as far as Var, and crossed it and passed through it almost bleeding to death; there he found his comrade utterly exhausted, and with him succeeded in surviving as far as the first houses of Ste. Hélène. There, as I have said, the inhabitants took care of them. The first man said that after being shot he had hidden in some bushes, that afterwards he had heard voices, that the pursuing gendarmes had probably come upon others and so made off.

How zealous are the French police!

This example was followed by the zealous maires and their deputies, the procureurs of the republic and prefects; the zeal was displayed in the elections and counting of votes: all this was typically French, and familiar to everybody. I will only say that in remote parts the steps taken for attaining an immense majority at the polls were of a rustic simplicity. On the farther side of the Var, in the first village, the maire and brigadier of gendarmes sat beside the urns and looked at every ballot-paper any one put in, saying on the spot that they would make mince-meat of any rebel. The government voting-papers were printed on special paper—so it worked out that there were in the whole village only some five or six bold, unruly spirits who voted against the plebiscite; the rest, and with them the whole of France, voted for the Empire in spe.