Part 2 — PART II. EXCELSIOR!

“Great news! Extra! Three sous!” The newsvender, a ragged little urchin who nearly collapsed under the weight and volume of his extras, was shouting out these three startling facts at the top of his voice as I went out early in the morning. Two rheumatic old rag-women, immediately suspending their investigation of the dust-heaps, dropped their crooks, and cried out to him to know the news. Was it a victory or a defeat, or was it anything about the siege? But the urchin, as hard-hearted as any editor, waved the momentous sheet majestically with one hand, and answered, “Three sous!” To the renewed entreaties of the rag-women he condescended so far as to say that it was well worth the money, that they never spent three sous more advantageously, for the news was wonderful news, but for less than three sous they should not have it. I did not altogether believe either in the extra or in the wonderful news, but the newspaper fever was on me like the rest of the world, so I produced the inexorable three sous and took the paper. The moment the two women saw this they came up to me, and, evidently taking for granted that I was going to give them the benefit of my extravagance, stood to hear the news. I read it aloud for them, as well as to a milk-boy who was passing at the moment and stood also to get his share of the three sous, and a remarkably sympathetic audience the three made. The news was none of the best. The Prussians were at Chalons, and they might be at the gates of Paris before another week.

“That was MacMahon’s plan from the first,” observed the milk-boy, “and, if the Prussians fall into the trap, the game is ours.”

The rag-women, not being so well up in military tactics and technicalities, meekly begged to be enlightened as to the nature and aim of the trap in question, and the young politician was so kind as to explain to them that the marshal had all along been luring on the Prussians to Paris, which was to be their pitfall; Mont Valérien and the fortifications would annihilate them like flies; not a man of them would go back alive; the only fear was that that rascally Bismarck would be too many guns for the marshal, and make him fight before Chalons, in which case, he observed, “it was all up with the marshal, and consequently with France.”

Having delivered himself of this masterly exposition of the case, the milk-boy swung his cans, touched his cap to me, and, having achieved the most preternaturally knowing wink I ever beheld, strode off without waiting to see the effect of his words on the two old women. They looked after him aghast. Had they been talking to a confidential agent of the War Office, or to an emissary of the rascally Bismarck himself? A spy, in fact?

“One ought to have one’s mouth sewed up these times,” observed the more ancient of the beldames, casting a half-suspicious glance at me as I folded my newspaper and put it into my pocket. “One never knows whom one may be speaking to.”

This remark was too deep and too fearfully suggestive to admit of any commentary from her companion; the only thing to be done in such a crisis was to take refuge in professional pursuits that offered no ground for suspicion, so seizing her crook the rag-woman plunged prudently once more into her rubbish.

A little further on, turning the corner of a street, I came on two gentlemen whom I knew, standing in animated conversation. I stopped to ask what news? None, except that the horizon was growing darker from hour to hour. The despatches from the frontier were as bad as could well be. As to pooh-poohing the siege now it was sheer stupidity, one of them declared, and, for his part, he only wished it were already begun: it was the last chance left us of rejecting the disasters of the campaign and crushing the remains of the enemy. His companion indignantly scouted both the certainty of the siege and the desirability of it. The city was not to be trusted; no great city ever was; there were hundreds of traitors only too ready to open the gates to the enemy at his own price. Look at the proprietors! Did any one suppose there were fifty proprietors in Paris who would not cry Capitulons! before one week was out?

“Well, let the proprietors be taken down to their own cellars, and kept there under lock and key, and let them sit on their money-bags till the siege is over!” suggested the advocate of the siege.

“Then you must lock up half the National Guard and the Mobiles,” resumed the other, “for they are full of those money-loving traitors.”

This was not very reassuring. I kept repeating to myself that public opinion at a moment like this was always an alarmist, and that the wisest plan would be to read no papers and to consult nobody, but just wait till events resolved themselves, as they infallibly do, sooner or later, to those who have patience to wait for them, and then act as they decided; but it was no use. I went home in dire perplexity, and began to wish myself in Timbuctoo or the Fiji Islands, or anywhere out of the centre of civilization and the fashions and chronic alarm and discontent. Things went on in this way for another week, the tide advancing rapidly, but so gradually that it was difficult for those on shore to note its progress and be guided by it. No one would own to being frightened, but it was impossible to see the scared faces of the people, as they stood in groups before every new placard setting forth either a fresh order from the Hôtel de Ville or some dubious and disheartening despatch from the seat of war, without feeling that the panic was upon them, and that the complicated problems of the great national struggle had resolved themselves into the immediate question: Shall we stay, or must we fly? When you met a friend in the street, the first, the sole, the supreme salutation was: “Do you believe in the siege? Are you going to stay?” The obduracy of the Parisians in refusing to believe in the siege up to the very last moment was certainly one of the strangest phases of the siege itself. They were possessed by a blind faith in the sacredness and inviolability of their capital, and they could not bring themselves to believe that all Europe did not look upon it with the same eyes; they thought that Prussia might indeed push audacity so far as to come and sit down before the gates, but beyond that Bismarck would not go; he would not dare; all Europe would stand up and cry shame on him, not out of sympathy for France, but out of sheer selfishness, for Paris was not the capital of France, but of Europe. So the walls were white with proclamations and advertisements and invitations to non-combatants to withdraw, and practical advice to the patriotic citizens whose glorious duty it was soon to be to defend the city; and the great exodus of the so-called poltroons and strangers had begun to pour out, and the much more inconvenient sort of non-combatants, the homeless population of the neighboring villages, poured in—a sorry sight it was to see the poor little ménages, the husband trundling the few sticks of furniture on a hand-cart, with the household cat perched on the top of the pile, while the wife carried a baby and bundle, and a little one trotted on by her side, carrying the canary bird in its painted cage—and still the real, born Parisian said in the bottom of his heart: “It will never come to a siege, they will never dare; England will interfere, Europe will not allow it.”

On the morning of the third of September I went out to make some purchases on the Boulevards. Coming back, I saw the Madeleine draped in black, and a number of mourning-coaches drawn up in ghastly array on the Place. The solemn cortége was descending the last steps. I stood to let it pass, and then cast a glance round to see if there was any one I knew in the crowd. To my surprise I saw Berthe in the midst of a group of several persons who had broken away from the stream, and were standing apart in the space inside the rails; she was talking very emphatically, and the others were listening to her apparently with great interest, and seemed excited by whatever she was telling them. When the crowd had nearly cleared away, I beckoned to her. She ran out to me at once.

“You are the very person I wanted to see,” she said, clutching me by the arm in her vehement way. “I was going straight to your house. I have just been to the Etat Major, and met General Trochu there. He came down on account of despatches that had just come in, and have put them all in a state of terrible consternation. There is not a doubt of it now; the city will be blockaded in ten days from this. The Prussians are within as many days’ march from us. I thought of you immediately, and I asked the general what you ought to do; he said by all means to go, and within forty-eight hours; after that the rails may be cut from one moment to another; he was very emphatic about it, and said it would be the maddest imprudence of you to remain; there is a terrible time before us, and no one should stay in Paris who could leave. Of course, you will leave at once.”

I was too much taken aback to say what I would do. The news was so bewildering. I had never looked upon the siege as the impossible joke it had been so long considered, neither did I share the infatuation of the Parisians about the inviolability of Paris in the eyes of Europe, and for the last fortnight we had come to expect the siege as almost a certainty, that was now only a question of time, and yet we were as much startled by this cool official announcement of it as if the thing had never been seriously mentioned before.

“I don’t know what I will do,” I said; “if we had nerves equal to it, it would be the most fearfully interesting experience to go through.”

“No doubt,” assented Berthe; “but it is an experience that will tax the strongest nerves; of that you may be sure; and unless one has duties to keep one here, I think it would be mad imprudence, as the general said, to run the risk.”

“You mean to leave, of course?” I said.

“No; I mean to stay. I am pretty sure of my nerves; besides, as a Frenchwoman, I have a duty to perform; I must bear my share of the common danger; it would be cowardly to fly; but with you it is different. I don’t think you would be justified in remaining for the interest of the thing. Only if you mean to go, you must set about it at once. Have you got your passport?”

“No; I had not gone that far in believing in the siege.”

“It was very foolish,” said Berthe; “all the foreigners we know have got theirs.”

“I will go for it now,” I said. “Come on with me, and let us talk it all over. Are you on foot?”

“No; but I shall be glad of the walk home; I will send away the carriage.”

She did so, and we went on together.

“It is like death,” I said; “no matter how long one is expecting it, it comes like a blow at the last; I can hardly realize even now that the siege is so near. Why, it was only the other day we were listening to those people joking about it all!”

“It was a sorry joke,” said Berthe; “but that is always the way with us; we go on joking to the end. I believe a Frenchman would joke in his coffin if he could speak.”

“And you really mean to stay, Berthe?”

“I do. I shall be of some use, I hope; at any rate, I will try my best. But we can talk of that presently. First about you; are you decided?”

“I cannot say; I feel bewildered,” I replied. “I long to stay, and yet I fear it; it is not the horrors of the siege that would deter me, at least I don’t think it is that; it is the dread of being taken up as a spy.”

She burst out into one of her loud, merry laughs.

“What a ridiculous idea! Why on earth should you be taken for a spy?”

“There is no why or wherefore in the case,” I said, “that is just the alarming part of it; the people are simply mad on the point; they have barked themselves rabid about it, and they are ready to bite every one that comes in their way. Twice on my way into town this morning I heard a hue and cry raised somewhere near, and when I asked what was the matter, a mad dog, or a house on fire, the answer was, ‘Oh, no; it’s an espion they’ve started, and he’s giving them chase!’ One man said to me, half in joke, half in earnest: ‘Madame would do well to hide her fair hair under a wig; it’s dangerous to wear fair hair these times.’ I own it made me feel a little uncomfortable.”

“Well, that is not very comforting for me,” said Berthe, laughing, “my hair is blond enough to excite suspicion.”

“Oh! your nationality is written on your face,” I said; “there is no fear of you ever being mistaken for anything but a Frenchwoman.”

On arriving at the Embassy, we found a throng of British subjects waiting for their passports, and considerably surprised at being kept waiting, and expressing their surprise in no measured terms. Surely they paid dear enough for the maintenance of their embassies abroad to be entitled to prompt and proper attendance when once in a way they called on their representatives for a service of this kind! The attachés were so overworked that it was impossible to avoid the delay? Then why were there not special attachés put on for the extra press of work? And so on. Some nervous old couples were anxious to have the benefit of his excellency’s personal opinion as to the prudence of leaving their plate behind them, and, if he really thought there was a risk in so doing, would he be so kind as to suggest the safest mode of conveying it to London? Also, whether it was quite prudent to leave their money in the Bank of France and other French securities, or whether it would be advisable to withdraw it at once at a loss? Also, whether it would be a wise precaution to hang the Union Jack out of the window, those who had furnished apartments in Paris, or whether the present state of feeling between England and France was such as to make such a step rather dangerous than otherwise? It was not for outsiders to know how things stood between the two countries so as to be able to guide their course in the present crisis, but his excellency being a diplomatist was well informed on the subject, and they would rely implicitly on his judgment and advice, etc.

Berthe and I were so highly entertained by the naïve egotism and infantine stupidity displayed by the various specimens of British nature around us, that we did not find it in our hearts to grumble at being kept waiting nearly two hours.

On reaching the Rond Point of the Champs Elysées, our curiosity was attracted by a silent, scared-looking crowd collected on the sidewalk in front of the Hôtel Meyerbeer. The blinds of the house were closed as if there were a death within, and a few sergents-de-ville were standing at intervals with arms crossed, staring up at the windows. The owner of the hotel had been arrested with great noise the night before, on the strength of some foolish words which had escaped him about the possible entry of the Germans into Paris; but we neither of us knew anything of this, and I asked the nearest sergeant if anything had happened. The man turned round, and, without uncrossing his arms, bent two piercing eyes upon me—piercing is not a figure of speech, they literally stabbed us through like a pair of blades—and, after taking a deliberate view of my person from head to foot, he growled out: “Yes, something has happened. A spy has been found!” There was something so diabolical in the tone of his voice and his expression that it terrified me, and I suppose my terror got into my face and gave it a guilty hue, for another sergent-de-ville who had turned round on hearing his colleague speak, strode up to me, and said nothing, but drove another pair of eyes into me with fierce suspicion. The crowd, attracted by the incident, turned round and stared at me, and I felt as if I had that morning posted a despatch to Bismarck or Bismarck’s master betraying every state secret in France. Despair, however, that makes cowards brave, came to my rescue, and, putting a bold face on it, I said, with extraordinary pluck and coolness:

“Has he been arrested?”

“He has.”

“Ah, it is well!” I observed. And in abject fear of being pounced upon there and then, and done equally well by, I walked away.

When we had got to a safe distance, I looked at Berthe. She was as white as ashes. Indeed, if I looked half as guilty, it is nothing short of a miracle that we were not both seized on the spot and carried off to the Préfecture de Police.

“Let this be a lesson to us never to speak to any one in the street while things are in this state,” said Berthe. “Indeed, the safest way would be not to speak at all, especially in a foreign language, for whatever they don’t understand they set down as German, and to be a German is of course to be a spy.”

After this we walked on in silence. Evidently Berthe no longer looked on my fears as chimerical or matter for laughter, and, puerile as the incident was, I believe it put an end to my hesitation, and decided me to leave Paris with as little delay as possible. She had not realized as much as I had, but the spy-fever had spread so alarmingly within the last few days that what had first been merely a recurring panic was now a fixed idea that had grown to insanity. You might read suspicion and fear written on the faces of the people as you went along. They walked in twos and threes without speaking, glancing timidly on every side, and trying to carry it off with an air of indifference or preoccupation. Every one was in mortal fear of being pointed at and hooted off to the nearest poste. No nationality was safe. A few Englishmen who had fallen victims to the popular mania, and been subjected to a night’s hospitality at the expense of the government, had published their experiences, and described the sort of entertainment prepared for casual visitors, and it was anything but enticing: a salle crammed full of every kind and degree of sinner, from the imaginary spy whipped up on the pavement without proof or witness, to the lowest vagrants of the worst character, all put in for the same offence, and huddled up together without a chair to sit on or air to breathe. Those who were lucky enough to be set free after a short term of durance vile were warmly congratulated by their friends, and retired into private life without further éclat. Some English subjects were simple enough to venture a protest against the unceremonious proceeding on the part of the police, and were politely reminded that the gates of the city were still open and trains ready to convey them to many places of more agreeable manners where the sacred person of a British subject ran no risk of being mistaken for a common mortal, but that, while they choose to remain within the gates, they must take the consequences. And this was, after all, the best answer they could make, and it behooved all sensible British subjects to abide by it. I parted from Berthe at the corner of her own street, and went home to pack up and start the next day by the twelve o’clock train.

I stopped on my way to the station to take leave of her. It was near eleven o’clock. Contrary to my expectations, I found her up and dressed, instead of lolling in dishabille on her couch. But this was not the only surprise awaiting me. The whole appearance of the house was changed. The portières and curtains were taken down; the two salons were emptied of their furniture, and four iron beds placed in the large one and two in the small one. A young woman was busy cutting out bandages with a great basket of linen beside her in Berthe’s room—that soft, Sybarite room, so unused to such company and such occupation. Her face was concealed by a broad-frilled Vendean cap, but on hearing us enter she turned round, and I recognized the bride-widow of the Bréton volunteer.

“We are going to work very hard together,” said Berthe, putting her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Jeannette is to teach me to make poultices, and to dress wounds, and to do all kinds of useful things that one wants to know how to do for the wounded. She is quite an adept in the service, it seems, so I hope our little ambulance will be well managed and comfortable for the dear soldiers.”

Jeannette’s eyes filled with tears, and she took Berthe’s hand and kissed it. Just at this moment François came in to say there were some Sœurs de Charité who wanted to speak to madame. Berthe and Jeannette went out to meet them, and as they left the room Antoinette came in through the dressing-room. She threw up her arms when she perceived me, and looked toward the salon with blank despair in her face.

“The world is upside down,” she said, “everything is going topsy-turvy; what between the war, and the siege, and the rest of it, one doesn’t know what to expect next; but of all the queer things going, the queerest is what is happening in this house. To think of le salon de la comtesse being turned into a hospital! That I should live to see such things! Madame does well to go away; people are all going crazy in this country, and they say it’s catching.”

“So it is, Antoinette,” I said, “and the best thing I can wish you is that you may catch it yourself.”

Berthe wanted to come with me to the station, but I would not let her. I preferred to carry away my last impression of her as I saw her now. She was dressed in a plain dark silk, with a white apron before her, and a soft cambric handkerchief tied loosely round her head; the quaint, half-nunlike dress seemed to me to become her more than the most artistic of M. Grandhomme’s combinations, and as I watched her going from room to room with a duster in her hand, changing the chairs and tables, and working as deftly as an accomplished housemaid, her face flushed with the exercise and bright with a new-found joy, I thought I had never seen her look so beautiful. So we parted in that blue chamber that was henceforth to have a new memory of its own to both of us. Before I had started from my own house, the news of Sedan had come in, and spread like wild-fire. All that I had previously witnessed of popular excitement was cold and calm compared with what I beheld on my way to the station. The city was like a galvanized nightmare, electrifying and electrified into hubbub and madness. Rage and despair were riding the whirlwind with suspicion tied like a bandage on their eyes. The cry of Treason! out-topped all other cries; every man suspected his brother and accused him; the air was filled with curses and threats, and there was no voice strong enough to rise above the popular tumult and subdue it. If there had been, what might not have come of it? If at that moment there had been a voice loud enough to speak to the hurricane, and compel those millions of tongues to be silent and listen to the truth, and then gather them into one great voice that would lift itself up in a unit of harmony and power that would have been heard, not only to the ends of Paris, but to the ends of France, What might not have been done? what might not have been saved? But it was not to be. Nothing came of the discord but discord. The strong hand that might even then have welded all these suicidal elements of hate, and fury, and suspicion into a vigorous bond of action was not forthcoming; the strife was to go on to the bitter end, till the soil of fair France was drenched with blood, and all her energies spent, and her youth and chivalry laid low in bootless butchery.

The blocks that stopped our progress in every street made it a difficult matter to get to the railway, and when we eventually did get there we were a quarter of an hour behind our time. But, as it happened, this was of no consequence; we had to wait another hour before the train started. Meantime the confusion was indescribable. Several wagons full of wounded had arrived by the last train, and a regiment of the line was waiting to start by the next. The Place was filled with soldiers, some were lying at full length fast asleep under the hot noon sun, others were smoking and chatting near their arms that were stacked here and there; some of the poor fellows had been out before, and were only just recovering from their wounds; they looked worn and weak as if hardly able to bear themselves; women were clinging to them, weeping and lamenting; inside the station, travellers were rushing frantically from bureau to bureau; then in despair at ever getting through the crowd that besieged every wicket, they would seize some unlucky porter with a band on his hat, and implore him in heart-rending tones to help them to a ticket, and, when he protested that such a service was not in his power they would belabor him vindictively with hard words, and make another rush at the bureau.

At last we were off. It was an exciting journey, such as I hope never to make again. The lines were encumbered with trains full of wounded coming and troops going, and our pace was regulated with a view to avoid running into those ahead or being run into by those behind. Now we darted on at a terrific speed, the engine wriggling from rail to rail like a snake gone mad; then we would pull up spasmodically and crawl almost at a foot-pace, then off we flew again like a telegram. Trains flashed past us on either side every now and then with a tremendous roar, and soldiers sang out snatches of war-songs, and we cheered them and waved hands and handkerchiefs to them in return. We had started an hour and a quarter behind our time, and we arrived three hours after we were due. For two hours before we reached Boulogne, the danger lights were flashing ahead, red and lurid in the darkness, and it was with something like the feeling of being rescued from a house on fire that we set foot at last on the platform. Once in safety, I was able to look back more calmly on the history of the last fortnight. It seemed to me that I had been standing on a rock, watching the tide roll in, creeping gradually higher and nearer to my standpoint till I felt the cold touch of the water on my feet, and leaped ashore.

And Berthe? She stood out like a bright star transfiguring the dense darkness of the picture. The change I had witnessed in her appeared to me like the promise of other changes, wider, deeper, universal. I had ceased to wonder at the choice she had made; the more I thought of it, the more I felt that she was worthy of it as it was of her, and the only wish I could form for her now was, that she might be strong to persevere unto the end. The course she had adopted was the noblest and the only true one for a Frenchwoman while France was suffering, and struggling, and bleeding to death. While the war-cry and the battle psalm were clanging around, it was not meant for the women of France to sit idly in luxurious ease, and watch the death-struggle of the nation in indifference or mere passive sympathy. We may none of us stand aloof from our brethren in such a crisis, or take refuge in cowardly neutrality. Neutrality in the brotherhood of Freedom is desertion, treachery. We have each our appointed post in the battle, and we cannot desert it without being traitors. We must all fight somehow. Not of necessity with iron or steel, but we must fight. Moses had neither bow nor arrow nor javelin when he got up on the mountain and watched with uplifted arms the conflict in the valley below, but yet he was not neutral. So to the end of time it must be with all of us. We must fight somehow; we may never abide in selfish peace or a sense of isolated security while the brethren around are at war; whithersoever the battle goes, to victory or defeat, to glory or humiliation, we must take our share in it, and let our hearts go on fighting faithfully to the end. We must love the combatants through good and evil alike; through the smoke and din we must discern every ennobling incident of the struggle, such as there abounds on every battle-field in every land, seeing all things in their true proportions, shutting our hearts inexorably to despair, making them wide to endless sympathy with the good, to inexhaustible pity for the wicked. The smoke must not blind us; the crash and the roar must not deafen us; through the agony of souls, despair, and hate, and sin, we must have our vision clear and strong to recognize the loveliness of virtue, the divine beauty of sacrifice, the infinite possibilities of repentance, the joy of the conquerors, the sweetness of the kiss of peace. Loving all love. Hating all hate. We must see angels outnumbering fiends in incalculable degree, light triumphing over darkness, and the breath of purity healing the blue corruption of the world.

TO BE CONTINUED.