Part 18

“Faire le bien Récolter l’ingratitude Se confier à Dieu.”

7 A FIRST BOOK—ON NOTHING CERTAIN A YEAR

Now that McClure’s was really started, I felt that on what I could do for them and the two or three articles in which I had interested Scribner’s I could live, and that I might drop everything else and devote the bulk of my time to my real business—a study of the life of Madame Roland. She had never been out of my mind. Soon after my arrival I had found to my joy that my daily walks to and from the National Library, where I was spending most of my time, could be laid through the very Quarter in which her father had carried on his trade of goldsmith and past the house in which she had been born, the church where she had taken her first communion, the prison where she had spent her last days, along the route she followed to the guillotine.

“What luck, what luck,” I used to say, “that I should be taking the very walks she took!” It was amazing how little things had changed. The house where Madame Roland was born still stands at the western point of the Ile de la Cité looking down on the statue of Henry IV and the busy Seine, and to the right the Pont-Neuf, in her day the heart of Paris and still to me one of its most fascinating spots.

As she slowly came to life something more important began to take shape, something which had been little more than a set of dates and events in my mind. I began to see the Revolution already well on its way when she was born; I saw it rising around her, sucking her in, using her when she thought it had gone far enough and should check its excesses, throwing her over without her head while true to type it went the whole way, finally falling exhausted into the hands of a dictator equipped with guns.

The physical scars of all this long train of violence could be seen on my daily walks or studied in the Musée Carnavalet where Paris has gathered documents and relics of what she has destroyed as well as of what she has achieved. But besides the scars of Madame Roland’s time were other scars dating from the centuries, scars of revolutionary outbreaks of the same type hardly to be distinguished from those of the period I was trying to visualize; and the more you knew of these explosions, the more they seemed to fit together. You could not bound Madame Roland’s Revolution as I had supposed. What I had called the French Revolution was only an unusually violent episode in the lifelong struggle of Paris to preserve herself as a free individual, the slave of no man or group of men. Revolution had always been her last resort in making herself what she was, in forcing kings to do her bidding, tolerating them when they fed her well, beautified her, protected her, but throwing them over when they asked too much money for the job they did.

The marks were all over the city. How could I understand Madame Roland until I understood the elemental force which for centuries had been sweeping Paris in big or little gusts? Did these who sought to loosen the force suppose that they created it or could control it, once loosened? Had Madame Roland, confident as she had been of her ability to act as Providence, frank as she was in saying that no role but that of Providence was suited to her powers, been anything more than a revolutionary tool and victim?

It had always been at work and still was. I must find out about it, and it looked at the moment as if I were going to have a good opportunity to watch a revolutionary revival—of what proportions no man could tell.

The Panama affair had disgusted all self-respecting Frenchmen. “Is the Republic to be a failure?” they were asking. Nothing so gives heart to the leaders of lost causes, disappointed political groups, advocates of panaceas and particularly to the radical-minded, as a rousing political scandal. Panama stirred all the parties of France to action—Bourbons and Bonapartists, extreme conservatives, socialists of all the many varieties, and particularly the anarchists.

There were four groups of the latter, no one of which would have anything to do with any of the others. It was the Independents who now went into action. Members of this group worked alone, letting not even their fellows know what they had in mind. A branch of the order existed in the United States, and it was one of them, Alexander Berkman, who attempted this same year, 1892, to assassinate Henry Frick in Pittsburgh. The Independent who acted first in Paris was Jules Ravachol by name, a man some thirty-three years old, a dyer by trade, with a courageous but not a criminal face. So I thought when, a little later, I secured his photograph and measurements from the Criminal Identification Bureau for McClure’s Magazine.

Ravachol began by blowing up various houses. It was like a tocsin. All over France similar outrages followed, and they continued at intervals for two or more years—the crowning one a bomb thrown in the Chamber of Deputies in December of 1893 by a notorious anarchist known as Auguste Vaillant. Several Deputies and eighty or more spectators in the gallery were wounded seriously. It was a ghastly affair.

The outbreaks and the rumors of outbreaks as well as the actual destruction had a bad effect on the nerves of many of the French. There was Alphonse Daudet.

Madame Daudet had offered to get me a pensée for the collection I was making for McClure’s Magazine, and arranged for me to call for the copy. After we had tea she took me to the library to see how “Alphonse was getting on.” It was my first glimpse of him: a little man, with a shock of straight black hair which stood out rather ferociously at the moment, evidently from running his fingers through it. His face was pale, his eyes astonishingly black and bright. He had lost two or three teeth, and the remaining ones were not very good. He was terribly excited. He had not finished his pensée, he said, because he had just had a visit from an anarchist. The servant had let in a man who had demanded twenty francs to buy a wagonload of dynamite to blow up the Hôtel de Ville. He grew more and more excited as he talked.

“I really expected the man to kill me,” he said, “and I got out this revolver which I always keep in the drawer.” And he pulled it out to show it to me. “A pretty affair,” he said, “if while you two were visiting in there a tragedy had gone on in here.”

I so shared the general nervousness that, more than once when I saw a man on the omnibus carrying a package, I feared a bomb and abruptly descended; yet along with all my nervousness I was always nosing around, hoping to see a bomb go off. It seemed to me that was my journalistic duty, but I never saw anything more than the ruins they had caused. I did see a pretty good revolution, one that had all the earmarks that I had been finding in my attempted study of Revolution. It was in July of 1893. This time it was youth in revolt, the youth of the Latin Quarter and the Beaux Arts. From start to finish the revolt went on practically under my windows.

The Annual Ball of the Beaux Arts in the winter of 1893 had scandalized Paris. As I remember, the exhibit which outraged was a lady who promenaded with no other covering than a mosquito net. The protest finally reached the Chamber of Deputies, where a member—Berenger—took it up in a serious way and proposed a restrictive law which angered the students. It was, they said, an interference with their right to amuse themselves. Immediately long and picturesque monômes—single lines of men, one hand on the shoulder of the man in front, the other grasping a hand of the one behind—threaded their way up and down the boulevards, particularly in the vicinity of the Luxembourg, chanting at the top of their voices, “Conspuez Berenger!” “Conspuez Loze [Chief of Police]!” “Down with the puritans!”

The demonstration began on a Saturday, and that night a great crowd centered in a café in my neighborhood. The place was packed inside and out with youths noisier and noisier as the hours went on. Finally the crowd became so unruly that a squadron of police charged them. There was a great hubbub and in the mêlée somebody hurled one of the heavy white match boxes which were used on all the tables in the Latin Quarter restaurants—a dangerous missile. It hit an innocent spectator who had come to see the fun—a young man of twenty-two or twenty-three from the other side of the river—and killed him. The students were wild with rage, and all that night and all next day they tore up and down the streets, pulling up trees, knocking over kiosks, breaking windows.

The shopkeepers of Paris, having the experience of centuries of revolutionary outbreaks behind them, knew when to retire; and before Monday night the heavy wooden shutters with which they protect their fronts were all up, their doors closed, and the Quarter was alive with soldiers and mounted police. The center of the disturbance that day, however, was not the Latin Quarter but the streets around the Chamber of Deputies, where a great band of angry students kept up a tumult. There were funny incidents. A big group of deputies came out to look over the demonstration, and on the instant the air rang with the jingling of hundreds of big copper sous pitched on the pavements to cries of “Panama, Panama.”

The Dahomans were pets of Paris in those days, a picturesque addition to the population. Handsomer creatures never were seen. It happened a carriageful, naked to the waist, attempted to pass through the crowd. At once the students set up the cry, “Berenger, Berenger, bring ’em a figleaf, bring ’em a figleaf.”

By Tuesday the Latin Quarter had begun to look sinister. The inevitable had happened.

A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who start it. Advocates of all sorts of systems and causes join it, seize it, if one of them can produce a real leader. A students’ revolt can easily become an anarchist raid, with looting and arson on the side by professional lawbreakers, who always come out of their hiding places when anarchy breaks out. As the to-be-expected invasion of the Latin Quarter from without began, destruction increased. Omnibuses were seized and, at strategic points, piled up as barricades.

But the rioters never succeeded in making a stand. Steadily and quietly, night and day, platoons of mounted police moved up and down the boulevards and into the Quarter. I tried at first to go on my usual round, hoping to learn something of revolutionary technique, but after I had been caught in a crowd the cavalry was driving from the Place de la Sorbonne, had heard bullets whistling over my head, been forced to take refuge in the portal of the church, I was content to stay at home. However, there was excitement enough there.

Our street was narrow and steep. When the cavalry charged, it would fill up with the rioters. The movement was amazingly quiet—no shouting, no shots, the only noise the clatter of the horses’ feet as they drove the mass ahead.

This invasion of our street produced panic among the foreigners in the house. There were a couple of middle-aged American women on the floor below me out seeing the world; but they had not bargained for a Revolution, and during the three or four days our Revolution was going on they shut themselves night and day in their room.

The Egyptians were in a worse panic. They whispered horrible stories of what happened in revolutions, and one night when fires had been set in our neighborhood and the firemen were out, they were sure we were all going to be burned alive. “Here we are, fourth floor,” cried one of them, “too high up to get out. We’ll all be dead by morning.”

A week was as long as the students could hold out in the torrid weather. There were too many cavalry, too many soldiers, too alert a police force, and also there were the apaches, the anarchists. It was no longer their revolution. They gave up; and by the end of the week kiosks were replaced, trees replanted, windows and doors opened, and we were all going on in our normal way.

Over, all quiet, nevertheless it was a pretty fine little revolution while it lasted. Was it not like Ravachol and Vaillant, a symptom, the kind of symptom by which the rise of the revolutionary fever always announces itself? Were there those who would nourish these symptoms as carefully as Madame Roland and her friends had nourished them in her day? If so, you would get your explosion. And for what good, I was asking myself.

Madame Roland had lost her head because she was not content with a first Revolution which had given the country a Constitution. She wanted to get the King and Queen and the highborn of all varieties out of the way. She wanted a Republic. She lost her head to those who were not satisfied with getting King and Queen out of the way, who wanted her and her followers out of the way as soon as they began to cry for order. Her Republic had collapsed under Napoleon Bonaparte. There had come a return to the Bourbon, then a Republic, then a return to a Bonaparte and again her Republic. But was this corrupt and vulgar Republic I was hearing about any better than the corrupt and scandalous court she hated and helped overthrow? Was the affair of the diamond necklace any worse than the affair of Panama? Was the Bastille a more ghastly prison than the spot where they were now sending political prisoners—the Devil’s Island of the Tropics?