Chapter 12 : Voyage to Exile

Chapter 12. Voyage to Exile

While I waited for deportation, I was kept in the Auberive prison. Once again I can see that prison, with its enormous cell blocks and its narrow white paths running under the pines. There a gale is blowing, and I can see the lines of silent women prisoners with their scarves folded at their necks and wearing white headdresses like peasants. In front of the pines burdened with snow during the long winter of 1872-73, the tired women prisoners passed slowly by, their wooden shoes ringing a sad cadence on the frozen earth.

My mother was still strong then, and I waited for my deportation to New Caledonia without seeing what I have seen since: the terrible and silent anguish under her calm appearance. She was staying at her sister’s in Clefmont, which was very near the Auberive prison, and I knew she was well. She brought me packages of cakes and cookies the way she used to do when I was a student at Chaumont.

How many little gifts her old hands sent me, even in the last year she was alive. We revolutionaries bring so little happiness to our families, yet the more they suffer, the more we love them. The rare moments we have at home make us intensely happy, for we know that those moments are transient and our loved ones will miss them in the future.

According to the few pages remaining from my journal of the trip to New Caledonia, we left Auberive on Tuesday, 5 August 1873, between six and seven in the morning. The night before we left my mother came to say goodbye, and I noticed for the first time that her hair was turning white.

When I left for exile I wasn’t bitter about deportation because it was better to be somewhere else and so not see the collapse of our dreams. After what the Versailles government had done, I expected to find the savages in the South Pacific good, and perhaps I would find the New Caledonian sun better than the French one.

We were put on a train and while we were crossing through Langres on the way to Paris, five or six metalworkers with bare arms black up to their elbows came out of their workshop. One white-haired worker flourished his hammer and let out a yell that the noise of the railroad carriage’s rolling wheels almost drowned out. “Long live the Commune!” he cried. Something like a promise to stay worthy of his salute filled my heart.

That evening we arrived in Paris in a prison carriage. As we were being transported from the Gare de l’Est to the Gare d’Orl£ans, I peered out and could see the little shop on the rue Saint-Honor6 where my mother planned to live with a relative after my departure. We left almost immediately from the Gare d’Orleans, and the next day around four in the afternoon we arrived near the Atlantic coast at the prison of la Rochelle.

On August 8 we were put aboard a vessel, the Comlte , to go the last thirty kilometers to Rochefort. Aboard the Comtte we were treated like a vanquished enemy, not like evildoers, and some friendly people in small boats followed the Comete the entire way. We answered their salute from afar. As my last farewell I wanted to wave a red scarf I had saved since the Commune, but it was buried deep in my baggage, hidden from any search, and on deck I had only my black veil.

In the harbor at Rochefort we were put aboard the old warship Virginie. On Sunday, August 10, the crew let out the sails and weighed anchor while they sang the old war songs of Brittany. The rhythm of their songs multiplied their strength, and the cable rose while the men sweated. Their harmony became a force without which it would have been impossible to raise the anchor.

Until Monday we skirted the coasts of France. Then came the open sea. At first two or three ships were in sight on the horizon; then only one; then none at all. Two seabirds accompanied us for some time, but toward the fourteenth the last large ones disappeared. On the sixteenth the waves were strong. The wind blew a tempest, and the sun made a thousand flashes on the water. Two rivers of diamonds seemed to slide down the flanks of the ship.

It was really my ship then, alone under the heavens! Except for the trip between Chaumont and Paris, I had never traveled. Now I was taking a long voyage on a warship; I would never have dared to dream of such a stroke of good luck, especially with the state paying the cost. It was true that ultimately the cost was high: our people by the thousands fallen in the slaughter and mothers who believed they would never see us again. Still, to me, the sea was the most beautiful of spectacles, even though from infancy pictures and tales and especially my imagination had filled my mind with the ocean. I had dreamed of the ocean the way it truly was, and now that the reality had appeared, I was charmed and magnetized by its immensity. In my imagination I had loved the sea all my life; now I loved it as I really saw it.

For my first toys my grandfather had made me boats, beautiful little ones whose sails could be clewed up with cables of thick thread. In a poem about my childhood, I wrote about those toy boats my grandfather made.

As my first toys, he made me some boats.

Ships of great beauty with real sails and masts,

And we floated them through the cool of the pond.

We sailed them through hazards of monstrous brown toads,

Which sometimes turned and leaped on their decks

Down near the old elm where honeybees swarmed

In the hot summer sun, midst the roses of Provins.

How many white sails I saw as a child.

They swooped o’er the waves in my dreams of the night,

There was one in the starlight that floated alone,

A soaring white bird against blackest horizon.

How great was its beauty! I painted it brightly,

And stood struck with awe at its forest of rigging.

My grandfather said: “I will build you a ship,

A ship of great beauty with its heart made of oak,

For it is a frigate.”...

But though he made me many lesser craft he never made that dream frigate with its oaken heart, and we never set it afloat in the pond near the red rosebushes with bees flying over its masts. He never built it, and yet on the real waves, after the defeat of the Commune, I recognized my dream frigate; it was the Virginie.

Anyone can try to explain this childhood dream. When I saw the ship from my imagination appear in the real world, I had already seen too many strange things to be moved by that new coincidence. I have seen things that made me think of Edgar Allan Pe or Baudelaire or the narrators of strange events; here I simply note that the Virginie breasting the waves under full sail was the very ship I had seen in my dreams.

On August 19 a black ship like the legendary Naglfar , the spectral ship of the North, came into view, sometimes crowding on sail and coming nearer, sometimes slipping back. It began to look as if it were lying in wait, and we wondered if its crew were liberators. It followed us in an intermittent fashion for two days. On the evening of the second day our vessel did some practice maneuvers and fired two blank cannon shots, and the strange ship faded into the night. For a little while longer it watched from a greater distance, its white sails shining like stars just over the horizon against the depths of shadow. Then it returned no more.

On August 22 sea swallows perched on our yardarms. We were in sight of Palma [sic: Las Palmas], Grand Canary Island, whose white houses seemed to grow out of the water. From the ships we could see mountains and more mountains, piled up and mixed with the clouds. From the anchorage at Las Palmas we could see some savage rocks, two forts, Luz and Santa Catarina [sic: Catalina], and some ruins which we were told were those of a customshouse. To the north, on a hill overlooking the bay, was the citadel.

The inhabitants came out to the ship in barges laden with enormous grapes, and they acquainted us with the monetary system of the Canaries. An ounce of gold or quadruple is eighty-four francs eighty centimes, a quantity of money none of us needed to worry about. Then there are quarters, eighths, and sixteenths of piasters and pincettes and demi-piecettes. There is also the real, nine of which are equal to a five-franc piece, and still others.

More interesting was the type of inhabitant. Two among them were magnificent. May science forgive me, but after looking in a number of scientific books, I don’t think I’m mistaken; the natives were the Guanches, and their ancestors had lived in Atlantis. Perhaps the Canaries are the remains of Atlantis. Why not? The tormented ground there still shakes.

On the twenty-fourth we raised anchor at 9 a.m. We followed the reef and kept seeing mountain peaks without number and without end. In the deep gorges between them were forests or plantations of a somber green with delicate green spots. The bays lay open to the northwest wind. To the west we could see Tenerife in the distance and farther still we could see what appeared to be a blue summit lost in the sky, but we decided it must be masses of clouds.

I can smell the bitter odor of the waves. I can hear the organlike sound of the wind in the sails and the clatter of clearing for action and maneuvers. I can hear the whistles trilling as the sailors heaved up the anchor, snubbed it, and made it fast. I can hear the rough chafing of the cable and metal being bumped and the chants of the sailors who pushed at the capstan.

I see the ship tacking, and I see our ports of call, the Canaries and then Santa Catarina in Brazil before we turned southeastward. The sailors spread the topsails and hauled in the sheets to hoist them. Up on the yards the sailors let out the reefs, the canvas caught the wind and pulled away from the mast, and the land disappeared behind us.

We exchanged many letters and poems across the grates of the cages in which we were confined. Such actions were forbidden, but the guards did not enforce that rule. Because they treated us with consideration, we did not break their other regulations.

Until after my return from exile I saved much of that shipboard correspondence, but it has since been destroyed. The only fragments I still have are a few scraps of poetry I wrote and a wonderful poem that Henri Rochefort wrote to me, “To My Neighbor, Starboard Aft.” I miss those scraps of paper on which the deportees wrote their simple letters and verses. There was one very pretty dedication that a comrade, a zealous Protestant, wrote on the flyleaf of some pious book that was scented with myrrh and cinnamon. I tore out the dedication and kept it, but I threw the book overboard. Some letters—a great many of them— were full of memories of those we left behind us. Those persons would be less free under the surge of the triumphant reaction in France than we would be in the Caledonian deserts.

The Virginie sailed on, ever southeastward. The sea was calm as an oilcloth, peacefully reflecting the shadow of the high yards. Then came the stormy seas of the Cape of Good Hope. On the mountains of waves all white with foam, all black in their depths, the eastern sun rose. At night millions of phosphorescent stars made constellations in the waves. How magnificent it all was!

There were albatrosses, the poor albatrosses that beat their wings against the ship or that the sailors caught with a hook. After snaring them, the sailors hung them up by their beaks until they died; any other method of killing them might let drops of blood spot the whiteness of their valuable feathers. Sadly, the albatrosses would keep their heads up as long as possible, rounding their swans’ necks, prolonging their pitiful agony for a moment or two. Then with one last grimace of horror they opened wide their great, black-lidded eyes and died.

I wrote a poem to them:

Soar high in brilliant whiteness, birds,

Fly high above the roaring waves,

And beat your shining wings around

The tiny ship that glides away.

Float in a dream on the foaming sea,

Float like a scattered, roving fleet,

Gleam in the light of the shining sun,

For soon our men will capture you.

Men to glut their petty vices,

Defiling beauty, want your feathers.

They mean to torture you to death.

Poor flying birds, be fearful!

That sort of death is not given only to an albatross. Some men kill other men the same way, being very careful not to let the drops of blood soil either them or their victims.

The Virginie sailed through polar seas far south of the Cape of Good Hope, and the air itself was frozen under a black sky in which morning mingled with evening. With every swell the vessel creaked. The sailors sang old airs from Brittany as a magical chant to keep the cold from overtaking them, so that in the midst of polar cold, I smelled the breath of Brittany filled with the scent of genista in bloom.

Finally as we sailed across the Indian Ocean, the terrible cold slackened, and for week after week we sailed across the empty seas bound for New Caledonia.