Chapter 7. The Decaying Empire

The city of Paris condemned our school building on the rue du Chateau- d’Eau. Mme Vollier hoped in vain that after its demolition we would get an indemnity which would let us establish a day school in the suburbs. Julie had received a small sum from her family, and she struck out on her own. Relinquishing her share in the partnership to us, she bought a day school in faubourg St. Antoine; I chose not to go with her, but on holidays we got together, and on Thursday evenings I gave music lessons at her school.

My mother sold all her remaining land except the vineyard to give me enough money to buy a day school in Montmartre. The poor woman, how little she got back for that money, and what sacrifices she and Grandmother imposed on themselves to raise it! Mme Vollier and I lived in the day school. Her sons gave her an annuity, and gradually the number of our pupils increased, so that for schoolmistresses we were nearly comfortable. What plans we made. Those were good times, when my grandmother was still living, and I continually got good news about her and my mother. For a few brief years, joy filled my heart.

But then Mme Vollier died. One evening Julie and Adele Esquiros had come over to dine with us. It was a holiday, and all four of us were very warm in our little room high up. We spoke gaily, especially Mme Vollier. I had never seen her so cheerful. She had just received her pension, so we were momentarily rich, and we; were even talking about sending a little gift to the Haute-Marne. Julie had brought something to eat from the country, and Adele was responsible for some dainties.

On the open piano, the fat, black cat paced back and forth on the keys, listening to the tune which his paws produced. His head was raised, and earlier he had lapped up a whole bowl of coffee cream.

I told the others how, the day before, I had pasted a republican poster on the back of a policeman. I had been holding the poster, and there was nowhere else to put it.

Mme Vollier told us that, in the best interests of the household, she had collected all the keys and put them in her pocket. She made them clink in her pocket with the same smile in her eyes I used to see in my grandmother’s and that I had seen so many times in my mother’s when she snatched something back from my little larcenies.

Our friends applauded Mme Vollier, and we laughed still more when, full of remorse, I gave her back the purse I had stolen from the chest of drawers that morning. Almost nothing was missing from it. In the midst of all this happiness some kind of terrible grief took hold of me. We were so happy it couldn’t last, but I did my best to try to ignore that foreboding.

Our friends left fairly late, and I walked with them as far as the omnibus on the rue Marcadet. The night was black and sad, and in this darkness a dog was howling. As I was returning, he began to follow me. It was chance that put this sinister beast on my track; he was an evil portent.

When I got back to school I was careful to avoid letting Mme Vollier see the sadness sweeping over me. She was still gay, but not for long. That night she had her second stroke.

Her portrait is near my bed, opposite a bouquet of red carnations. Her sons gave me a share of memorabilia as if I were their sister. After her death a great sadness forced its way into my heart, but there was no time to indulge my suffering. The Empire became more threatening as it neared its end, and we became more determined.

I kept my school going. Mile Caroline L’Homme, the first school¬ mistress who had established herself in Montmartre, and who had, she rightly claimed, taught the whole neighborhood to read, had become sick and old. She still had a few pupils, and one day she brought them to me and established herself in my school. She was exhausted.

She was like one of the legends of the North. She appeared to be one of the Norns, so quietly did she walk. Pale, her long white hair fastened by a large needle, she exhaled a spirit of something prophetic and fateful. There was no person more charming than Mile L’Homme. She was so sweet and at the same time so proud, and now she too is dead.

Then my grandmother died. My poor mother had so few peaceful days. Broken by the death of her mother, she came to Montmartre, but when she came the Revolution was imminent, so I left her alone during many long evenings. Afterwards it was days, then months, then years. Can the mothers of revolutionaries be happy? I loved her so much that I will be happy only when I go to meet her in the earth where we shall sleep.

Of all the schoolmistresses I have known, one of the most keen to collect all of the details of science was Mile Poulin in Montmartre. Although her health had been undermined by consumption for a long time, she no longer felt it. She kept busy piling up the greatest amount of knowledge possible so that she could take it with her to her grave. At the very end of the Empire, Mile Poulin and I united our two schools into a new school at 24, rue Houdon. Mile Poulin lived for only a brief time, and by coincidence I saw her tomb one last time at the climax of the fighting in May 1871.

I had met Mile Poulin at the rue Hautefeuille. Many of us schoolmistresses continued our educations at the center where various activities took place. We had free courses in elementary teaching, professional courses, readings to mothers of families, and a night course for young people who had to work. I taught a great number of those poor children there. Young as they were they had to work all day, and if it hadn’t been for the center on the rue Hautefeuille, they would never have been in a class. Instruction continued up to ten o’clock at night, and when I got out even the bookstores were closed. Under the Empire those women who were either young teachers or were preparing themselves to be¬ come teachers were eager for this learning. They had only what they had been able to snatch here and there, and at the rue Hautefeuille they became even more thirsty for knowledge and liberty. Many good friend¬ ships were born there.

It was comfortable there in the evenings, both in our little groups and when a large meeting occurred. When big meetings took place, we left the floor of the hall to the strangers, and our little group of enthusiasts gathered near the instructor’s desk, where a skeleton and other things we liked were kept. From that spot near the desk we could see and hear much better than if we had tried to join the mob in the room.

The rue Hautefeuille overflowed with life and youth. We lived in the future, in the time when people would be more than beasts of burden whose work and blood other people made use of. At the rue Hautefeuille in the long night of the Empire we had glimpses of a better world. Five or six years before the Siege, it provided an untainted refuge in the middle of imperial Paris, a place impervious to the stench of the charnel house, although sometimes our history courses roared out the Marseillaise and smelled of gunpowder.

Somehow we were always able to find the time to attend courses several days a week. There were lectures on physics, chemistry, and even law. People tried out new methods of teaching, too. In addition to listening to others, we found time to give lectures ourselves. I had never understood how time could be so elastic. We didn’t waste a minute, and our days were stretched to fit so that midnight seemed early.

I remember a tall old man with white hair explaining how useful stenography could be in teaching. Using stenographic techniques would allow many things to be abbreviated. People have so little time for study, and they waste so much of it.

Several of us began spasmodic studies for the baccalaureate again. My former passion for algebra engrossed me once more. I was able to verify, and this time with certainty, that if a person isn’t an idiot (at least all the time), he can get along in mathematics without a teacher. The trick is to leave no formula behind without knowing it and no problem behind without finding its answer.

A frenzy for knowledge possessed us. It was refreshing to sit two or three times a week on student benches ourselves, side by side with our own most advanced pupils, whom we sometimes brought with us. They listened happily and proudly beside us, scarcely thinking about the time.

The more excited we got about all these things, the more we lapsed into the high spirits of schoolchildren. We had good times, and often we resembled students more than teachers.

When we were sad, we played jokes, for laughter cuts the shadows. One vacation day, I went to an employment agency to get a job as a cook at the home of some bourgeois family. After the first dinner I planned to cook for them, they would have fired me pretty rapidly. The employment agency was next to the Bastille on a fourth floor. Of course I had no papers, so I told the employment agent I had forgotten them. When I gave him the names of the imperial gangsters I claimed to have worked for, he got giddy. He ended up making me feel sorry for him, and I gave up the project; I flung it all in his face, laughing till my sides hurt.

Why are people so entranced with name-dropping? That was the lesson I gave that poor devil, and it would have been worth the trouble to go put pepper in the sugared dishes of some bourgeois soul used to cordon bleu cooks. Once the employment agent understood what was happening, he began to rail at me. Still laughing at him I left, after I warned him against being too easily “bonaparted” with name-dropping.

I recall another incident. One evening at the rue Hautefeuille we had been learning Danefs method of musical notation. As in England and Germany the notes in Danel’s method are represented by letters of the alphabet, but with the difference that they are written without a staff. We left the rue Hautefeuille late, and because there were no more busses, we were returning to our homes on foot. Some idiot began to follow me, walking up on his toes with long heronlike legs. At first it amused me to watch this shadow of a bird glide along under the streetlights.

He kept repeating the foolish remarks people use when they don’t know if you will answer them. I became impatient, and that spoiled the impression I got of his being some kind of fantastic bird running around on his long legs. I looked him straight in the face, and in my loudest voice I began to descend the Danel scale: D, B, L, S, F, M, R, D!

The effect was overwhelming.

Perhaps it was the somewhat masculine accent, or perhaps it was the strange syllables formed by the letters. I never found out. The bird disappeared.

Another time I was returning home on foot fairly late, and I had on a long cloak which enveloped me completely. I was wearing a sort of wide hat made out of shaggy cloth which cast a lot of shadows on my face, and brand-new ankle boots from the pawnshop. For some reason the heels made a lot of noise. The newspapers recently had been writing a lot about nocturnal attacks. Some good bourgeois heard my boots ringing, and being unable to make out my exact form because of my cloak and hat, he began to run with such fear that it gave me the idea of following him for a bit to scare him properly.

He went along, looking around to see if anyone would come to help him. With the black night and the deserted streets, the bourgeois was scared witless, and I was having a really good time. He lengthened his stride as much as he could. I kept to the shadows and made my heels strike even louder, because that noise was what kept up his fright. I don’t know what district we had come to when I let the bourgeois go, yelling at him: “Must you be so stupid?”

That night I returned home very late, or rather very early in the morning, and I was no longer laughing. In the same night, after I had scared the bourgeois idiot, I had seen the people who live off victims, and people who are the victims themselves. It was an ordinary night of what people call civilized society.

Mme Vollier was still living then, and when I got home she scolded me for my lateness, in spite of my daily precaution of setting back the clock. The poor woman had been worrying about me as my mother would have done, and she told me how tired I would feel the next day.

As she was talking to me I composed in my mind a few verses about the bandits and girls I had spoken with that night, and with whom I have often spoken since.

Criminals and Whores

Discerned in the dark of ill-lit streets,

The sublimely wretched shamble through the night,

Namelessly slide past and cast no shadow,

Past obscured doorways at the edge of light For other phantoms to erase.

I have seen criminals and whores And spoken with them. Now I inquire If you believe them made as now they are To drag their rags in blood and mire,

Preordained, an evil race?

You, to whom all men are prey,

Have made them what they are today.

No one comes into the world with a knife in his hand to stab others, or with a card in her hand to sell herself. No one comes into the world with a club ready to be a cop, and no one comes into the world carrying a minister’s portfolio, so that he may be captured by the dizziness of power and drag nations down.

No bandit who could not have been an honest man. No honorable man who is not capable of committing crimes.

Among the people associated with the rue Hautefeuille was Jules Favre. At this time he was a true republican leader, but after the fall of Napoleon III he became one of those who murdered Paris. Power would poison him as it poisons all those who are clothed in that cloak of Nessus.

In those years during the twilight of the Empire that same Jules Favre was like a father, and he treated us with a father’s kindness. Many times I used his being a chairman of our association as a pretext for taking people to him who needed a lawyer’s opinion and couldn’t pay for it.

One day, I remember I took him an old woman who thought she was being persecuted, and he had to try to reassure her. Dealing with her cost him a lot of time. I was with her in his office, and Favre came over to tell me how annoyed he was with me. The obtuse angle made by his forehead and his chin closed into a right angle, a bad sign.

“This is too much,” he muttered to me while the old woman kept curtsying to him and telling him how she had been persecuted for twenty years.

I can still see the spot where that took place; Favre and I were whispering near a large vase his voters had given him. An uncontrollable desire to laugh took hold of me, and I did. I laughed so heartily that the right angle of Favre’s profile was transformed into its usual obtuse angle again, and his eyes shone. He couldn’t stop himself from laughing, too.

Still curtsying, the old woman left saying, “Thank you very much. Till another time. See you soon.”

Another chairman of our association was Eugene Pelletan, a republi¬ can member of Bonaparte’s assembly. His eyes, sunk under thick, gray eyebrows, glowed like coals and gave him a strange appearance. He reminded me of Nicolas Flamel or Cagliostro or some other alchemist out of the legends. It was when he was speaking from the desk at the rue Hautefeuille that we especially liked to huddle near the skeleton and observe events from there, listening, caught up in the poetry of science, caught up in his words on liberty, his love of the Republic, and his hatred for the Caesars.

Under this inspiration we began to write many works that are lost today. I wrote an enormous manuscript that I entitled The Wisdom of a Madman. Pelletan was then our chairman, and I carried it to him so that he could read it and give me his opinion. Since then I have come to understand how patient he must have been to read that enormous, unintelligible book and to annotate a few passages in it.

“This is not the wisdom of a madman,” he wrote. “One day it will be the wisdom of peoples.”

Bringing that manuscript home, I seemed to walk on air. I reread much of it carefully, but I didn’t have time to revise it. I had to give more and more lessons after class, and The Wisdom of a Madman was laid aside with my other unpublished works. Perhaps I would have looked for a publisher if I hadn’t been so busy.

The last two years before 1871, the rue Hautefeuille was a hotbed of intellectual women. My friend Marie L-wrote page after page, and Jeanne B-and possibly her sister were assumed to have manuscripts in progress. Julie L-and Mile Poulin threw poems to the winds. But prose and verse and music disappeared because we felt so near the drama coming from the street, the true drama, the drama of humanity. The songs of the new epoch were war songs, and there was no room for anything else.

The professional schools, for which we had Jules Simon, an opposition member of the Assembly, to thank, captured all-out enthusiasm. Those schools saved a few handfuls of girls from apprenticeship, and provided them with trades or diplomas.

In the last years of the Empire there was a free professional school on the rue Thevenot. Each of us gave three evenings a week there. The Society for Elementary Education took care of the rent, and it all worked out. One of our professors, a man whom we called Doctor Francolinus, displayed fiendish activity there. Sometimes the police of the Empire gave us the pleasure of attending our classes, and then an hour of lessons would go by quickly, because we put in occasional comments that gave a good clawed swat at Napoleon Ill’s ugly hyena’s mustache.

I taught the literature and ancient geography courses twice a week and Charles de Sivry taught them two other days. We taught them exactly the same way, for Charles and I often had the same ideas. The last idea we had was for a piano whose hammers had been replaced by little bows to give a piano something of the passion that violins have. I wrote an article about this, and it was published in the Progres musical under the name of Louis Michel. I have often noticed that when I sent a periodical material signed Louise Michel it was a hundred to one it wouldn’t be printed, but if I signed it Louis Michel or Enjolras, a pseudonym I used, the chances of publication were greater.

What Charles and I taught in the courses on literature was the utility of examining cities and peoples in terms of childhood, youth, and decay. That is the real way it happens, although people think it is a romanesque approach. The lives of individuals and the history of humanity show a parallel progression. In every individual’s life you can see the same transformations that you can see in our history, in the story of our collective existence that spans the centuries.

Nevertheless, however aware a person is of those centuries-long rhythms of change, he still lives inside his own epoch. It is inside his own epoch that he feels, suffers, and is happy; and all the love, all the hate, all the harmony, all the power that he possesses—he must throw all this into his surroundings. One person is nothing and yet part of that which is everything—the Revolution.

And so here is Louise Michel. She is a menace to society, for she has declared a hundred times that everyone should take part in the banquet of life. What would be the pleasure of riches if one were unable to compare one’s own well-fed condition to that of people dying of hunger? Where would the feeling of security come from if one were unable to compare one’s good, solid position to that of people who must work in poverty?

What is more, Louise Michel is a woman. If she could only be fooled by the idea that women can get their rights by asking men for them. But she has the villainy to insist that the strong sex is just as much a slave as the weak sex, that it is unable to give what it does not have itself. All inequalities, she claims, will collapse when men and women engage in the common battle together.

Louise Michel is a monster who maintains that men and women are not responsible for their situations and claims it is stupidity which causes the evils around us. She claims that politics is a form of that stupidity and is incapable of ennobling the race.

If Louise Michel were the only person saying all this, people could say she is a pathological case. But there are thousands like her, millions, none of whom gives a damn about authority. They all repeat the battle cry of the Russian revolutionaries: land and freedom!

Yes, there are millions of us who don’t give a damn for any authority because we have seen how little the many-edged tool of power accomplishes. We have watched throats cut to gain it. It is supposed to be as precious as the jade ax that travels from island to island in Oceania. No. Power monopolized is evil.

Who would have thought that those men at the rue Hautefeuille who spoke so forcefully of liberty and who denounced the tyrant Napoleon so loudly would be among those in May 1871 who wanted to drown liberty in blood? Power makes people dizzy and will always do so until power belongs to all mankind.

During the twilight of the Empire the type of things I wrote changed. When I was at Mme Vollier’s I sent some poems to the newspapers, VUnion des poetes, La Jeunesse, and others. I just threw things out and I barely paid any attention to them; I don’t even know which ones were printed. I did send some of the best poems to Victor Hugo when I was in exile.

The time was far removed from those days at Vroncourt when I had sent him verses that the indulgent master had said were as sweet as my youth.

Me, I am the white dove

Of the black arch.

I had sent him that one from Vroncourt. Now, the verses I sent him smelled of gunpowder:

Do you hear the brazen thunder

Behind the man who takes no side?

A reluctant man betrays tomorrow.

Up the mountains and over the cliffs

We go together to sow freedom.

That poem, “The Black Marseillaise,” I threw one July 14 into the wicket at the Echelle along with some others addressed to Mme Bonaparte. These later poems, begun in collaboration with Vermorel, had been reviewed and augmented by friends who had the same disdain for rhyme; they added other phrases that were more appropriate to the circumstances.

Under the Empire, literature was strange, as it always is when nations are slaughterhouses. Books were filled with foolishness, but there were forgotten corpses behind each page. All published writing smelled stale.

Adele Esquiros, the author of captivating works, remained silent during those years as she waited for more propitious times. She continued to write, but submitted nothing to a publisher. From time to time, however, she would read us a few pages full of fresh lines and gracious images that gave us the impression of spring mornings when dew covers the flowers and the sun shines in the branches. There were also bitter passages in her work, but she covered their sadness with some seeming pleasantry. I wonder what has become of her manuscripts; I have never seen any of them appear in print. Because of deportation and prison, I haven’t had enough time to visit my old friends. Adele Esquiros has been paralyzed for several years now, but she is submitting to her fate with the same smile on her lips that she wore before.

At the end of the Empire our revolutionary meetings became more numerous, and many of them were even held in daylight. Evening meetings were more common, however, and one evening while my mother was living with me, I had planned to go to a meeting. To keep her from worrying, I had been claiming that I wasn’t actively involved in anything. Two of our friends came by to take me to the meeting, but stayed outside so she wouldn’t suspect what was going on. I told her I was going out to give some lessons.

“Impossible,” said the poor woman. “You can’t be going out to give lessons at this hour.”

“Julie sent for me,” I said.

She went to the window.

“I knew it,” she said. “It is one of your meetings.”

And she laughed in spite of herself, as my friends and I left laughing, too.

Most of our meetings took place outside Paris. Often as we were returning to Paris by little paths through fields, we talked about many things. At other times we were silent, dazzled by the idea of sweeping away the shame of twenty years. We were all poets, a little. We have suffered, but we have seen some beautiful things.

One holiday I was going to Julie’s when I encountered a vast multitude of people on the boulevard. With the hopes I held, I believed the hour had come, but it was a carnival, in the midst of which the old republican Miot was being taken to prison. Some people in the crowd who were following the carnival performers left them to see the old man dragged off by the varlets of the Empire. It was a joyous crowd on a day of mourning, but they weren’t really the people. They were the same crowd you see at public executions, but which you can never find when you need to rip up paving stones to build barricades. They are the same unthinking crowd that bolsters up tyrannies and cuts the throats of people trying to save them. They are the great herd that bares its back for the whip and holds out its neck to the knife.

For five years, from 1865 to 1870, we had believed that the end of the Empire was imminent. For the cup to overflow, however, the defeat at Sedan had to be added to the other crimes. People always wait for the cup to overflow for the same reason that keeps them from ever being upset by the approach of misfortunes they think they can prevent.

How strongly toward the end of the Empire the fearful stanza of Victor Hugo came back to me. “Harmodius, it’s time! / You can strike down this man without remorse,” Hugo wrote. Hugo’s words went into my heart like a knife, and each syllable rang in my ears like the tolling of a bell. Vengeance finally reached Harmodius, the Athenian murderer, when the younger brother of his innocent victim cut him down.

I would have killed my tyrant without feeling any distress. Millions would have been spared if he had died. Someone promised me an entree to him; even to kill him I wouldn’t have requested a formal audience. But I got that entree only after Bonaparte had left for the war and was no longer in Paris.

Sedan could have been avoided if Bonaparte had been dead. People are used to waiting for the annihilation of multitudes, and to stop bandits like Bonaparte they will accept the annihilation of a nation willingly. Perhaps Sedan will make things understood more quickly, and the destruction of those legions will keep the human race from surrendering itself any longer to those woodcutters of men who chop people down like a forest for their own convenience.

Far away in the forests of New Caledonia, I once saw a rotten tree collapse suddenly. When the cloud of dust dispersed, there was only a heap of trash, over which, like headstones in a graveyard, a few green boughs stretched out, the last effort of the old tree dragged down by the dead trunk. In that tree, myriads of insects had lived for centuries, and they, too, were engulfed in the collapse. Some of them stirred painfully in the dust, and startled and upset they stared at the daylight which was going to kill them, for their kind, born in the shade, could not stand light.

Like those insects, we live in an old tree, and we stubbornly believe it still lives, but the least breath of wind will destroy it, and its debris will blow across the earth. No one can escape change.