Then Maurice, who had escaped unharmed from the slaughter, his nerves
still quivering with the fury that had inspired him on the battlefield, was filled with fresh detestation for that so-called
government of law and order which always allowed itself to be beaten by the Prussians, and could only muster up a little courage when it came to oppressing Paris. And the German armies were still there, from Saint-Denis to Charenton, watching the shameful spectacle of internecine conflict!

Thus, in the fierce longing for vengeance and destruction that animated him, he could not do otherwise than sanction
the first measures of communistic violence, the building of barricades in the streets and public squares, the arrest of the archbishop, some
priests, and former officeholders, who were to be held as hostages.

The atrocities that distinguished either side in that horrible
conflict were already beginning to manifest themselves, Versailles
shooting the prisoners it made, Paris retaliating with a decree that
for each one of its soldiers murdered three hostages should forfeit
their life. The horror of it, that fratricidal conflict, that wretched
nation completing the work of destruction by devouring its own
children! And the little reason that remained to Maurice, in the ruin
of all the things he had hitherto held sacred, was quickly dissipated
in the whirlwind of blind fury that swept all before it. In his eyes
the Commune was to be the avenger of all the wrongs they had suffered,
the liberator, coming with fire and sword to purify and punish. He was
not quite clear in mind about it all, but remembered having read how
great and flourishing the old free cities had become, how wealthy
provinces had federated and imposed their law upon the world. If Paris
should be victorious he beheld her, crowned with an aureole of glory,
building up a new France, where liberty and justice should be the
watchwords, organizing a new society, having first swept away the
rotten debris of the old. It was true that when the result of the
elections became known he was somewhat surprised by the strange
mixture of moderates, revolutionists, and socialists of every sect and
shade to whom the accomplishment of the great work was intrusted; he
was acquainted with several of the men and knew them to be of
extremely mediocre abilities. Would not the strongest among them come
in collision and neutralize one another amid the clashing ideas which
they represented? But on the day when the ceremony of the inauguration
of the Commune took place before the Hotel de Ville, amid the thunder
of artillery and trophies and red banners floating in the air, his
boundless hopes again got the better of his fears and he ceased to
doubt. Among the lies of some and the unquestioning faith of others,
the illusion started into life again with renewed vigor, in the acute
crisis of the malady raised to paroxysmal pitch.

During the entire month of April Maurice was on duty in the
neighborhood of Neuilly. The gentle warmth of the early spring had
brought out the blossoms on the lilacs, and the fighting was conducted
among the bright verdure of the gardens; the National Guards came into
the city at night with bouquets of flowers stuck in their muskets. . . .

Maurice favored the creation of a Committee of Public Safety. The
warnings of history came to his mind; had not the hour struck for
adopting energetic methods if they wished to save the country? There
was but one of their barbarities that really pained him, and that was
the destruction of the Vendome column; he reproached himself for the
feeling as being a childish weakness, but his grandfather's voice
still sounded in his ears repeating the old familiar tales of Marengo,
Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Wagram, the Moskowa--those epic
narratives that thrilled his pulses yet as often as he thought of
them. But that they should demolish the house of the murderer Thiers,
that they should retain the hostages as a guarantee and a menace, was
not that right and just when the Versaillese were unchaining their
fury on Paris, bombarding it, destroying its edifices, slaughtering
women and children with their shells? As he saw the end of his dream
approaching dark thoughts of ruin and destruction filled his mind. If
their ideas of justice and retribution were not to prevail, if they
were to be crushed out of them with their life-blood, then perish the
world, swept away in one of those cosmic upheavals that are the
beginning of a new life. Let Paris sink beneath the waves, let it go
up in smoke and flame, like a gigantic funeral pyre, sooner than let
it be again delivered over to its former state of vice and misery, to
that old vicious social system of abominable injustice. And he dreamed
another dark, terrible dream, the great city reduced to ashes, naught
to be seen on either side the Seine but piles of smoldering ruins, the
festering wound purified and healed with fire, a catastrophe without a
name, such as had never been before, whence should arise a new race.
Wild stories were everywhere circulated, which interested him
intensely, of the mines that were driven under all the quarters of the
city, the barrels of powder with which the catacombs were stuffed, the
monuments and public buildings ready to be blown into the air at a
moment's notice; and all were connected by electric wires in such a
way that a single spark would suffice to set them off; there were
great stores of inflammable substances, too, especially petroleum,
with which the streets and avenues were to be converted into seething
lakes of flame. The Commune had sworn that should the Versaillese
enter the city not one of them would ever get beyond the barricades
that closed the ends of the streets; the pavements would yawn, the
houses would sink in ruins, Paris would go up in flames, and bury
assailants and assailed under its ashes.

And if Maurice solaced himself with these crazy dreams, it was because
of his secret discontent with the Commune itself. He had lost all
confidence in its members, he felt it was inefficient, drawn this way
and that by so many conflicting elements, losing its head and becoming
purposeless and driveling as it saw the near approach of the peril
with which it was menaced. Of the social reforms it had pledged itself
to it had not been able to accomplish a single one, and it was now
quite certain that it would leave behind it no great work to
perpetuate its name. But what more than all beside was gnawing at its
vitals was the rivalries by which it was distracted, the corroding
suspicion and distrust in which each of its members lived. For some
time past many of them, the more moderate and the timid, had ceased to
attend its sessions. The others shaped their course day by day in
accordance with events, trembling at the idea of a possible
dictatorship; they had reached that point where the factions of
revolutionary assemblages exterminate one another by way of saving the
country. Cluzeret had become suspected, then Dombrowski, and Rossel
was about to share their fate. Delescluze, appointed Civil Delegate at
War, could do nothing of his own volition, notwithstanding his great
authority. And thus the grand social effort that they had had in view
wasted itself in the ever-widening isolation about those men, whose
power had become a nullity, whose actions were the result of their
despair.

In Paris there was an increasing feeling of terror. Paris, irritated
at first against Versailles, shivering at the recollection of what it
had suffered during the siege, was now breaking away from the Commune.
The compulsory enrollment, the decree incorporating every man under
forty in the National Guard, had angered the more sedate citizens and
been the means of bringing about a general exodus: men in disguise and
provided with forged papers of Alsatian citizenship made their escape
by way of Saint-Denis; others let themselves down into the moat in the
darkness of the night with ropes and ladders. The wealthy had long
since taken their departure. None of the factories and workshops had
opened their doors; trade and commerce there was none; there was no
employment for labor; the life of enforced idleness went on amid the
alarmed expectancy of the frightful denouement that everyone felt
could not be far away. And the people depended for their daily bread
on the pay of the National Guards, that dole of thirty sous that was
paid from the millions extorted from the Bank of France, the thirty
sous for the sake of which alone many men were wearing the uniform,
which had been one of the primary causes and the _raison d'etre_ of
the insurrection. Whole districts were deserted, the shops closed, the
house-fronts lifeless. In the bright May sunshine that flooded the
empty streets the few pedestrians beheld nothing moving save the
barbaric display of the burial of some federates killed in action, the
funeral train where no priest walked, the hearse draped with red
flags, followed by a crowd of men and women bearing bouquets of
immortelles. The churches were closed and did duty each evening as
political club-rooms. The revolutionary journals alone were hawked
about the streets; the others had been suppressed. Great Paris was
indeed an unhappy city in those days, what with its republican
sympathies that made it detest the monarchical Assembly at Versailles
and its ever-increasing terror of the Commune, from which it prayed
most fervently to be delivered among all the grisly stories that were
current, the daily arrests of citizens as hostages, the casks of
gunpowder that filled the sewers, where men patrolled by day and night
awaiting the signal to apply the torch.