The History of a Crime Part 63

The soldiers were infuriated. One would say that they were revenging themselves. On whom? A workman, named Paturel, received three b.a.l.l.s and six bayonet-thrusts, four of which were in the head. They thought that he was dead, and they did not renew the attack. He felt them search him.

They took ten francs which he had about him. He did not die till six days later, and he was able to relate the details which are given here.

We may note, by the way, that the name of Paturel does not figure upon any of the lists of the corpses published by M. Bonaparte.

Sixty Republicans were shut up in this redoubt of the Pet.i.t Carreau.

Forty-six were killed there. These men had come there that morning free, proud to fight, and joyous to die. At midnight all was at an end. The night wagons carried away on the next day nine corpses to the hospital cemetery, and thirty-seven to Montmartre.

Jeanty Sarre escaped by a miracle, as well as Charpentier, and a third whose name we have not been able to ascertain. They glided along the houses and reached the Pa.s.sage du Saumon. The grated doors which closed the Pa.s.sage during the night only reached to the centre of the archway.

They climbed it and got over the spikes, at the risk of tearing themselves. Jeanty Sarre was the first to climb it; having reached the summit, one of the spikes pierced his trousers, hooked them, and Jeanty Sarre fell headforemost upon the pavement. He got up again, he was only stunned. The other two followed him, and gliding along the bars, all three found themselves in the Pa.s.sage. It was dimly lighted by a lamp which shone at one end. In the meanwhile, they heard the soldiers, who were pursuing them, coming up. In order to escape by the Rue Montmartre, they would have to climb the grated gateway at the other end of the Pa.s.sage; their hands were grazed, their knees were bleeding; they were dying of weariness; they were in no condition to recommence a similar ascent.

Jeanty Sarre knew where the keeper of the Pa.s.sage lived. He knocked at his window, and begged him to open. The keeper refused.

At this moment the detachment which had been sent in pursuit of them reached the grated gateway which they had just climbed. The soldiers, hearing a noise in the Pa.s.sage, pa.s.sed the barrels of their guns through the bars. Jeanty Sarre squeezed himself against the wall behind one of those projecting columns which decorate the Pa.s.sage; but the column was very thin, and only half covered him. The soldiers fired, and smoke filled the Pa.s.sage. When it cleared away, Jeanty Sarre saw Charpentier stretched on the stones, with his face to the ground. He had been shot through the heart. Their other companion lay a few paces from him, mortally wounded.

The soldiers did not scale the grated gateway, but they posted a sentinel before it. Jeanty Sarre heard them going away by the Rue Montmartre. They would doubtless come back.

No means of flight. He felt all the doors round his prison successively.

One of them at length opened. This appeared to him like a miracle.

Whoever could have forgotten to shut the door? Providence, doubtless. He hid himself behind it, and remained there for more than an hour, standing motionless, scarcely breathing. He no longer heard any sound; he ventured out. The sentinel was no longer there. The detachment had rejoined the battalion.

One of his old friends, a man to whom he had rendered services such as are not forgotten, lived in this very Pa.s.sage du Saumon. Jeanty Sarre looked for the number, woke the porter, told him the name of his friend, was admitted, went up the stairs, and knocked at the door. The door was opened, his friend appeared in his nights.h.i.+rt, with a candle in his hand.

He recognized Jeanty Sarre, and cried out, "You here! What a state you are in! Where hove you come from? From what riot? from what madness? And then you come to compromise us all here? To have us murdered? To have us shot? Now then, what do you want with me?"

"I want you to give me a brush down," said Jeanty Sarre.

His friend took a brush and brushed him, and Jeanty Sarre went away.

While going down the stairs, Jeanty Sarre cried out to his friend, "Thanks!"

Such is the kind of hospitality which we have since received in Belgium, in Switzerland, and even in England.

The next day, when they took up the bodies they found on Charpentier a note-book and a pencil, and upon Denis Dus...o...b.. a letter. A letter to a woman. Even these stoic souls love.

On the 1st of December, Denis Dus...o...b.. began this letter. He did not finish it. Here it is:--

"MY DEAR MARIE,

"Have you experienced that sweet pain of feeling regret for him who regrets you? For myself since I left you I have known no other affliction than that of thinking of you. Even in my affliction itself there was something sweet and tender, and although I was troubled, I was nevertheless happy to feel in the depths of my heart how greatly I loved you by the regret which you cost me. Why are we separated?

Why have I been forced to fly from you? For we were so happy! When I think of our little evenings so free from constraint, of our gay country chats with your sisters, I feel myself seized with a bitter regret. Did we not love each other clearly, my darling? We had no secret from each other because we had no need to have one, and our lips uttered the thoughts of our hearts without our thinking to keep anything back.

"G.o.d has s.n.a.t.c.hed away from us all these blessings, and nothing will console me for having lost them; do you not lament with me the evils of absence?

"How seldom we see those whom we love! Circ.u.mstances take us far from them, and our soul tormented and attracted out of ourselves lives in a perpetual anguish. I feel this sickness of absence. I imagine myself wherever you are. I follow your work with my eyes, or I listen to your words, seated beside you and seeking to divine the word which you are about to utter; your sisters sew by our side. Empty dreams--illusions of a moment--my hand seeks yours; where are you, my beloved one?

"My life is an exile. Far from those whom I love and by whom I am loved, my heart calls them and consumes away in its grief. No, I do not love the great cities and their noise, towns peopled with strangers where no one knows you and where you know no one, where each one jostles and elbows the other without ever exchanging a smile. But I love our quiet fields, the peace of home, and the voice of friends who greet you. Up to the present I have always lived in contradiction with my nature; my fiery blood, my nature so hostile to injustice, the spectacle of unmerited miseries have thrown me into a struggle of which I do not foresee the issue, a struggle in which will remain to the end without fear and without reproach, that which daily breaks me down and consumes my life.

"I tell you, my much-loved darling, the secret miseries of my heart; no, I do not blush for what my hand has just written, but my heart is sick and suffering, and I tell it to you. I suffer... I wish to blot out these lines, but why? Could they offend you? What do they contain that could wound my darling? Do I not know your affection, and do I not know that you love me? Yes, you have not deceived me, I did not kiss a lying mouth; when seated on my knees you lulled me with the charm of your words, I believed you. I wished to bind myself to a burning iron bar; weariness preys upon me and devours me. I feel a maddening desire to recover life. Is it Paris that produces this effect upon me? I always yearn to be in places where I am not. I live here to a complete solitude. I believe you, Marie...."

Charpentier's note-book only contained this line, which he had written in the darkness at the foot of the barricade while Denis Dus...o...b.. was speaking:--

Admonet et magna testatur voce per umbras.

[28] February 18. Louvain.

CHAPTER V.

OTHER DEEDS OF DARKNESS

Yvan had again seen Conneau. He corroborated the information given in the letter of Alexandre Dumas to Bocage; with the fact we had the names.

On the 3d of December at M. Abbatucci's house, 31, Rue Caumartin, in the presence of Dr. Conneau and of Pietri, a Corsican, born at Vezzani, named Jacques Francois Criscelli,[29] a man attached to the secret and personal service of Louis Bonaparte, had received from Pietri's own mouth the offer of 25,000 francs "to take or kill Victor Hugo." He had accepted, and said, "That is all very well if I am alone. But suppose there are two of us?"

Pietri had answered,--

"Then there will be 50,000 francs."

This communication, accompanied by urgent prayers, had been made to me by Yvan in the Rue de Monthabor, while we were still at Dupont White's.

This said, I continue my story.

The ma.s.sacre of the 4th did not produce the whole of its effect until the next day, the 5th. The impulse given by us to the resistance still lasted for some hours, and at nightfall, in the labyrinth of houses ranging from the Rue du Pet.i.t Carreau to the Rue du Temple, there was fighting. The Pagevin, Neuve Saint Eustache, Montorgueil, Rambuteau, Beaubourg, and Transnonain barricades were gallantly defended. There, there was an impenetrable network of streets and crossways barricaded by the People, surrounded by the Army.

The a.s.sault was merciless and furious.

The barricade of the Rue Montorgueil was one of those which held out the longest. A battalion and artillery was needed to carry it. At the last moment it was only defended by three men, two shop-clerks and a lemonade-seller of an adjoining street. When the a.s.sault began the night was densely dark, and the three combatants escaped. But they were surrounded. No outlets. Not one door was open. They climbed the grated gateway of the Pa.s.sage Verdeau as Jeanty Sarre and Charpentier had scaled the Pa.s.sage du Saumon, had jumped over, and had fled down the Pa.s.sage. But the other grated gateway was closed, and like Jeanty Sarre and Charpentier they had no time to climb it. Besides, they heard the soldiers corning on both sides. In a corner at the entrance of the Pa.s.sage there were a few planks which had served to close a stall, and which the stall-keeper was in the habit of putting there. They hid themselves beneath these planks.

The soldiers who had taken the barricade, after having searched the streets, bethought themselves of searching the Pa.s.sage. They also climbed over the grated gateway, looked about everywhere with lanterns, and found nothing They were going away, when one of them perceived the foot of one of these three unfortunate men which was projecting from beneath the planks.

They killed all three of them on the spot with bayonet-thrusts. They cried out, "Kill us at once! Shoot us! Do not prolong our misery."

The neighboring shop-keepers heard these cries, but dared not open their doors or their windows, for fear, as one of them said the next day, "that they should do the same to them."

The execution at an end, the executioners left the three victims lying in a pool of blood on the pavement of the Pa.s.sage. One of those unfortunate men did not die until eight o'clock next morning.

No one had dared to ask for mercy; no one had dared to bring any help.

They left them to die there.

One of the combatants of the Rue Beaubourg was more fortunate. They were pursuing him. He rushed up a staircase, reached a roof, and from there a pa.s.sage, which proved to be the top corridor of an hotel. A key was in the door. He opened it boldly, and found himself face to face with a man who was going to bed. It was a tired-out traveller who had arrived at the hotel that very evening. The fugitive said to the traveller, "I am lost, save me!" and explained him the situation in three words.

The traveller said to him, "Undress yourself, and get into my bed." And then he lit a cigar, and began quietly to smoke. Just as the man of the barricade had got into bed a knock came at the door. It was the solders who were searching the house. To the questions which they asked him the traveller answered, pointing to the bed, "We are only two here. We have just arrived here. I am smoking my cigar, and my brother is asleep." The waiter was questioned, and confirmed the traveller's statement. The soldiers went away, and no one was shot.

We will say this, that the victorious soldiers killed less than on the preceding day. They did not ma.s.sacre in all the captured barricades. The order had been given on that day to make prisoners. It might also be believed that a certain humanity existed. What was this humanity? We shall see.

At eleven o'clock at night all was at an end.