THE CENTURY MAGAZINE.

VOL. XLIV.

OCTOBER, 1892.

No. 6.

WHAT I SAW OF THE PARIS COMMUNE.

THE Franco-Ger

I.

man war was over. I had witnessed the great Kaiser's parade on the Longchamps race-course on the 1st of March, 1871, and then had accompanied the German troops who marched down the Champs Elysées into the Place de la Concorde and the wrecked gardens of the Tuileries. A week later I had rid den behind the old Emperor and the Crown Prince of Saxony as the former reviewed the "Maas Armee," which the latter commanded, drawn up on the plateau between Champigny and Brie, among the grave-mounds beneath which lay the Germans and the Frenchmen who had fallen in the stubborn fighting of Ducrot's great sortie on the east side of Paris. Then my field-work was done, and I had hurried home to London to begin the task I had set myself of writing a book describing what I had seen of the great conflict.

DRAWN BY VIERGE.

ing when the Commune broke out. Promptly the manager of the "Daily News" dashed to me in a swift hansom, and urged me with all his force to start for Paris that same night. I refused; I was under contract to the publishers, and I burned to see my first book in print. For two months that peremptory manager gave me innumerable bad quarters of an hour, for he was not being served to his liking by the persons whom, in my default, he had commissioned to "do" the Commune for him. At length, on the afternoon of May 19, I finished the last revise of my book, and the same evening-to the great relief of my managerial friend, for a desperate crisis in Paris was clearly imminent-I left London by the Continental Mail.

In those troubled times the train service of the North of France railway was greatly dislocated, and it was nearly midday of the 20th when we halted in the St. Denis station. I foreboded no difficulty, since the halt at St. Denis was normal for ticket-collecting purposes; and I was chatting with a German officer of my acquaintance who commanded the detachment of the Kaiser Alexander Prussian Guard regiment in occupation of the St. Denis station. The collector serenely took up my ticket. There followed him to the carriage door two French gendarmes, who with all the official consequentialness of their species demanded to be informed of my nationality. I enlightCopyright, 1892, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved.

I was toiling ten hours a day at this undertak

ened them on that point, and turned to renew the conversation with Von Brockdorff. But the gendarmes were not done with me. They peremptorily ordered me to alight. I requested an explanation, and was told that no foreigners were now allowed to enter Paris, as the fighting force of the Commune was understood to be directed chiefly by foreigners. "But," said I, "I am a newspaper correspondent, not a fighting man." "N'importe," replied the senior gendarme; "you look, too, not unlike a military man. Anyhow, you must alight."

then we shall have coffee, and you will smoke one of those long corkscrew cigars which you may remember; and in the evening you will take the 'cocotte train' here in Enghien. If the gendarmes at the St. Denis fetch you out a second time, make them a polite bow, and walk into Paris by the chaussée; or, for that matter, you can take the bus from St. Denis." It was already dusk when I boarded the "cocotte train," and ensconced myself between two young ladies of gay and affable manners, who promised so to cover me with "What does this mean, Brockdorff?" I asked, their skirts, when we should reach St. Denis, when I had obeyed. "Surely you can do some- that the gendarmes would not discover me. thing for me, in charge as you and your fellows The train was full of the frail sisterhood of are of the station!" "No, my dear fellow," an- Paris, who were wont to pay afternoon visits swered the Prussian; "we are here only to to the German officers of the still environing maintain order. Two days ago these swallow- army, and were now returning to town. Fairly tailed gentlemen came from Versailles, and our concealed as the ladies and I thought myself, orders are not to interfere with them." The the lynx-eyed gendarme detected me, and I train went on, leaving me behind; the senior again had to alight. A commissary of police in gendarme came up to me, and told me that I the station courteously offered me quarters for should have to return to Calais by the next out- the night, but assured me that my entrance into going train. A thought struck me, and I pleaded Paris was impossible. I declined his offer, and hard to be allowed to take instead a local train went into the street, where I found the Gerto Enghien-les-Bains, a few miles away, near man soldiers enforcing the old curfew laws. the forest of Montmorency, where Brockdorff" Everybody must be indoors by nine,” said told me was still residing the Crown Prince of Saxony, to whose staff I had been attached during the siege of Paris. Brockdorff added his persuasions to my solicitations, and finally the gendarme thus far mitigated my sentence.

The Crown Prince of Saxony was at luncheon when I reached the château in which he had his quarters. He roared with laughter when I told him how the gendarme had served me. "These people at Versailles," he explained, "have been leaving the mouth of the trap open all these weeks, and pretty near all the turbulent blackguards of Europe have walked into it. Now they think all the blackguards are inside, and since they are just about to begin business, they have stopped both ingress and egress. Still," he continued musingly, "I am surprised that they did n't let you in!" The Prince has something of a sardonic humor, and he made his point; and I for my part made him my bow in acknowledgment of his compliment. Presently he added: "Mr. Forbes, when you were with us in the winter, we used to think you rather a rusé and ingenious man; but I fear now, since you are no longer with us, that you have become dull. Have n't you ever heard the proverb that there are more ways of killing a pig than by cutting its throat? There is a railway to Paris, my friend, and there is also a chaussée to Paris. On the railway there are these French gendarmes; on the chaussée there is only a picket of your friends of the Kaiser Alexander regiment, who have no orders to stop any one. Now, you join us at luncheon;

the grizzled sergeant, "else I take them prisoners, and they are kept for the night, and fined five francs in the morning." He did not interfere with me, because I spoke German to him; and I found a hay-loft where I slept. The charge for sitting in a room in St. Denis was ten francs; beds were luxuries impossible to casual strangers.

On the morning of the 21st I left St. Denis by road, and walked straight into Paris without hindrance. The national guards of La Chapelle were turning out for service as I passed through, and there seemed nothing to find fault with in either their appearance or conduct. Certainly there was no unwillingness apparent, but the reverse. Paris I found very somber, but perfectly quiet and orderly. It was the Sabbath morning, but no church-bells filled the air with their music. It was with a far different and more discordant sound that the air throbbed on this bright spring morning-the distant roar of the Versaillist batteries on the west and southwest of the enceinte. "That is Issy which gives," quietly remarked to me the old lady in the kiosk at the corner of the Place de l'Opéra, as she sold me a rag dated the 22d and printed the 20th. I asked her how she could distinguish the sound of the Issy cannon from those in the batteries of the Bois de Boulogne. 'Remember," she replied, "I have been listening now for many days to that delectable bicker, and have become a connoisseur. The Issy gun-fire comes sharper and clearer, because the fort stands high and nothing intervenes. The reports from the can

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