The History of a Crime, Victor Hugo [white hot kiss .TXT] 📗
- Author: Victor Hugo
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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 Passage 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 nightshirt, 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 Dussoubs a letter. A letter to a woman. Even these stoic souls love.
On the 1st of December, Denis Dussoubs began this letter. He did not finish it. Here it is:—
"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.
"God has snatched 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! Circumstances 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 Dussoubs was speaking:—
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 Piétri, a Corsican, born at Vezzani, named Jacques François Criscelli,29 a man attached to the secret and personal service of Louis Bonaparte, had received from Piétri'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?"
Piétri 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 massacre 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 Petit 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 assault 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 assault 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 Passage Verdeau as Jeanty Sarre and Charpentier had scaled the Passage du Saumon, had jumped over, and had fled down the Passage. 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 Passage 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 Passage. 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 Passage. 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 passage, 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 massacre 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.
They arrested all those whom they found in the streets which had been surrounded, whether combatants or not, they had all the wine-shops and the cafés opened, they closely searched the houses, they seized all the men whom they could find, only leaving the women and the children. Two regiments formed in a square carried away all these prisoners huddled together. They took them to the Tuileries, and shut them up in the vast cellar situated beneath the terrace at the waterside.
On entering this cellar the prisoners felt reassured. They called to mind that in June, 1848, a great number of insurgents had been shut up there, and later on had been transported. They said to themselves that doubtless they also would be transported, or brought before the Councils of War, and that they had plenty of time before them.
They were thirsty. Many of them had
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