Chapter 26

"I am very fond of Denmark; the people there seem to me to be happy, despite everything, and the country not to be over-populated. In any case, the population finds ample means of outlet in sea-life and emigration. Denmark is an idyllic little country. Now you want to declare war there. My thoughts seek down in dark places, and I ask myself whether I really believe that truth does any good, whether in my secret heart I am convinced that strife is better than stagnation? I admire Oliver Cromwell, but I sympathise with Falkland, who died with 'Peace! Peace!' [Footnote: Sir Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland, who fell at Newbury, Sept. 20, 1643.] on his lips. I am afraid that you will have to bear a great deal. You will learn that the accoutrements of truth are a grievously heavy coat of mail. You will call forth reaction. Even that is the least. But reaction will come about in your own mind; after a long time, I mean. Still, you are strong; it will be a reaction of the kind that keeps aloof in order to spring farther and better. Your unity will not go to pieces. You are a kind of cosmos."

When the conversation turned upon England and English conditions, she protested against the opinion prevalent on the continent since Byron's day, that English society was infested with hypocrisy.

"I do not think that hypocrisy is characteristic of English thought. We have, of course, like every serious people, our share of hypocrites; in a frivolous nation hypocrisy has no pretext for existence. But its supremacy amongst us is over. Apathetic orthodoxy, and superficial ideas of the correct thing, ruled England during the first half of the century. The intellectual position of the country is different now. No one who has not lived in England has any idea how serious and real the belief here is in the tough doctrine of the Trinity, who, in human form, walked about in Galilee. Good men, noble men, live and work for this dogma, perform acts of love for it. We, you and I, have drunk from other sources; but for these people it is the fountain of life. Only it is depressing to see this doctrine in its Roman Catholic form winning greater power everywhere every day. In Denmark, intellectual stagnation has hindered it hitherto; you have political, but not yet religious, freedom. Belgium has both, and Belgium is at the present time the most fiery Catholic power there is. France is divided between extreme materialism and Madonna worship. When European thought--between 1820 and 1860, let us say--rebelled against every kind of orthodoxy, and, as always happens with rebellion, made mistakes and went too far, France played a wretched rôle. It is a Celtic land, and Celtic it will remain; it desires, not personal freedom, but a despotic levelling, not equality before the law, but the base equality which is inimical to excellence, not the brotherhood that is brotherly love, but that which gives the bad the right to share with the good. That is why the Empire could be victorious in France, and that is why the Roman Catholic Church, even in its most modern, Byzantine form, is triumphant there."

So thoroughly English was Anna Gallenga's way of looking at things, in spite of an education which had included the chief countries in Europe. So blindly did she share the prejudice that the French are essentially Celtic. And so harshly did she judge, in spite of a scepticism, feminine though it was, that was surprising in a woman.

XXI.

Don Juan Prim, Count of Reus, Marques de los Castillejos, would now be forgotten outside Spain were it not that Régnault's splendid equestrian picture of him, as he is receiving the homage of the people (on a fiery steed, reminding one of Velasquez), keeps his memory green in everyone who visits the Gallery of the Louvre. At that time his name was on every tongue. The victorious general and revolutionary of many years' standing had since 1869 been Prime Minister of Spain, and had eagerly endeavoured to get a foreign prince for the throne who would be dependent upon him and under whom he would be able to keep the power in his own hands. He had now offered the throne of Spain to Leopold of Hohenzollern, but without having assured himself of the consent of the Powers. That of Prussia was of course safe enough, and for six weeks Napoleon had looked on benevolently at the negotiations, and acted as though the arrangement had his approval, which Prim had the more reason to suppose since Leopold was related to the Murat family, and the Emperor had raised no objection to a Hohenzollern ascending the throne of Roumania. Consequently, Prim was thunderstruck when France suddenly turned round and seized upon this trivial pretext for a breach of the peace.

He was in regular correspondence with the Gallengas, whom he had seen a good deal of during the years, after the unsuccessful rebellion against Queen Isabella, that he had spent in London. At that time he had been a man of fifty, and, with his little body and large head, had looked very strange among Englishmen. He was of modest birth, but denied the fact. He was now a Spanish grandee of the first class, but this was through a patent bestowed on him for courage in the war with Morocco; he had little education, did not know a word of English, wrote French with a purely fantastic orthography, but had excellent qualities as a Liberal, an army chief, and a popular leader. Still, he was not pleased that Régnault had painted him greeted by the enthusiastic cheers of an untidy, ragged mob of rebels; he would have preferred to be receiving the acclamations of regular troops, and of the highest men and women in the nation, as now, at the conclusion of his career, he really was. Only a few months later (in December, 1870), he was shot by an assassin in the streets of Madrid.

In Prim's communications to Gallenga, the attitude of the French government appeared to me in a most unfavourable light. Ollivier, the Premier, I had long despised; it did not need much political acumen to see that he was an ambitious and conceited phrase-monger, who would let himself be led by the nose by those who had disarmed him. The Emperor himself was a wreck. I had had no doubt of that since I had one day seen him at very close quarters in the Louvre, where he was inspecting some recently hung, decorative paintings. It was quite evident that he could not walk alone, but advanced, half-sliding, supported by two tall chamberlains, who each gave him an arm. His eyes were half-closed and his gaze absolutely dulled. The dressed and waxed moustache, which ran to a needle-like point, looked doubly tasteless against his wax mask of a face. He was the incarnation of walking decrepitude, vapid and slack. Quite evidently he had committed the blunder of trusting to a split in Germany. In his blindness he explained that he had come to free the Germans, who had, against their will, been incorporated into Prussia, and all Germany rose like one man against him. And in his foolish proclamation he declared that he was waging this war for the sake of the civilising ideals of the first Republic, as if Germany were now going to be civilised for the first time, and as if he, who had made an end of the second Republic by a _coup d'état_, could speak in the name of Republican freedom. His whole attitude was mendacious and mean, and the wretched pretext under which he declared war could not but prejudice Europe against him. In addition to this, as they knew very well in England, from the earlier wars of the Empire, he had no generals; his victories had been soldier victories.

I was very deeply impressed, in the next place, by the suicide of Prévost-Paradol. I had studied most carefully his book, _La France Nouvelle_; I had seen in this friend and comrade of Taine and of Renan the political leader of the future in France. No one was so well acquainted with its resources as he; no one knew better than he what policy ought to be followed. If he had despaired, it was because he foresaw that the situation was hopeless. He had certainly made mistakes; first, in believing that in January it had been Napoleon's serious intention to abrogate personal control of the state, then that of retaining, despite the long hesitation so well known to me, his position as French Envoy to North America, after the plebiscite. That he should now have turned his pistol against his own forehead told me that he regarded the battle as lost, foresaw inevitable collapse as the outcome of the war. When at first all the rumours and all the papers announced the extreme probability of Denmark's taking part in the war as France's ally, I was seized with a kind of despair at the thought of the folly she seemed to be on the verge of committing. I wrote to my friends, would have liked, had I been permitted, to write in every Danish paper a warning against the martial madness that had seized upon people. It was only apparently shared by the French. Even now, only a week after the declaration of war, and before a single collision had taken place, it was clear to everyone who carefully followed the course of events that in spite of the light-hearted bragging of the Parisians and the Press, there was deep-rooted aversion to war. And I, who had always counted Voltaire's _Micromégas_ as one of my favourite tales, thought of where Sirius, the giant, voices his supposition that the people on the earth are happy beings who pass their time in love and thought, and of the philosopher's reply to him: "At this moment there are a hundred thousand animals of our species, who wear hats, engaged in killing a hundred thousand more, who wear turbans, or in being killed by them. And so it has been all over the earth from time immemorial." Only that this time not a hundred thousand, but some two million men were being held in readiness to exterminate each other.

What I saw in London of the scenic art at the Adelphi Theatre, the Prince of Wales' Theatre and the Royal Strand Theatre was disheartening. Molière was produced as the lowest kind of farce, Sheridan was acted worse than would be permitted in Denmark at a second-class theatre; but the scenic decorations, a greensward, shifting lights, and the like, surpassed anything that I had ever seen before.

More instructive and more fascinating than the theatres were the parliamentary debates and the trials in the Law Courts. I enjoyed in particular a sitting of the Commons with a long debate between Gladstone and Disraeli, who were like representatives of two races and two opposed views of life. Gladstone was in himself handsomer, clearer, and more open, Disraeli spoke with a finer point, and more elegantly, had a larger oratorical compass, more often made a witty hit, and evoked more vigorous response and applause. Their point of disagreement was the forthcoming war; Disraeli wished all the documents regarding it to be laid before parliament; Gladstone declared that he could not produce them. In England, as elsewhere, the war that was just breaking out dominated every thought.

XXII.

The Paris I saw again was changed. Even on my way from Calais I heard, to my astonishment, the hitherto strictly forbidden _Marseillaise_ hummed and muttered. In Paris, people went arm in arm about the streets singing, and the _Marseillaise_ was heard everywhere. The voices were generally harsh, and it was painful to hear the song that had become sacred through having been silenced so long, profaned in this wise, in the bawling and shouting of half-drunken men at night. But the following days, as well, it was hummed, hooted, whistled and sung everywhere, and as the French are one of the most unmusical nations on earth, it sounded for the most part anything but agreeable.

In those days, while no collision between the masses of troops had as yet taken place, there was a certain cheerfulness over Paris; it could be detected in every conversation; people were more lively, raised their voices more, chatted more than at other times; the cabmen growled more loudly, and cracked their whips more incessantly than usual.

Assurance of coming victory was expressed everywhere, even among the hotel servants in the Rue Racine and on the lips of the waiters at every restaurant. Everybody related how many had already volunteered; the number grew from day to day; first it was ten thousand, then seventy-five thousand, then a hundred thousand. In the Quartier Latin, the students sat in their cafés, many of them in uniform, surrounded by their comrades, who were bidding them good-bye. It was characteristic that they no longer had their womenfolk with them; they had flung them aside, now that the matter was serious. Every afternoon a long stream of carriages, filled with departing young soldiers, could be seen moving out towards the Gare du Nord. From every carriage large flags waved. Women, their old mothers, workwomen, who sat in the carriages with them, held enormous bouquets on long poles. The dense mass of people through which one drove were grave; but the soldiers for the most part retained their gaiety, made grimaces, smoked and drank.

Nevertheless, the Emperor's proclamation had made a very poor impression. It was with the intention of producing an effect of sincerity that he foretold the war would be long and grievous, (_longue et pénible_); with a people of the French national character it would have been better had he been able to write "terrible, but short." Even now, when people had grown accustomed to the situation, this proclamation hung like a nightmare over them. I was all the more astonished when an old copy of the _Daily Paper_ for the 30th of July fell into my hands, and I read that their correspondent (Topsöe, recently arrived in Paris) had seen a bloused workman tear off his hat, after reading the proclamation, and heard him shout, "_Vive la France_!" So thoughtlessly did people continue to feed the Danish public with the food to which it was accustomed.

Towards the 8th or 9th of August I met repeatedly the author of the article. He told me that the Duc de Cadore had appeared in Copenhagen on a very indefinite errand, but without achieving the slightest result. Topsöe, for that matter, was extraordinarily ignorant of French affairs, had only been four weeks in France altogether, and openly admitted that he had touched up his correspondence as well as he could. He had never yet been admitted to the _Corps législatif_, nevertheless he had related how the tears had come into the eyes of the members and the tribunes the day when the Duc de Grammont "again lifted the flag of France on high." He said: "I have been as unsophisticated as a child over this war," and added that Bille had been more so than himself.

XXIII.

One could hardly praise the attitude of the French papers between the declaration of war and the first battles. Their boasting and exultation over what they were going to do was barely decent, they could talk of nothing but the victories they were registering beforehand, and, first and last, the entry into Berlin. The insignificant encounter at Saarbrücken was termed everywhere the _première victoire!_ The caricatures in the shop-windows likewise betrayed terrible arrogance. One was painfully reminded of the behaviour of the French before the battle of Agincourt in Shakespeare's _Henry V._

It was no matter for surprise that a populace thus excited should parade through the streets in an evening, shouting _"A Berlin! A Berlin!"_

National enthusiasm could vent itself in the theatres, in a most convenient manner, without making any sacrifice. As soon as the audience had seen the first piece at the Théâtre Français, the public clamoured for _La Marseillaise_, and brooked no denial. A few minutes later the lovely Mlle.

Agar came in, in a Greek costume. Two French flags were held over her head. She then sang, quietly, sublimely, with expression at the same time restrained and inspiring, the _Marseillaise_. The countless variations of her voice were in admirable keeping with her animated and yet sculptural gesticulation, and the effect was thrilling, although certain passages in the song were hardly suitable to the circumstances of the moment, for instance, the invocation of Freedom, the prayer to her to fight for her defenders. When the last verse came, she seized the flag and knelt down; the audience shouted, "_Debout_!" All rose and listened standing to the conclusion, which was followed by mad applause.

People seized upon every opportunity of obtruding their patriotism. One evening _Le lion amoureux_ was given. In the long speech which concludes the second act, a young Republican describes the army which, during the Revolution, crossed the frontier for the first time and utterly destroyed the Prussian armies. The whole theatre foamed like the sea.

XXIV.

Those were Summer days, and in spite of the political and martial excitement, the peaceful woods and parks in the environs of Paris were tempting. From the Quartier Latin many a couple secretly found their way to the forests of St. Germain, or the lovely wood at Chantilly. In the morning one bought a roast fowl and a bottle of wine, then spent the greater part of the day under the beautiful oak-trees, and sat down to one's meal in the pleasant green shade. Now and again one of the young women would make a wreath of oak leaves and twine it round her companion's straw hat, while he, bareheaded, lay gazing up at the tree-tops. For a long time I kept just such a wreath as a remembrance, and its withered leaves roused melancholy reflections some years later, for during the war every tree of the Chantilly wood had been felled; the wreath was all that remained of the magnificent oak forest.

XXV.

The news of the battle of Weissenburg on August 4th was a trouble, but this chiefly manifested itself in profound astonishment. What? They had suffered a defeat? But one did not begin to be victorious at once; victory would soon follow now. And, indeed, next morning, the news of a victory ran like lightning about the town. It had been so confidently expected that people quite neglected to make enquiries as to how and to what extent it was authenticated. There was bunting everywhere; all the horses had flags on their heads, people went about with little flags in their hats. As the day wore on it turned out to be all a false report, and the depression was great.

Next evening, as I came out of the _Théâtre Français_, there stood the Emperor's awful telegram to read, several copies of it posted up on the columns of the porch: "Macmahon has lost a battle. Frossard is retreating. Put Paris in a condition of defence as expeditiously as possible!" Then, like everyone else, I understood the extent of the misfortune. Napoleon had apparently lost his head; it was very unnecessary to publish the conclusion of the telegram.

Immediately afterwards was issued the Empress' proclamation, which was almost silly. "I am with you," it ran--a charming consolation for the Parisians.

Astonishment produced a kind of paralysis; anger looked round for an object on which to vent itself, but hardly knew whom to select. Besides, people had really insufficient information as to what had happened. The _Siècle_ printed a fairly turbulent article at once, but no exciting language in the papers was required. Even a foreigner could perceive that if it became necessary to defend Paris after a second defeat, the Empire would be at an end.

The exasperation which had to vent itself was directed at first against the Ministers, and ridiculously enough the silence imposed on the Press concerning the movements of the troops (_le mutisme_) was blamed for the defeat at Weissenburg; then the exasperation swung back and was directed against the generals, who were dubbed negligent and incapable, until, ponderously and slowly, it turned against the Emperor himself.

But with the haste that characterises French emotion, and the rapidity with which events succeeded one another, even this exasperation was of short duration. It raged for a few days, and then subsided for want of contradiction of its own accord, for the conviction spread that the Emperor's day was irrevocably over and that he continued to exist only in name. A witness to the rapidity of this _volte face_ were three consecutive articles by Edmond About in _Le Soir_. The first, written from his estate in Saverne, near Strassburg. was extremely bitter against the Emperor; it began: "_Napoleone tertio feliciter regnante_, as people said in the olden days, I have seen with my own eyes, what I never thought to see: Alsace overrun by the enemy's troops." The next article, written some days later, in the middle of August, when About had come to Paris, called the Emperor, without more ado, "The last Bonaparte," and began: "I see that I have been writing like a true provincial; in the provinces at the moment people have two curses on their lips, one for the Prussians, and one for those who began the war; in Paris, they have got much farther; there they have only one curse on their lips, one thought, and one wish; there are names that are no more mentioned in Paris than if they belonged to the twelfth century."

What he wrote was, at the moment, true and correct. I was frequently asked in letters what the French now said about the government and the Emperor. The only answer was that all that side of the question was antiquated in Paris. If I were to say to one of my acquaintances: _"Eh! bien, que dites-vous de l'empereur_?" the reply would be: _"Mais, mon cher, je ne dis rien de lui. Vous voyez si bien que moi, qu'il ne compte plus. C'est un homme par terre. Tout le monde le sait; la gauche même ne l'attaque plus."_ Even General Trochu, the Governor of the capital, did not mention Napoleon's name in his proclamation to Paris. He himself hardly dared to send any messages. After having been obliged to surrender the supreme command, he followed the army, like a mock emperor, a kind of onlooker, a superfluous piece on the board. People said of him: "_On croit qu'il se promène un peu aux environs de Châlons._"

As can be seen from this, the deposition of the Emperor had taken place in people's consciousness, and was, so to speak, publicly settled, several weeks before the battle of Sedan brought with it his surrender to the King of Prussia and the proclamation of the French Republic. The Revolution of September 4th was not an overturning of things; it was merely the ratification of a state of affairs that people were already agreed upon in the capital, and had been even before the battle of Gravelotte.

In Paris preparations were being made with the utmost energy for the defence of the city. All men liable to bear arms were called up, and huge numbers of volunteers were drilled. It was an affecting sight to see the poor workmen drilling on the Place du Carrousel for enrolment in the volunteer corps. Really, most of them looked so bloodless and wretched that one was tempted to think they went with the rest for the sake of the franc a day and uniform.

XXVI.

Anyone whose way led him daily past the fortifications could see, however technically ignorant he might be, that they were exceedingly insignificant. Constantly, too, one heard quoted Trochu's words: "I don't delude myself into supposing that I can stop the Prussians with the matchsticks that are being planted on the ramparts." Strangely enough, Paris shut herself in with such a wall of masonry that in driving through it in the Bois de Boulogne, there was barely room for a carriage with two horses. They bored loop-holes in these walls and ramparts, but few doubted that the German artillery would be able to destroy all their defences with the greatest ease.