UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY (36 page)

On the Wednesday I saw many public buildings in flames, including the Tuileries Palace. Some said the garden had been set ablaze by the Communards to stop the advance of the government troops, and indeed there were mad Jacobins,
les petroleuses
, who went around with a bucket of kerosene to start fires; others swore they had been caused by government howitzers; yet others blamed old Bonapartists who were taking advantage of the situation to destroy compromising archives. At first I thought that was what I would have done if I had been in Lagrange's position, but then it occurred to me that a good secret service agent hides information but never destroys it, since it may come in handy one day against someone.

Out of an excess of scruples, and with much fear of finding myself in the midst of fighting, I went for the last time to the pigeon loft, where I found a message from Lagrange. He told me I need no longer communicate by pigeon, and gave me an address at the Louvre, which had been occupied by now, and a password to get me through the government roadblocks.

At the same time I heard that government forces had reached Montparnasse. I remembered how at Montparnasse I had been taken to visit a vintner's cellar. From there you entered an underground passageway that followed rue d'Assas as far as rue du Cherche-Midi and then emerged in an abandoned storeroom in a building at carrefour de la Croix-Rouge, a crossroads still heavily occupied by Communards. Seeing that my underground investigations had so far been of no benefit, and that I had to obtain some results in order to earn my pay, I went to see Lagrange.

It wasn't difficult to reach the Louvre from the Île de la Cité, but behind Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois I saw a scene that, I confess, made quite an impression on me. A man and woman with a child were passing by, and they didn't seem to be running away from a stormed barricade; but there was a squad of drunken
brassardiers
who were obviously celebrating the capture of the Louvre, and they tried to pull the man from the arms of his wife, who was holding on to him, crying, and the
brassardiers
pushed all three against the wall and riddled them with bullets.

I made sure I passed only through the lines of regular soldiers to whom I could give my password, and was then led to a room where several people were marking a large map of the city with colored pins. I couldn't see Lagrange, and asked for him. A middle-aged man with an excessively normal face (by which I mean that if I had to describe him I could point out no salient feature) turned and greeted me courteously, not extending his hand.

"Captain Simonini, I presume. My name is Hébuterne. From now on, whatever you had to do with Monsieur Lagrange you will do with me. You are aware that change is necessary, even in state services, especially at the end of a war. Monsieur Lagrange deserved an honorable retirement, and perhaps he is right now fishing
à la ligne
somewhere or other, away from this disagreeable confusion."

This wasn't the moment to ask questions. I told him about the underground passage from rue d'Assas to the Croix-Rouge, and Hébuterne commented that an operation at the Croix-Rouge would be extremely useful, as he had received news that the Communards were amassing large numbers of troops there, awaiting the arrival of government forces from the south. He therefore ordered me to go to the vintner's shop, whose address I had given, and to wait there for a squad of
brassardiers
.

I was thinking of taking it slowly from the Seine to Montparnasse, to allow enough time for Hébuterne's messenger to arrive before me, when I saw, there on the pavement on the right bank, twenty corpses laid out in a line. They must have just been shot, and seemed to be of various ages and social classes. There was a young man who looked like a laborer, his mouth gaping open. Next to him was an older, more respectable man with curly hair and a well-groomed mustache, with hands crossed over a slightly rumpled frock coat. Beside him was someone with the face of an artist, and another whose features were almost unrecognizable, with a black hole where his left eye should have been and a towel tied around his head, as if some pious soul, or some ruthless renegade, had sought to bind up his head, which had been blown apart by who knows how many bullets. There was also a woman who had perhaps once been pretty.

 

A middle-aged man with an excessively normal
face . . . turned and greeted me . . . "Captain
Simonini, I presume. My name is Hébuterne."

The bodies lay in the late May sun, the first flies of the season buzzing around them, attracted by the feast. They looked as if they had been taken at random and shot just to set an example, and had been lined up on the pavement to clear the street for a platoon of government soldiers who were passing at that very moment, pulling a cannon behind them. What struck me about those faces was . . . I find it difficult to write down . . . was their
casualness:
in their sleep they seemed to show an acceptance of their common destiny.

Having reached the end of the row, I was shocked to see the corpse of the last executed man, slightly apart from the others, as if it had been added to the group later. Part of the face was caked with blood, but I had no difficulty in recognizing Lagrange. Changes certainly were under way in the secret service.

I have no womanish sensitivity, and had been perfectly capable of dragging a priest's corpse down into the sewers, but this sight disturbed me. Not out of pity, but because I realized it could have happened to me. All that was needed was to meet someone on the way to Montparnasse who recognized me as one of Lagrange's men — it could just as well have been a Versaillais or a Communard. Both sides had reason to distrust me — and distrust, in those days, meant death.

I decided to cross the Seine and follow the whole of rue du Bac above ground as far as the Croix-Rouge, assuming that in those areas where buildings were still on fire I'd be unlikely to find any Communards, and that the government forces would not yet be on patrol. From there I could go straight into the abandoned storeroom and take the rest of the route below ground.

I feared that the defenses at the Croix-Rouge would have prevented me from reaching the building, but they didn't. Armed groups stood at the entrances of various houses, awaiting orders. Conflicting information was circulating — it wasn't clear from which direction the government forces would arrive, and someone was laboriously building and dismantling barricades, changing the entrance of the road according to the latest rumor. A larger contingent of National Guardsmen was arriving, and many of the people living in that respectable district tried to persuade the soldiers not to attempt useless acts of heroism. After all, they said, the men from Versailles were compatriots and, what is more, republicans, and Thiers had promised an amnesty for all Communards who surrendered.

I found the door of my building ajar, went inside and closed it firmly behind me, climbed down to the storeroom, then down to the underground passageway, and found my way to Montparnasse without difficulty. There I met thirty or so
brassardiers
who followed me back along the same route. From the storeroom, the men went up to various top-floor apartments, ready to overpower the occupants, but were welcomed with relief by well-dressed people who pointed out the windows commanding the best positions over the crossroads. At that moment, an officer arrived on horseback from rue du Dragon, carrying an order of alert. The order was obviously for them to prepare for an attack from rue de Sèvres or rue du Cherche-Midi, and at the corner of the two streets the Communards were pulling up paving slabs to build a new barricade.

While the
brassardiers
were readying themselves at the windows of the occupied apartments, I did not think it fit to remain in a place where Communard bullets would, sooner or later, be flying, and so returned downstairs while there was still plenty of commotion below. Knowing the direction of fire from the windows of the building, I positioned myself at the corner of rue du Vieux Colombier so I could slip away in the event of danger.

Most of the Communards had stacked their weapons in a pile while they worked away, so when the shooting started from the windows they were caught unprepared. And even when they had retrieved them, they had no idea where the shots were coming from and began firing toward the corner of rue de Grenelle and rue du Four— I had to move back, fearing that the shots would also reach rue du Vieux Colombier. Finally, someone realized their enemy was shooting from above, and there was an exchange of fire between the crossroads and the windows of the houses, except that while the government soldiers could clearly see whom they were shooting at, and fired into the mob, the Communards were still unsure which windows to aim for. In short, it was an easy massacre. Meanwhile, someone at the crossroads was shouting that they'd been betrayed. It's always the same. When you fail at something, you try to blame someone else for your incompetence. But what betrayal? I thought — you simply have no idea how to fight. And you call this a revolution!

Someone eventually managed to work out which building was occupied by the government troops, and the survivors tried to break down the door. I imagined that by then the
brassardiers
had already returned into the underground tunnel and the Communards had found the house empty, but I decided not to wait around to find out. As I later discovered, the government forces were indeed approaching from rue du Cherche-Midi, and in large numbers, so the last defenders of the Croix-Rouge must have been easily wiped out.

I returned to my own alleyway by the back streets, avoiding those directions from which I could hear the rattle of gunshots. Along the walls I saw notices, freshly pasted up, from the Committee for Public Safety, urging citizens to make a last stand:
"Aux barricades! L'ennemi est dans nos murs. Pas d'hésitations!"

In a brasserie in place Maubert I received the latest news: seven hundred Communards had been shot in rue Saint-Jacques, the powder keg went up at the Luxembourg, and in revenge the Communards had taken hostages from the prison of La Roquette, including the archbishop of Paris, and lined them up against the wall. The execution of the archbishop marked the point of no return. There had to be a complete bloodbath for things to return to normal.

Just as these events were being described to me, several women arrived to shouts of jubilation from the other customers. They were
les femmes
returning to their brasserie! The prostitutes banned by the Commune had been brought back from Versailles by the government forces, who allowed them once again to circulate in the city, as if to show that all was returning to normal.

I couldn't stay there in the midst of that mob. They were undoing the one good thing the Commune had achieved.

In the next few days the Commune came to an end with the last hand-to-hand combat in Père-Lachaise cemetery. It was said that 147 survivors were captured and executed on the spot.

That way, they learned not to stick their noses into other people's affairs.

18

THE PROTOCOLS

From the diary for 10th and 11th April 1897 With the war over, Simonini resumed his normal work. Fortunately, with all the deaths, problems of inheritance were an everyday occurrence. Large numbers of those killed on or in front of the barricades were young and hadn't yet thought about making a will, and Simonini was inundated with work — and handsome profits. How wonderful it was to have peace, even if there had first been a sacrificial purification.

His diary makes little mention of the legal routine of the following years and refers only to his hope, which during that period he had never abandoned, of finding new contacts for the sale of his document on the Prague cemetery. He had no idea what Goedsche had been up to in the meantime, but had to keep ahead of him, not least because the Jews seemed to have curiously disappeared during almost the whole time of the Commune. Were they inveterate conspirators, secretly pulling strings in the Commune? Or were they, on the contrary, accumulators of capital hiding at Versailles waiting for the war to finish? But they were behind the Freemasons, and the Paris Freemasons had sided with the Commune, and the Communards had shot an archbishop. The Jews had to be involved in some way. They killed children, so killing archbishops was hardly a problem.

One day in 1876, while Simonini was pondering this question, he heard the bell downstairs. At the door was an elderly man in a cassock. He thought at first it was the usual satanist priest come to sell consecrated hosts, but then, studying him more closely, under that mass of gray but still curly hair, he recognized Father Bergamaschi. It had been almost thirty years since he'd last seen him.

For the Jesuit it was more difficult to be sure that the person in front of him was indeed the Simonini he had known as an adolescent, mainly because of the beard (which, after the return of peace, had become black again, with a touch of gray, as befitted a man in his mid-forties). Then his eyes brightened, and he said, with a smile, "But of course. Simonino, it's you, my boy, isn't it? Why keep me at the door?"