Miniatures of French history

In the height of a scorching summer, in June 1870, a young man, tall, lean, long in features, active in gesture, something fanatical, with deep-set and fixing eyes, pushed a perambulator (of all things!) along a pavement of the South Bank in Paris. By his side was the mother of the child: nor was she his wife.

I have said “young man,” but in years he was a boy. He was but twenty years old. That household he had set up was a curious adventure indeed. His parents, as he thought, knew nothing of it; and perhaps he was right. The strict laws of the French family would have forbidden a marriage. But his allowance was sufficient and his happiness was complete. At that age one is immortal; and as he lived in an undefeated society at the height of its hope and wealth, as he had himself hope and wealth beneath him in the largest measure for his foundation, nothing mattered but the intensity of his affection in this opening of his life.

There he was, in this comically small domestic manner, at the summit of whatever this life can bring, and trusting rightly to chance for the regulation of all things.

It was, I say, in the middle of that burning summer, and if the foreign affairs of the country were talked of at all (after small but supposedly splendid foreign victories), they were for him and his like but newspaper talk. They did not touch realities between waking and sleeping.

There was this difference between him and his like—that he had in him a certain material which could catch fire, and having caught fire would blaze unfed until he should die.

Ten weeks later this young man, or boy, having volunteered, was on the field of Sedan. The capitulation was announced; the men were already beginning to pile arms, and he, by a chance, was arguing with certain bearers who were moving a body. They maintained that the man was dead; he said that he was alive. He had his way, and he proved right. This also was a sharp point in his life, which he remembered always, even more clearly than any other episode of that disaster: how, while it was yet full light, he had argued with the bearers. The man whom he had saved he kept close to years after, making him a friend; for they went off as prisoners together into the Germanies.

That young man broke prison, and found his way to the Rhine and farther. He spoke no German; he did but ask his way; and when he had reached his own country again he went to the nearest centre and re-enlisted.

They sent him to the Loire. All this while he had heard nothing from his own people, or from what was nearer to him than his own people. So he served through that memorable and terrible winter under Chanzy, and saw the failure to relieve the capital. In those snows he came of age.

He did not see Paris again until he came there with the rank of captain in the troops of Thiers, for the suppression of the Commune. It was against one of the last barricades, near the foot of the Northern Hill, that he received his third wound in all that fighting, national and civil. To his old age he remembered that scene as a comedy for all its slaughter. He saw himself something of a chromo-lithograph, waving a sword and leading his men, who were Bretons. He turned his face toward the barricade, and at that moment saw, peering between two stones, the face of a boy younger than himself—a boy in no uniform, with a bandolier slung over the blue canvas of his blouse. He saw the boy’s musket resting on the stones and pointed towards him. He remembered that it was singularly fore-shortened ... and almost in the same instant that he saw this thing he felt as though a horse had kicked him with full strength on the left arm. He fell down, stunned, without pain; but a very few moments afterwards, as they carried him back, the pain grew intolerable. It was the worst thing he had suffered in all those months, and it was a day before the confusion of his thoughts relaxed. When his mind grew slowly clear again, he saw (more vividly than the dirty walls of the gaunt ward in which he lay) the barricade, and the boy in the blue canvas, and the fore-shortened barrel.

All these enormous things had run their course, and reached a settlement: the empire gone, Prussia supreme, the nation half murdered—a stillness and bitterness over everything. That which had been his life such a very little time before had ceased for him altogether. Some who read this would know too well whom I mean if I were to give the details of his misfortune, or of how he followed, but only at a distance, and supported his child: of how he learnt that the mother had left him for ever.

Note this strange thing: that to this young man, even now not yet in his twenty-third year, the torrents of violent emotion had settled into a sort of lake; a permanent feeling, profound, unchangeable, nourishing an unvarying output of appeal. Whatever he had lived, in whatever ways, his own small concealed home, his family for a moment estranged, his tradition and his proud name—all these had distilled into a lyrical patriotism, the fruits of which seemed at first more than half contemptible to the hard French temper about him. Those fruits took many forms. In the first place, he expended his whole self in a perpetual and open insistence upon the necessity for raising the nation against its conqueror; and this he did in a society where all such open and direct expression is greeted as insufficient and unworthy.

He acted thus, ingenuous and direct, in the midst of a Paris and of a France especially bent upon reserve, and he maintained that form of expression in spite of a much ridiculing and, what wounded him more, a patronizing affection. Through all his youth, through all his manhood, on into his middle age and to the verge of old age, this exalted mood affected him to verse, most of it of the second-rate sort; all of it rhetorical; all of it sincere. You may guess how this popular versifying jarred on the critical French ear and soul.

There was no occasion during thirty years, during forty years, in which he did not make it his business to preach continually the duty of reassertion and of warring down a conqueror who had become now assured in strength and rooted, and of whose achievement and mastery there seemed at last no question. It was the moment when Renan said: “France is dying. Let us not brawl at her death-bed.”

Long after Alsace-Lorraine had become mere names to a younger generation which knew nothing of the war, through mighty civil contests of opinion and even of religion (which the French alone wage in our time), his simple note sounded continually: at first acclaimed by the poor; always ridiculed by the too-cultured or the too-fatigued: latterly almost grotesque, still sounding in a world which had completely changed. In some part of his expression he had aged prematurely. In body he was still alert, though his last illness was upon him; in the vigour of his gesture, the fire of his glance, he was more than he had ever been.

By the year 1912—so oddly do human things turn about in the short unit of one lifetime—his career, his verse, his rhetoric, his perpetual insistence, had become a sort of institution for the nation. Societies love to take those of an older generation and to make them symbols. Even his literary insufficiency was half forgiven, and men talked of him as a sort of curious relic from the days when war was possible, and when the glory of a national rehabilitation (now impossible) could be reasonably entertained. But with this position of his among his fellow-citizens (which was quaintly mixed up with the love we bear for ancient things, almost because they are odd, and largely because we are sure they can never return) there now went something of grandeur. He was now, they said, an old man; and his very insistence in harping upon so single and so unfertile a theme had given him his definite place. And just as men would say, “So and so is now our great poet, So and so our great actor, So and so this, and So and so that,” in the same way they pointed to the man now grown old and said, “He, of course, is our great patriot,” but they said it with a smile. One man, however, who loved him, called him “Tyrtæus”: quizzically enough, I think.

No one thought it possible that his war would come.

His illness grew upon him fast. By one of those accidents which show the lives of men to be ordered, as the parts of an actor are ordered upon the stage, this man died just in those days before the war, when it was far too late for any man to remember great wars in Western Europe as a reality, and still some weeks too early for men to have grown uneasy and to think they already heard the guns. But as though so simple, so direct, and so very great a life were a presage, his funeral made a great picture.

There was a sort of silence after his death, like that which comes before a storm. Nor was the moment long delayed.

Upon a certain day, memorable to all of us, the Cabinet of Berlin presented a brief note to the Government of Paris. Prussia would fight in the East, and demanded as a guarantee the frontier garrisons of the French, over and above a promise of neutrality. We know the reply, and we know what followed.

The first young men to cross the frontier in arms (which was in the pine forests on the crests of the Vosges) pulled up the frontier post for a trophy. There was no discussion as to what should be done with that trophy. The decision seemed inevitable. It was sent back to be set upon this man’s grave, and there I saw it the other day. It had been set up hurriedly, and was leaning a little sideways. It always remains in my mind as the most significant monument in Europe. The grave is in a small cemetery upon the country hills which lie to the west of Paris, a cemetery so domestic and of such small consequence to the little village it belongs to that no good road leads to it, but the dead of the village are brought up from the main road a quarter of a mile off by bearers who follow a rough track.

Up this track, with a ritual dear to the French people, did certain delegates bear that frontier post, as we bear dead men for whom we proclaim the resurrection. They took it through the rustic gate into that small, neglected place, and put it upon the grave of the man who had lived so strange and inartistic a life: who stirred, and was gladdened in his sleep.