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My Double Life

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He slept next the wall, and therefore had no neighbour on the one side.
During the night he managed to file the brass of his bedstead. He put
the filings in a little pot which had been used for ointment of some
kind. A few drops of water and some salt mixed with this powdered brass
formed a poison which might have cost its inventor his life. I was
furious at this stratagem. I wrote to the Val-de-Grâce, and an ambulance
conveyance was sent to take this unpatriotic Frenchman away.

But side by side with these despicable men what heroism we saw! A young
captain was brought in one day. He was a tall fellow, a regular
Hercules, with a superb head and a frank expression. On my book he was
inscribed as Captain Menesson. He had been struck by a bullet at the top
of the arm, just at the shoulder. With a nurse's assistance I was trying
as gently as possible to take off his cloak, when three bullets fell
from the hood which he had pulled over his head, and I counted sixteen
bullet holes in the cloak. The young officer had stood upright for three
hours, serving as a target himself, whilst covering the retreat of his
men as they fired all the time on the enemy. This had taken place among
the Champigny vines. He had been brought in unconscious, in an ambulance
conveyance. He had lost a great deal of blood, and was half dead with
fatigue and weakness. He was very gentle and charming, and thought
himself sufficiently well two days later to return to the fight. The
doctor, however, would not allow this, and his sister, who was a nun,
besought him to wait until he was something like well again.

"Oh, not quite well," she said, smiling, "but just well enough to have
strength to fight."

Soon after he came into the ambulance the Cross of the Legion of Honour
was brought to him, and this was a moment of intense emotion for every
one. The unfortunate wounded men who could not move turned their
suffering faces towards him, and, with their eyes shining through a mist
of tears, gave him a fraternal look. The stronger amongst them held out
their hands to the young giant.

It was Christmas-eve, and I had decorated the ambulance with festoons of
green leaves. I had made pretty little chapels in front of the Virgin
Mary, and the young priest from St. Sulpice came to take part in our
poor but poetical Christmas service. He repeated some beautiful prayers,
and the wounded men, many of whom were from Brittany, sang some sad
solemn songs full of charm.

Porel, the present manager of the Vaudeville Theatre, had been wounded
on the Avron Plateau. He was then convalescent and was one of my
patients, together with two officers now ready to leave the ambulance.
That Christmas supper is one of my most charming and at the same time
most melancholy memories. It was served in the small room which we had
made into a bedroom. Our three beds were covered with draperies and
skins which I had had brought from home, and we used them as seats.
Mlle. Hocquigny had sent me five metres of _boudin blanc_
("white-pudding"), the famous Christmas dish, and all my poor soldiers
who were well enough were delighted with this delicacy. One of my
friends had had twenty large _brioche_ cakes made for me, and I had
ordered some large bowls of punch, the coloured flames from which amused
the grown-up sick children immensely. The young priest from St. Sulpice
accepted a piece of _brioche_, and after taking a little white wine left
us. Ah, how charming and good he was, that poor young priest! And how
well he managed to make Fortin, the insupportable wounded fellow, cease
talking. Gradually the latter began to get humanised, until finally he
began to think the priest was a good sort of fellow. Poor young priest!
He was shot by the Communists. I cried for days and days over the murder
of this young St. Sulpice priest.




XVII


PARIS BOMBARDED


The month of January arrived. The army of the enemy held Paris day by
day in a still closer grip. Food was getting scarce. Bitter cold
enveloped the city, and poor soldiers who fell, sometimes only slightly
wounded, passed away gently in a sleep that was eternal, their brain
numbed and their body half frozen.

No more news could be received from outside, but thanks to the United
States Minister, who had resolved to remain in Paris, a letter arrived
from time to time. It was in this way that I received a thin slip of
paper, as soft as a primrose petal, bringing me the following message:
"Every one well. Courage. A thousand kisses.--Your mother." This
impalpable missive dated from seventeen days previously.

And so my mother, my sisters, and my little boy were at The Hague all
this time, and my mind, which had been continually travelling in their
direction, had been wandering along the wrong route, towards Hâvre,
where I thought they were settled down quietly at the house of a cousin
of my father's mother.

Where were they, and with whom?

I had two aunts at The Hague, but the question was, were they there? I
no longer knew what to think, and from that moment I never ceased
suffering the most anxious and torturing mental distress.

I was doing all in my power just then to procure some wood for fires.
Comte de Kératry had sent me a large provision before his departure to
the provinces in a balloon on October 9. My stock was growing very
short, and I would not allow what we had in the cellars to be touched,
so that in case of an emergency we should not be absolutely without any.
I had all the little footstools belonging to the theatre used for
firewood, all the wooden cases in which the properties were kept, a good
number of old Roman benches, arm-chairs and curule chairs, that were
stowed away under the theatre, and indeed everything which came to hand.
Finally, taking pity on my despair, pretty Mlle. Hocquigny sent me ten
thousand kilograms of wood, and then I took courage again.

I had been told about some new system of keeping meat, by which the meat
lost neither its juice nor its nutritive quality. I sent Madame Guérard
to the _Mairie_ in the neighbourhood of the Odéon, where such provisions
were distributed, but some brute answered her that when I had removed
all the religious images from my ambulance I should receive the
necessary food. M. Herisson, the mayor, with some functionary holding an
influential post, had been to inspect my ambulance. The important
personage had requested me to have the beautiful white Virgins which
were on the mantel-pieces and tables taken away, as well as the Divine
Crucified--one hanging on the wall of each room in which there were any
of the wounded. I refused in a somewhat insolent and very decided way to
act in accordance with the wish of my visitor, whereupon the famous
Republican turned his back on me and gave orders that I should be
refused everything at the _Mairie_. I was very determined, however, and
I moved heaven and earth until I succeeded in getting inscribed on the
lists for distribution of food, in spite of the orders of the chief. It
is only fair to say that the mayor was a charming man. Madame Guérard
returned, after her third visit, with a child pushing a hand-barrow
containing ten enormous bottles of the miraculous meat. I received the
precious consignment with infinite joy, for my men had been almost
without meat for the last three days, and the beloved _pot-au-feu_ was
an almost necessary resource for the poor wounded fellows. On all the
bottles were directions as to opening them: "Let the meat soak so many
hours," &c. &c.

Madame Lambquin, Madame Guérard, and I, together with all the staff of
the infirmary, were soon grouped anxiously and inquisitively around
these glass receptacles.

I told the head attendant to open the largest of the bottles, in which
through the thick glass we could see an enormous piece of beef
surrounded by thick, muddled-looking water. The string fastened round
the rough paper which hid the cork was cut, and then, just as the man
was about to put the corkscrew in, a deafening explosion was heard and a
rank odour filled the room. Every one rushed away terrified. I called
them all back, scared and disgusted as they were, and showed them the
following words on the directions: "Do not be alarmed at the bad odour
on opening the bottle." Courageously and with resignation we resumed our
work, though we felt sick all the time from the abominable exhalation. I
took the beef out and placed it on a dish that had been brought for the
purpose. Five minutes later this meat turned blue and then black, and
the stench from it was so unbearable that I decided to throw it away.
Madame Lambquin was wiser, though, and more reasonable.

"No, oh no, my dear girl," she said; "in these times it will not do to
throw meat away, even though it may be rotten. Let us put it in the
glass bottle again and send it back to the _Mairie_."

I followed her wise advice, and it was a very good thing I did, for
another ambulance, installed at Boulevard Medicis, on opening these
bottles of meat had been as horrified as we were, and had thrown the
contents into the street. A few minutes after the crowd had gathered
round in a mob, and, refusing to listen to anything, had yelled out
insults addressed to "the aristocrats," "the clericals," and "the
traitors," who were throwing good meat, intended for the sick, into the
street, so that the dogs were enjoying it, while the people were
starving with hunger, &c. &c.

It was with the greatest difficulty that the wretched, mad people had
been prevented from invading the ambulance, and when one of the
unfortunate nurses had gone out, later on, she had been mobbed and
beaten until she was left half dead from fright and blows. She did not
want to be carried back to her own ambulance, and the druggist begged me
to take her in. I kept her for a few days, in one of the upper tier
boxes of the theatre, and when she was better she asked if she might
stay with me as a nurse. I granted her wish, and kept her with me
afterwards as a maid.

She was a fair-haired girl, gentle and timid, and was pre-destined for
misfortune. She was found dead in the Père Lachaise cemetery after the
skirmish between the Communists and the Versailles troop. A stray bullet
struck her in the back of the neck as she was praying at the grave of
her little sister, who had died two days before from small-pox. I had
taken her with me to St. Germain, where I had gone to stay during the
horrors of the Commune. Poor girl! I had allowed her to go to Paris very
much against my own will.

As we could not count on this preserved meat for our food, I made a
contract with a knacker, who agreed to supply me, at rather a high
price, with horse flesh, and until the end this was the only meat we had
to eat. Well prepared and well seasoned, it was very good.

Hope had now fled from all hearts, and we were living in the expectation
of we knew not what. An atmosphere of misfortune seemed to hang like
lead over us, and it was a sort of relief when the bombardment commenced
on December 27. At last we felt that something new was happening! It was
an era of fresh suffering. There was some stir, at any rate. For the
last fortnight the fact of not knowing anything had been killing us.

On January 1, 1871, we lifted our glasses to the health of the absent
ones, to the repose of the dead, and the toast choked us with such a
lump in our throats.

Every night we used to hear the dismal cry of "Ambulance! Ambulance!"
underneath the windows of the Odéon. We went down to meet the pitiful
procession, and one, two, or sometimes three conveyances would be there,
full of our poor, wounded soldiers. There would be ten or twelve rows of
them, lying or sitting up on the straw. I said that I had room for one
or two, and, lifting the lantern, I looked into the conveyance, and the
faces would then turn slowly towards the lamp. Some of the men would
close their eyes, as they were too weak to bear even that feeble light.
With the help of the sergeant who accompanied the conveyance and our
attendant, one of the unfortunates would with difficulty be lifted into
the narrow litter on which he was to be carried up to the ambulance.

Oh, what sorrowful anguish it was for me when, on lifting the patient's
head, I discovered that it was getting heavy, oh, so heavy! And when
bending over that inert face I felt that there was no longer any breath!
The sergeant would then give the order to take him back, and the poor
dead man was put in his place and another wounded man was lifted out.

The other dying men would then move back a little, in order not to
profane the dead.

Ah, what grief it was when the sergeant said: "Do try to take one or two
more in! It is a pity to drag these poor chaps about from one ambulance
to another. The Val-de-Grâce is full."

"Very well, I will take two more," I would say, and then I wondered
where we should put them. We had to give up our own beds, and in this
way the poor fellows were saved. Ever since January 1 we had all three
been sleeping every night at the ambulance. We had some loose
dressing-gowns of thick grey flannel, not unlike the soldiers' cloaks.
The first of us who heard a cry or a groan sprang out of bed, and if
necessary called the other two.

On January 10, Madame Guérard and I were sitting up at night, on one of
the lounges in the green-room, awaiting the dismal cry of "Ambulance!"
There had been a fierce affray at Clamart, and we knew there would be
many wounded. I was telling her of my fear that the bombs which had
already reached the Museum, the Sorbonne, the Salpétrière, the
Val-de-Grâce, &c., would fall on the Odéon.

"Oh, but, my dear Sarah," said the sweet woman, "the ambulance flag is
waving so high above it that there could be no mistake. If it were
struck it would be purposely, and that would be abominable."

"But, Guérard," I replied, "why should you expect these execrable
enemies of ours to be better than we are ourselves? Did we not behave
like savages at Berlin in 1806?"

"But at Paris there are such admirable public monuments," she urged.

"Well, and was not Moscow full of masterpieces? The Kremlin is one of
the finest buildings in the world. That did not prevent us giving that
admirable city up to pillage. Oh no, my poor _petit Dame_, do not
deceive yourself. Armies may be Russian, German, French, or Spanish, but
they _are_ armies--that is, they are beings which form an impersonal
'whole,' a 'whole' that is ferocious and irresponsible. The Germans will
bombard the whole of Paris if the possibility of doing so should be
offered them. You must make up your mind to that, my dear Guérard----"

I had not finished my sentence when a terrible detonation roused the
whole neighbourhood from its slumbers. Madame Guérard and I had been
seated opposite each other. We found ourselves standing up close
together in the middle of the room, terrified. My poor cook, her face
quite white, came to me for safety. The detonations continued rather
frequently. The bombarding had commenced from our side that night. I
went round to the wounded men, but they did not seem to be much
disturbed. Only one, a boy of fifteen, whom we had surnamed "pink baby,"
was sitting up in bed. When I went to him to soothe him he showed me his
little medal of the Holy Virgin.

"It is thanks to her that I was not killed," he said. "If they would put
the Holy Virgin on the ramparts of Paris the bombs would not come."

He lay down again then, holding his little medal in his hand, and the
bombarding continued until six in the morning. "Ambulance! Ambulance!"
we then heard, and Madame Guérard and I went down. "Here," said the
sergeant, "take this man. He is losing all his blood, and if I take him
any farther he will not arrive living." The wounded man was put on the
litter, but as he was German, I asked the sub-officer to take all his
papers and hand them in at the Ministry. We gave the man the place of
one of the convalescents, whom I installed elsewhere. I asked him his
name, and he told me that it was Frantz Mayer, and that he was a soldier
of the Silesian Landwehr. He then fainted from weakness caused by loss
of blood. But he soon came to himself again with our care, and I then
asked him whether he wanted anything, but he did not answer a word. I
supposed that he did not speak French, and, as there was no one at the
ambulance who spoke German, I waited until the next day to send for some
one who knew his language. I must own that the poor man was not welcomed
by his dormitory companions. A soldier named Fortin, who was
twenty-three years of age and a veritable child of Paris, a comical
fellow, mischievous, droll, and good-natured, never ceased railing
against the young German, who on his side never flinched. I went several
times to Fortin and begged him to be quiet, but it was all in vain.
Every fresh outbreak of his was greeted with wild laughter, and his
success put him into the gayest of humours, so that he continued,
getting more and more excited. The others were prevented from sleeping,
and he moved about wildly in his bed, bursting out into abusive language
when too abrupt a movement intensified his suffering. The unfortunate
fellow had had his sciatic nerve torn by a bullet, and he had to endure
the most atrocious pain.

After my third fruitless appeal for silence I ordered the two men
attendants to carry him into a room where he would be alone. He sent for
me, and when I went to him promised to behave well all night long. I
therefore countermanded the order I had given, and he kept his word. The
following day I had Frantz Mayer carried into a room where there was a
young Breton who had had his skull fractured by the bursting of a shell,
and therefore needed the utmost tranquillity.

One of my friends, who spoke German very well, came to see whether the
Silesian wanted anything. The wounded man's face lighted up on hearing
his own language, and then, turning to me, he said:

"I understand French quite well, Madame, and if I listened calmly to the
horrors poured forth by your French soldier it was because I know that
you cannot hold out two days longer, and I can understand his
exasperation."

"And why do you think that we cannot hold out?"

"Because I know that you are reduced to eating rats."

Dr. Duchesne had just arrived, and he was dressing the horrible wound
which the patient had in his thigh.

"Well," he said, "my friend, as soon as your fever has decreased you
shall eat an excellent wing of chicken." The German shrugged his
shoulders, and the doctor continued, "Meanwhile drink this, and tell me
what you think of it."

Dr. Duchesne gave him a glass of water, with a little of the excellent
cognac which the Prefect had sent me. That was the only _tisane_ that my
soldiers took. The Silesian said no more, but he put on the reserved,
circumspect manner of people who know and will not speak.

The bombardment continued, and the ambulance flag certainly served as a
target for our enemies, for they fired with surprising exactitude, and
altered their firing directly a bomb fell any distance from the
neighbourhood of the Luxembourg. Thanks to this, we had more than twelve
bombs one night. These dismal shells, when they burst in the air, were
like the fireworks at a _fête_. The shining splinters then fell down,
black and deadly. Georges Boyer, who at that time was a young
journalist, came to call on me at the ambulance, and I told him about
the terrifying splendours of the night.

"Oh, how much I should like to see all that!" he said.

"Come this evening, towards nine or ten o'clock, and you will see," I
replied.

We spent several hours at the little round window of my dressing--room,
which looked out towards Chatillon. It was from there that the Germans
fired the most.

We listened, in the silence of the night, to the muffled sounds coming
from yonder; there would be a light, a formidable noise in the distance,
and the bomb arrived, falling in front of us or behind, bursting either
in the air or on reaching its goal. Once we had only just time to draw
back quickly, and even then the disturbance in the atmosphere affected
us so violently that for a second we were under the impression that we
had been struck.

The shell had fallen just underneath my dressing-room, grazing the
cornice, which it dragged down in its fall to the ground, where it burst
feebly. But what was our amazement to see a little crowd of children
swoop down on the burning pieces, just like a lot of sparrows on fresh
manure when the carriage has passed! The little vagabonds were
quarrelling over the _débris_ of these engines of warfare. I wondered
what they could possibly do with them.

"Oh, there is not much mystery about it," said Boyer; "these little
starving urchins will sell them."

This proved to be true. One of the men attendants, whom I sent to find
out, brought back with him a child of about ten years old.

"What are you going to do with that, my little man?" I asked him,
picking up the piece of shell, which was warm and still dangerous, on
the edge where it had burst.

"I am going to sell it," he replied.

"What for?"

"To buy my turn in the _queue when the meat is being distributed."

"But you risk your life, my poor child. Sometimes the shells come
quickly, one after the other. Where were you when this one fell?"

"Lying down on the stone of the wall that supports the iron railings."
He pointed across to the Luxembourg Gardens, opposite the stage entrance
to the Odéon.

We bought up all the _débris_ that the child had, without attempting to
give him advice which might have sounded wise. What was the use of
preaching wisdom to this poor little creature, who heard of nothing but
massacres, fire, revenge, retaliation, and all the rest of it, for the
sake of honour, for the sake of religion, for the sake of right?
Besides, how was it possible to keep out of the way? All the people
living in the Faubourg St. Germain were liable to be blown to pieces, as
the enemy very luckily could only bombard Paris on that side, and not at
every point. No; we were certainly in the most dangerous neighbourhood.

One day Baron Larrey came to see Frantz Mayer, who was very ill. He
wrote a prescription which a young errand boy was told to wait for and
bring back very, very quickly. As the boy was rather given to loitering,
I went to the window. His name was Victor, but we called him "Toto." The
druggist lived at the corner of the Place Medicis. It was then six
o'clock in the evening. Toto looked up, and on seeing me he began to
laugh and jump as he hurried to the druggist's. He had only five or six
more yards to go, and as he turned round to look up at my window I
clapped my hands and called out, "Good! Be quick back!" Alas! Before the
poor boy could open his mouth to reply he was cut in two by a shell
which had just fallen. It did not burst, but bounced a yard high, and
then struck poor Toto right in the middle of the chest. I uttered such a
shriek that every one came rushing to me. I could not speak, but pushed
every one aside and rushed downstairs, beckoning for some one to come
with me. "A litter"--"the boy"--"the druggist"--I managed to articulate.
Ah, what a horror, what an awful horror! When we reached the poor child
his intestines were all over the ground, his chest and his poor little
red chubby face had the flesh entirely taken off. He had neither eyes,
nose, nor mouth; nothing, nothing but some hair at the end of a
shapeless, bleeding mass, a yard away from his head. It was as though a
tiger had torn open the body with its claws and emptied it with fury and
a refinement of cruelty, leaving nothing but the poor little skeleton.

Baron Larrey, who was the best of men, turned slightly pale at this
sight. He saw plenty such, certainly, but this poor little fellow was a
quite useless holocaust. Ah, the injustice, the infamy of war! Will the
much dreamed of time never come when wars are no longer possible; when
the monarch who wants war will be dethroned and imprisoned as a
malefactor? Will the time never come when there will be a cosmopolitan
council, where a wise man of every country will represent his nation,
and where the rights of humanity will be discussed and respected? So
many men think as I do, so many women talk as I do, and yet nothing is
done. The pusillanimity of an Oriental, the ill-humour of a sovereign,
may still bring thousands of men face to face. And there will still be
men who are so learned, chemists who spend their time in dreaming about,
and inventing a powder to blow everything up, bombs that will wound
twenty or thirty men, guns repeating their deadly task until the bullets
fall, spent themselves, after having torn open ten or twelve human
breasts.

A man whom I liked very much was busy experimenting how to steer
balloons. To achieve that means a realisation of my dream, namely, to
fly in the air, to approach the sky, and have under one's feet the
moist, down-like clouds. Ah, how interested I was in my friend's
researches! One day, though, he came to me very much excited with a new
discovery.

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