Robert W. Chambers

“ In their misfortune, the lonely women of Paradise recognized in this influx a godsend—a few francs to gain with which to face those coming wintry months while their men were absent. And they opened their tiny houses to those who asked a lodging.
The crowds which had earlier in the evening gathered to gape at our big tent were now noisiest in the square, where the endless drone of the pipes intoned the farandole.
A few of our circus folk had come down to enjoy the picturesque spectacle. Speed, standing with Jacqueline beside me, began to laugh and beat time to the wild music. ”

“ The telegraph station at the semaphore was a little, square, stone hut, roofed with slate, perched high on the cliffs. A sun-scorched, wooden signal-tower rose in front of it; behind it a line of telegraph poles stretched away into perspective across the moors. Beyond the horizon somewhere lay the war-port of Lorient, with its arsenal, armed redoubts, and heavy bastions; beyond that was war.
While we plodded on, hip deep, through gorse and thorn and heath, we cautiously watched a spot of red moving to and fro in front of the station ”

“ I’m actually too tired to sleep. Have you got a pack of cards, Scarlett? or a 188 decent cigar, or a glass of anything, or anything to show me more amusing than that nightmare of an elephant? Oh, I’m sick of the whole business—sick! sick! The stench of the tan-bark never leaves my nostrils except when the odor of fried ham or of that devilish camel replaces it.
“I’m too old to enjoy a gypsy drama when it’s acted by myself; I’m tired of trudging through the world with my entire estate in my pocket. I want a home, Scarlett. Lord, how I envy people with homes!” ”

“ We were in seedy circumstances; an endless chain of bad luck had followed us from Chartres—bad weather, torrents of rain, flooded roads, damaging delays on 161 railways already overcrowded with troops and war material, and, above all, we encountered everywhere that ominous apathy which burdened the whole land, even those provinces most remote from the seat of war. The blockade of Paris had paralyzed France.
The fortune that Byram had made in the previous year was already gone; we no longer travelled by rail; we no longer slept at inns; we could barely pay for the food for our animals. ”

“ Those who first whispered to her that love of country was a narrow creed; those who taught her to abhor violence, and then failed at the test—Bazard, firing to kill, going down to death under the merciless lance of an Uhlan; Buckhurst, guilty of every crime that attracted him; and now Sylvia, her friend, false to the salt she had eaten, false to the roof above her, false, utterly false to all save the land of her nativity.
And she, Éline de Trécourt, a soldier’s daughter and a Frenchwoman, had been used as a shield by those who were striking her own mother-land—the country she once had denied ”

“ I said: “I do not believe that you care nothing for France. Train and curb and crush your own heart as you will, you cannot drive out that splendid earth-born humanity which is part of us—else we had all been born in heaven!”
“Come,” said Bazard, in a rage-choked voice, “let it end here, Monsieur Scarlett. If the government sends you here as a spy and an official, pray remember that you are not also sent as a missionary.”
My ears began to burn. “That is true,” I said, looking at the Countess, whose face had become expressionless. ”

“ I bear it from the devastated towns of the provinces, from your homeless brothers of Alsace and Lorraine.
“Peace, Love, Equality! All this is yours for the asking. The commune will be proclaimed throughout France; Paris is aroused, Lyons is ready, Bordeaux watches, Marseilles waits!
“You call your village Paradise—yet you starve here. Let this little Breton village be a paradise in truth—a shrine for future happy pilgrims who shall say: ‘Here first were sewn the seeds of the world’s liberty! Here first bloomed the perfect flower of universal brotherhood!” ”

“ This mild, balmy November weather, this afterglow of summer which in my own country we call Indian summer, had started new blossoms among the climbing tea-roses, lovely orange-tinted blossoms, and some of a clear lemon color, and their fragrance filled the air. Nowhere do roses blow as they blow near the sea, nowhere have I breathed such perfume as I breathed that drowsy afternoon in Paradise, where in every door-yard thickets of clove-scented pinks carpeted the ground 167 and tall spikes of snowy phlox glimmered silver-white in the demi-light. ”

“ Three of the torches were knocked to the ground and trampled out as the insurgents, doubly drunken with wine and the taste of blood, seized me and tried to force me against the wall; but the Turco, with his shrill, wolf-like battle yelp, attacked them, sabre-bayonet in hand. Speed, too, had wrested a rifle from a half-stupefied ruffian, and now stood at bay before the Countess; I saw him wielding his heavy weapon like a flail; then in the darkness Tric-Trac shot at me, so close that the powder-flame scorched my leg. ”

“ But wait, here is the point, Monsieur Buckhurst. Formerly the name of ’terrorist’ was a shock to the entire civilized world; it evoked the spectres of a year that the world can never forget. And so our modern reformers, modestly desiring to evade the inconveniences of such memories among the people, call themselves the ’Internationale.’ Listen to them; they are adroit, they blame and rebuke violence, they condemn anarchy, they would not lay their hands on public or individual property—no, indeed! ”

“ Far away, a thin cry sounded above the cannon din; the doomed cuirassiers were cheering. It was the first charge they had ever made; nobody had ever seen cavalry of their arm on any battle-field of Europe since Waterloo.
Suddenly their long, straight blades shot into the air, the cuirassiers broke into a furious gallop, and that mass of steel-clad men burst straight down the first slope of the plateau, through the Prussian infantry, then wheeled and descended like a torrent on Morsbronn. ”

“ Buckhurst swept the throng with colorless eyes.
“Under the commune we will have peace. Why? Because there can be no hunger, no distress, no homeless ones where the wealth of all is distributed equally. We will have no wars, because there will be nothing to fight for. We will have no aristocrats where all must labor for the common good; where all land is equally divided; where love, equality, and brotherhood are the only laws—”
“Where’s the mayor?” I whispered to Eyre.
“In his house; Speed is with him.” ”

“ The town had filled within a day or two; the Paradise coiffe was not the only coiffe to be seen in the square; there was the delicate-winged head-dress of Faöuet, the beautiful coiffes of Rosporden, Sainte-Anne d’Auray, and Pont Aven; there, too, flashed the scarlet skirts of Bannalec and the gorgeous embroidered bodices of the interior; there were the men of Quimperlé in velvet, the men of Penmarch, the men of Faöuet with their dark, Spanish-like faces and their sombreros, and their short yellow jackets and leggings. ”

“ Speed came slowly across the room with me.
“Do they mean to shoot us?” he asked, bluntly.
“Messieurs,” said the Countess, with a faint smile, “your whispers are no compliment to my race. Pray honor me by plain speaking. Are we to die?”
We stood absolutely speechless before her.
“Ah, Monsieur Scarlett,” she said, gravely, “do you also fail me ... at the end?... You, too—even you?... Must I tell you that we of Trécourt fear nothing in this world?”
She made a little gesture, exquisitely imperious. ”

“ At moments, from the outskirts of the village, the sinister sound of cheering came from the vanguard of the German Sixth Corps, just arriving to learn of the awful disaster to France. Too late to take any part in the battle, these tired soldiers stood cheering by regiments as the cavalry rode past in pursuit of the shattered army, and their cheering swelled to a terrific roar toward morning, when the Prince Royal of Prussia appeared with his staff, and the soldiers in Morsbronn rushed out into the street bellowing, “Hoch soll er leben! Er soll leben—Hoch!” ”

“ The train which bore me out of the arc of the Prussian fire at Strasbourg passed in between the fortifications of Paris the next morning about eleven o’clock. Ten minutes later I was in a closed cab on my way to the headquarters of the Imperial Military Police, temporarily housed in the Luxembourg Palace.
The day was magnificent; sunshine flooded the boulevards, and a few chestnut-trees in the squares had already begun to blossom for the second time in the season; there seemed to be no prophecy of autumn in sky or sunlight. ”

“ Why do you cry, mademoiselle?”
“Cry, m’sieu? They are taking the men of Paradise to the war. France must know how cruel she is to take our men from us.”
We had reached the green crest of the plateau; the girl tethered her diminutive cow, sat down on a half-imbedded stone, and continued her knitting, crying softly all the while.
I asked her to direct me to the house where Robert, the Lizard, lived; she pointed with her needles to a large stone house looming up in the gray light, built on the rocks just under the beacon. ”

“ The débris of the regiments closed up, long, straight sabres glittered, trembling horses plunged forward, broke into a stiff gallop, and passed through the infantry, through the rent in the barricade, and staggered away across the fields, buried in the smoke of a thousand rifles.
So rode the “Cuirassiers of Morsbronn,” the flower of an empire’s chivalry, the elect of France. So rode the gentlemen of the Sixth Lancers to shiver their slender spears against stone walls—for the honor of France.
Death led them. Death rode with them knee to knee. Death alone halted them. ”

“ The mayor hastily shaded his eyes with one fat hand, muttering: “All poachers have eyes like sea-hawks. There is a smudge of smoke to the north. Holy Virgin, what eyes the rascal has!”
As for me, strain my eyes as I would, I saw nothing save the faintest stain of smoke on the horizon. 172
“Hé, Lizard! Are they German, your six war-ships?” bawled the mayor. His voice had suddenly become tremulous.
“They are French,” replied the poacher, tranquilly.
“Then Sainte-Éline keep them from the rocks!” sang out the mayor. “Ohé, Lizard, I want somebody to drum and read a proclamation. ”

“ Some attract me so strongly—some I pity so. I think that if people only knew that there was no such thing as a stranger in the world, the world might be a paradise in time.”
“It might be, some day, if all the world were as good as you, madame.”
“Oh, I am only a perplexed woman,” she said, laughing. “I do so long for the freedom of all the world, absolute individual liberty and no law but that best of all laws—the law of the unselfish.”
We had stopped, by a mutual impulse, at the head of the stone stairway.
“Why do you shelter such a man as John Buckhurst?” ”

“ With one exception, all those whom the police and the government regarded as inclined to 10 violence left the group. There remained, with this one exception, a nucleus of earnest, thoughtful people whose creed was in part the creed of the Internationale, the creed of universal brotherhood, equality before the law, purity of individual living as an example and an incentive to a national purity.
To this inoffensive group came one day a young widow, the Countess de Vassart, placing at their disposal her great wealth, asking only to be received among them as a comrade. ”

“ That I can swing higher than any girl in Paradise has been demonstrated often,” she went on, earnestly. “I can swim farther, I can dive deeper, I can run faster, with bare feet or with sabots, than anybody, man or woman, from the Beacon to Our Lady’s Chapel! At bowls the men will not allow me because I have beaten them all, monsieur, even the mayor, which he never forgave. As for the farandole, I tire last of all—and it is the biniou who cries out for mercy!” ”