JULES VALLÈS AND MAXIME VUILLAUME SURVIVE BY PURE LUCK AND BY CONSORTING WITH OPPONENTS,
AS SHOTS FROM FIRING SQUADS RING OUT
Vallès is saved when a canteen lady offers him her wagon in which
she harbors wounded, so that he can say he is a doctor taking them to the hospital.
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| Portrait of Jules Vallès by Courbet, 1861 |
An officer who says they don't take prisoners so there are no wounded, but that he can remove the pestilential corpses.
The officer invites him for a drink in a neighboring café, and to maintain his alibi Valles shares a bottle of champagne.
# # #
In front of the Luxembourg palace (the Senate) Vuillaume is arbitrarily arrested and by a slip of the tongue calls the policeman "citizen." That makes him a Communard and he is sent to the line of those waiting to be shot:
- The prisoners were led out by this exit...
- ...and shot at this balustrade a few steps away:
He is young and well dressed: An officer of about his age notices him and says, "I will claim that you're my cousin." He persuades the policeman to let Vuillaume go. They all walk out of the Luxembourg together.
Not a single officer, not one civilian who in those odious days did the hideous and voluntary job of supplying the martial courts, turned around to see where we were going.
Two minutes after leaving the "queue" of the condemned, we were on the sidewalk, on the same spot where we had been arrested that morning by the men who accompanied us.
Good lord! What we went through last night and today. Just the same, what would your parents have said, when they learned this? [...]
That man who surely had led to the military court, to the slaughterhouse, hundreds of strangers, with never a question to his conscience, was pitying, almost crying at the fate of two young men whom he did not know from Adam and Eve, relatives, or so he thought, of a sergeant whose name he did not even know.
We heard firing behind the railings.
- The policeman invites them for a drink in a wine shop across the street, on the corner of rue de Vaugirard and rue de Servandoni. Then,
Ah! Guys! I'm glad I got you out of that... But I have to go back... time's up...
And, busy, wiping his mustache, he rushed off...
He held out his hand... That handshake, it still makes me shudder.
Oh ! how I stare at that cabaret every time I come to this place [...] I search for the little round table at which we sat. I see again the grand portal of the Senate, the soldiers who enter, the prisoners that are pushed with yells. And ringing in my ears is the sonorous laugh of the policeman, joyous and sinister at the same time.
- Vuillaume invites the officer for déjeuner.
The Senate and the surrounding streets looked like a vast battlefield, after the victory. The dead were spread out under the sun. Blood stained the walls. There was no corner where two or three cadavers did not lie [...]. At all the windows were officers, soldiers. [...]
When we were dining, in an isolated cabinet, I told the stupefied sergeant the real story.
# # #
The officer protects him as long as he can. Finally he says it has become too dangerous. Vuillaume continues to hide for a time, then manages to slip out of the city.
That is another story of arbitrariness and pure luck. If you know French read My Red Notebooks, even if on La Commune you read nothing else.
# # #
The wine shop is now a restaurant. Walking by one night, I saw that it was still open:
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Customers had left and the owner and friends were chatting at the bar: "I know it's late," I said, "but may I ask if you know for how long a restaurant as been here?"
They did not but when I explained the reason for my question and told them the story of Vuillaume and the officer, they listened attentively and posed for this photo.
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