Saturday, August 27
Zola comes to have breakfast with me. He tells me about a series of novels he is going to write, an epic in ten volumes, the Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille, which he has the ambition to attempt through the presentation of behaviors, characters, vices, virtues, developed by environment and differing like the parts of a garden where there is shade or sun.
He says to me: “After analyzing the infinite parts of feeling, as Flaubert did in Madame Bovary, after the analysis of artistic, plastic, nervous things, as you have done, after those jewel-works, those polished volumes, there is no longer any room for young writers, there is nothing left to do, nothing with which to constitute, to construct a character. It is only through the quantity of volumes, through the power of creation, that one can speak to the public.”
§
Sunday, August 28
In the Bois de Boulogne, where I had never seen anything but silk amid the green of the trees, I see a large patch of blue smock, the back of a shepherd, near a small column of bluish smoke; and around him, sheep grazing, for lack of grass, on the foliage of forgotten bundles of brushwood. In the carriage avenues, great oxen, astray and disoriented, wander in herds.
Sheep everywhere. Here, at the edge of the path, lying on its side, a dead ram, its head with curved horns crushed and oozing a little bloody water, spreading a red stain in the sand — poor head that sniffs, as though in a kiss, every sheep that passes.
At a certain moment, a commotion. Through every opening, through every gap between the leaves, one sees a flock of a hundred thousand lost beasts rush toward a gate, toward an exit, like an avalanche at Castiglione. And in the iridescent dust, on the slope of the fortifications, the tight lines of the countless sheep look like little superimposed walls that a visual disturbance sees running.
And the pond at Auteuil, half dried up by the lambs drinking on their knees among the reeds.
§
August 30
From the top of the Auteuil omnibus, at the Trocadéro stop, I glimpse, in the blinding brightness, on the great gray sheet of the Champ-de-Mars, a swarming of little red and blue dots of infantry soldiers.
I get down and find myself among small tents, where in the triangle of shadow one sees, here, the hilt of an officer’s saber, there, the weathered head of a foot soldier in the straw, near his canteen; among bright pavilions, among kitchens with tin pots on the stove; among distributions of gaiters, among open-air latrines, which form shirt sleeves of a beautiful moldy white tone. The soldiers refill their flasks from bottles that a wine merchant carries in a handcart. Others kiss a green-apple seller who laughs.
I walk through that animation, that movement, that gaiety of the French soldier ready to depart toward death, when the cracked voice of a little bow-legged, Hoffmannesque man gives this cry: “Pens, pencils, writing paper!” A cry uttered with such a strange intonation that one would call it a funeral memento, a kind of warning formulated thus: “Messieurs les militaires, what if you thought for a moment about your wills?”
§
August 31
This morning at dawn, the demolition of the houses in the military zone begins, amid a procession of neighborhood moves that resembles the migration of an ancient people. Strange corners of half-demolished houses, with remnants of heterogeneous furniture. For example, a barbershop whose gaping façade shows, forgotten, the praetorial chair where laundermen had their beards shaved on Sundays.
§
September 1
Yesterday, the Princess told me to come to her house, that she would have no one there. I arrive. The curtains have been removed from the windows. The Princess, as though stunned, repeats many times: “It was I, if they had told me on August 1 what was going to happen, it was I who would not have believed it!”
We dine. Around the table are old Giraud, Popelin, Soulié, Zeller, the new rector of the University of Strasbourg, and his daughter. Each one has his news, taken from Le Figaro or Le Gaulois. No one knows anything. They pity the inhabitants of Strasbourg, above all their manuscripts. Someone says that the spire of the cathedral has collapsed. The Princess, who is elsewhere, lets out: “But wasn’t that church solid?”
No one has the courage to laugh at the naïveté.
After dinner we smoke in the small drawing room; and since the Princess complains of the bad smell, everyone goes to smoke in the antechamber drawing room, except only Popelin, who, sunk into an armchair in the middle of the room, sends the smoke of his cigar up to the ceiling like the true master of the house. Once his cigar is finished, he goes to sit in the armchair that touches the end of the sofa where the Princess has the habit of knitting what turns into white waistcoats, throwing out from time to time a cutting, contradictory, extremely disdainful phrase. Poor woman! To fasten herself to the man who could best display her!
Nieuwerkerke arrives, and nothing is more curious than the greeting between the old lover and the new one. Then Abbatucci arrives unexpectedly, repeating himself with no ideas and, worse still, with no news. In this house of Napoleon’s cousin, in order to learn anything, one is reduced to sending someone to buy Le Soir and waiting for what Palikao’s doctor will see that night.
§
September 2
Leaving the Louvre, I meet Chennevières, who tells me that he is leaving tomorrow for Brest in order to escort the third convoy of paintings from the Louvre, which have been taken out of their frames, rolled up, and sent to be saved from the Prussians at the arsenal or the bathhouse of Brest. He describes to me the sad and humiliating spectacle of this packing, and Reiset weeping bitterly before La Belle Jardinière at the bottom of the crate, as before a beloved dead person at the moment when one is about to place him in the coffin.
At night, after dinner, we go to the train on the rue d’Enfer; and I see the seventeen crates containing Antiope, the most beautiful Venetians, etc., those paintings that were thought to be joined to the walls of the Louvre for all eternity and that are nothing more than packages protected against the misfortunes of displacement and travel by the word fragile.
It is not living, to live in this great and dreadful ignorance that surrounds us, that oppresses us.
Things die like men. Chennevières told me yesterday that Argentan lace, from 1815 to 1830, had been completely forgotten and that without the memory of two old spinsters, who still survive, it could not have been recovered. But there is one variety of that lace that has been lost.
What an aspect Paris has tonight, with the blow of Mac-Mahon’s defeat and the emperor’s capture circulating among the groups! Who will be able to paint the discouragement on faces, the coming and going of unconscious footsteps striking the asphalt at random, the anxious conversations of shopkeepers and concierges on the thresholds of doors and shops, the shadow of the crowd at street corners, near the town hall, the assault on the newspaper kiosk, the triple line of readers beneath any gas jet and on the chairs of back rooms, the collapse of the women one sees alone and without their men?
Then the roaring clamor of the crowd, in which anger succeeds stupefaction. Then the great bands move along the boulevards, preceded by flags and by the bristling cry of “Deposition! Long live Trochu!” Finally, the tumultuous and disorderly spectacle of a nation that is going to perish or save itself through a monstrous effort, through the impossibility of revolutionary times.
[1870]
