Chapter 4 (2)

The Reverend Father Petcherin!... That sin too lies at the doors of Nicholas. I had not known Petcherin personally, but I had heard a very great deal about him from Ryedkin, Kryukov and Granovsky. He had returned, a young professor, from abroad, to take the Chair of Greek in the Moscow University; it was at one of the very darkest periods of the persecution by Nicholas between 1835 and 1840. We were in exile, the later young professors had not yet arrived, the _Telegraph_ had been forbidden, the _European_ had been forbidden, the _Telescope_ had been forbidden. Tchaadayev had been declared insane.

It was not till after 1848 that the Terror in Russia went to even further extremes.

But the frenzied tyranny of the last years of Nicholas’ reign was unmistakably the fifth act. By then it was already becoming apparent that something was not only breaking and ruining, but was itself being broken and dropping into ruins. There was the sound as though the floor were cracking under a collapsing roof.

In the ’thirties, on the contrary, the frenzy of power went its accustomed routine with its regular step; all around was silence and desolation, everything was dumb submission with no hope, no human dignity, and at the same time dull, stupid and petty. Any one who looked for sympathy met a flunkey’s menace or panic, all turned from him or insulted him. Petcherin was gasping for air in this Neapolitan cave of slavery, he was overtaken by horror, misery, he had at all costs to escape from this accursed land. To get away he needed money. Petcherin began to give lessons, reduced his expenditure to the barest necessaries, missed the gatherings of his comrades, went out little, and after saving a small sum went away.

Soon afterwards he wrote a letter to Count Strogonov; he informed him that he should not return. Thanking him and bidding him farewell, Petcherin spoke of the unbearably suffocating atmosphere from which he was escaping, and besought him to protect the luckless young professors doomed by their culture to the same agonies, to shield them from the blows of brute force.

Strogonov showed this letter to many of the professors.

There was silence about him for some time in Moscow, then suddenly we heard with an infinitely bitter feeling that Petcherin had become a Jesuit, that he was serving his novitiate in a monastery. Poverty, friendlessness, solitude had broken his spirit. I looked through his _Triumph of Death_, and asked myself: ‘Can this man possibly be a Catholic, a Jesuit? Why, he has already gone from the rule of the Tsars, where _history is made_ under the stick of the policeman, and under guard of the gendarme. Why then did he so soon feel the need of other control, other authority?’

The Russian felt isolated, forlorn in the closely classified West, up to its neck in business; he was too conscious of being without kith or kin. When the cord by which he was bound was broken and his life, suddenly set free from every external guidance, was left in his own hands, he did not know what to do, could not deal with it, and thrown out of his natural orbit with no goal before him, no boundaries to restrain him, he sank into a Jesuit monastery!

At two o’clock on the day after I heard his name, I went to Saint Mary’s Chapel. The heavy oak door was closed—I knocked three times with a knocker in the shape of a ring, the door opened and a thin young man of about eighteen appeared, wearing a monk’s cassock; in his hand was a breviary.

‘Whom do you wish to see?’ the brother who acted as porter asked.

‘The Reverend Father Petcherin.’

‘Kindly give me your name.’

‘Here is my card and a letter.’ In the letter I had put an announcement of the Russian printing press.

‘Come in,’ said the young man, closing the door behind me. ‘Will you wait here?’ and he indicated two or three large chairs with antique carving on them in the spacious vestibule.

Five minutes later he returned, and told me in French, with a slight accent, that _le père Petcherin sera enchanté de me recevoir dans un instant_.

After that he led me across the refectory into a small, lofty room, dimly lighted, and again asked me to sit down. On the wall there was a crucifix carved out of stone, and, if I am not mistaken, on the other side there was also a Madonna. About the heavy, massive table there were large wooden armchairs and ordinary chairs. A door on the opposite side led by a porch into a spacious garden; its worldly greenness and the rustle of the leaves seemed somehow out of keeping.

The brother doorkeeper showed me a notice on the wall, in which was the statement that the reverend fathers saw those that had need of them between four and six. It was not yet four.

‘I think you are not an Englishman and not a Frenchman?’ I asked him, listening to his accent.

‘No.’

‘_Sind Sie ein Deutscher?_’

‘_Oh, nein, mein Herr. Ich bin beinahe ihre Landsmann, ich bin ein Pole._’

Well—the brother doorkeeper was not a bad choice, he spoke in four languages. I sat down; he went away; I felt strange at seeing myself in these surroundings. Black figures kept walking by in the garden; two men in semi-monastic dress passed close by me; they gravely but courteously bowed, looking at the ground; on each occasion I rose and as gravely bowed in return. At last a little very elderly priest came in wearing a biretta and the regular garb in which priests are dressed in monasteries. He came straight up to me, his robes rustling, and asked me with the purest French accent: ‘You wish to see Petcherin?’ I answered by giving my name.

‘I am greatly delighted at your visit,’ he said, holding out his hand; ‘please sit down.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, somewhat taken aback at not having recognised him. It had not entered my head that I should meet him in such a costume. ‘Your dress....’

He gave a slight smile and at once went on: ‘It is a long while since I have had any news of my own country, of our friends, of the university. You probably knew Ryedkin and Kryukov.’

I looked at him; his face was old, older than his years, one could see that behind those wrinkles much had passed, and passed away, _tout de bon_, that is, had died, leaving only its funereal traces on his features. The artificial clerical composure with which monks destroy as with corrosive sublimate whole sides of their heart and their mind had reached even his speech and all his movements. A Catholic priest has always something of the widow, he too is always in mourning and in solitude, he too is faithful to something which is not, and quenches his real passions by stimulating his imagination.

When I told him about our common acquaintances and about the death of Kryukov, at which I had been present, and how his students had borne him to the cemetery across the whole length of the town, and then about Granovsky’s triumphs, about his public lectures, we both sank into thought. What was passing in the skull under the biretta I do not know, but Petcherin took it off as though it weighed heavily on him at that moment, and laid it on the table. Conversation did not run easily. ‘_Sortons un peu au jardin_,’ said Petcherin, ‘_le temps est si beau, et c’est si rare à Londres._’

‘_Avec le plus grand plaisir_, but tell me, please, why are we talking in French?’

‘Yes, indeed! Let us speak Russian. I believe I have quite forgotten it.’

We went out into the garden. The conversation again passed to our university days in Moscow.

‘Oh,’ said Petcherin, ‘what a terrible time it was when I left Russia! I cannot think of it without shuddering!’

‘Only imagine what is being done there now; our Saul has gone completely mad since 1848,’ and I told him of several atrocious incidents.

‘Unhappy country, especially for the minority who have received the unlucky gift of culture. And yet what a good people! I often think of our peasants when I am in Ireland. They are very much alike; the Celtic peasant is just such a child as ours. You should go to Ireland, and you will be convinced of it yourself.’

So the conversation was prolonged for half an hour; at last when I prepared to leave him I said to him: ‘I have a favour to ask of you.’

‘Please tell me what it is.’

‘Several of your poems came into my hands in Petersburg: among them is a trilogy—“Polikrat Samossky,” “The Triumph of Death” and something else: haven’t you got them, or can you not let me have them?’

‘How can you recall such nonsense! They were the crude, childish productions of a certain period and a certain mood.’

‘Perhaps,’ I observed smiling, ‘that is why I like them; but have you got them or not?’

‘No, indeed!’

‘And you could not dictate them?’

‘No, no, certainly not.’

‘But if I can find them somewhere in Russia will you permit me to publish them?’

‘I really look upon those trivial productions as though some one else had written them; they mean no more to me than a sick man’s ravings after his recovery.’

‘Since they mean nothing to you, then I can publish them—without your name, of course?’

‘Do you like those verses still?’

‘That’s my business. You only tell me whether you will allow me to publish them or not.’

Even then he would not give me a direct answer. I did not insist further.

‘Why,’ observed Petcherin, as I was saying good-bye, ‘you have brought me none of your publications. I remember some three years ago there was talk in the newspapers of a book published by you, I believe in German.’

‘Your cloth,’ I answered, ‘will tell you on what grounds I could not bring it; accept my not doing so as a sign of respect and delicacy.’

‘You little know our tolerance and our love; we may grieve over error, pray for its correction, earnestly desire it, and in any case love the man.’

We parted. He forgot neither the book nor my answer, and three days later wrote me the following letter in French:—

J.M.J.A., ST. MARY’S, CLAPHAM, _April 11, 1853_.

I cannot disguise from you the sympathy that is awakened in
my heart by the word freedom—freedom for my unhappy country!
Do not for one instant doubt the sincerity of my desire for
the resurrection of Russia. For all that, I am far from
agreeing with your programme in all respects. But that is
of no importance, the love of the Catholic priest embraces
all opinions and all parties. When your most precious hopes
deceive you, when the powers of this world rise up against
you, you will still have left an unfailing refuge in the
heart of the Catholic priest: in him you will find affection
without insincerity, precious tears and the peace which this
world cannot give you. Come to me, dear fellow-countryman. I
should be very pleased to see you once more before I go away to
Guernsey. Do not forget to bring your brochure for me.

V. PETCHERIN.

I took him the books, and four days afterwards received the following letter:—

ST. PIERRE, ISLAND OF GUERNSEY, J.M.J.A.,
CHAPELLE CATHOLIQUE, _April 15, 1853_.

I have read both your books with great attention. One thing
has particularly impressed me: it seems to me that you and
your friends rest your hopes exclusively on philosophy and on
_belles lettres_. Can you imagine that it is their vocation to
reform society as it is? Pardon me, but the evidence of history
is entirely against you. There is no instance of a society
being founded or recreated by philosophy and literature. I say
plainly (_tranchons le mot_), only religion has ever served as
the foundation of a state; philosophy and literature, alas! are
but the latest flower of the social tree. When philosophy and
literature attain their apogee, when philosophers, orators and
poets are the ruling power and settle all public questions,
then comes the end, the downfall, then comes the death of
society. That is shown by Greece and Rome, that is shown by
the so-called Alexandrian period; never was philosophy more
encouraged, never was literature more flourishing, yet it
was a period of deep social degradation; whenever philosophy
has undertaken the re-creation of the social order, it has
invariably passed into a social despotism, for instance in the
case of Frederick II., Catherine II., Joseph II., and in all
the revolutions that have failed. You have let fall a phrase
felicitous or infelicitous as you like: you say that the
phalanstery is nothing but the barracks in another form, and
that Communism can but be the autocracy of Nicholas transformed
into another aspect. In fact, I see a shadow of melancholy
resting on you and your Moscow friends. Indeed, you seem
yourselves conscious that you are all Onyegins, _i.e._ that you
and your friends are all in negation, in doubt, in despair. Is
it possible to rebuild society on such foundations?

Perhaps what I have said is a commonplace, and you know it
better than I do. I write this not for the sake of argument,
not to begin a controversy, but I thought myself bound to make
this criticism, because sometimes the noblest minds and best
hearts are mistaken in their fundamental principle, without
themselves being aware of it. So I write this to you to show
how attentively I have read your book, and to give you a fresh
proof of the respect and love which, etc.

V. PETCHERIN.

To this I answered him in Russian:

25 EUSTON SQUARE, _April 21, 1853_.

HONOURED FELLOW-COUNTRYMAN,—I thank you most sincerely for your
letter, and ask your leave to say a few words _à la hâte_, on
the principal points of it.

I entirely agree with you that literature like the flowers of
autumn appears in all its brilliance before the downfall of
states. Ancient Rome could not be saved by the witty phrases of
Cicero, nor by his thin morality, nor by the Voltairianism of
Lucian, nor the German philosophy of Proclus; but note that it
could not be saved by the Eleusinian mysteries either, nor by
Apollonius of Tyana, nor all the efforts to prolong and revive
paganism.

It was not only impossible but useless. There was no need to
save the ancient world, it had outlived its age, and a new
world had risen up to take its place. Europe is precisely in
the same position; literature and philosophy are not preserving
its decrepit forms, but thrusting them into the tomb, breaking
them up, setting us free from them.

The new world is approaching exactly as it was then. Do not
think that I have been inconsistent in calling the phalanstery
a barracks; no, all doctrines and schools of socialists that
have appeared hitherto, from Saint-Simon to Proudhon, who
stands for nothing but negation, are poor, they are the first
murmur, the first spelling out word by word, they are the
Therapeutes and the Essenes of the ancient East. But who has
not a foreboding, a glimpse of the vast issues that are dimly
apparent through those one-sided efforts, and who would punish
children because their teeth are cut with difficulty or come
through irregularly?

The despondency of modern life is the despondency of the
twilight, of transition, of forebodings. Animals are uneasy
before an earthquake.

Nothing has got beyond that point. Some try to force open the
door to the future, others forcibly prevent the past from
going; some look to prophecies, others to memories, their work
consists in hindering each other, and both alike are stuck in
the bog.

Beside it is another world—Russia. Its foundation is a
communistic peasantry still slumbering, with a surface scum
of cultivated people reduced to the condition of Onyegin, to
despair, to exile, to your fate and to mine. It is a bitter
lot for us. We are victims of the fact that we are born out of
our right time. For our cause that makes no difference; at any
rate, it has not the same importance.

Speaking of the revolutionary movement in new Russia, I have
said that from Peter the Great Russian history is the history
of the nobility and of the Government. The revolutionary
ferment is found in the nobility; though in Russia it has had
no outlet—open, active, in the market-place—no outlet except
the literary career; there too I have tracked it.

I have had the boldness to say in my letter to Michelet that
cultured Russians are the most emancipated of men; we have
gone incomparably further in negation than, for instance, the
French. In negation of what? Of the old world, of course.

Together with his idle despair Onyegin now is arriving at
positive hopes. You have perhaps not noticed them. Abjuring
Europe in its effete form, abjuring Petersburg, which is Europe
again but adapted to our manners, weak and cut off from the
people, we have perished. But little by little something new,
grotesque in Gogol, exaggerated in the Panslavists, has been
developing. This new element is the element of faith in the
strength of the people, a faith full of love. With it we have
begun to understand the peasantry. But we are far away from
them. I am not saying that it will be our lot to re-create
Russia; we must be thankful to have welcomed the common people,
and to have divined that the new world belongs to them.

One word more. I am not confounding science with literary and
philosophical culture. Science, if it does not re-create a
state, does not really decline with it. It is a means, it is
the memory of the human race, it is its conquest over Nature,
its emancipation. Ignorance, ignorance alone is the cause of
pauperism and slavery. The masses have been left by their
educators in the condition of cattle. Science, nothing but
science, can correct that now and give them bread and shelter.
Not through propaganda but through chemistry, mechanics,
technology, railways, it may restore the brain which has been
cramped morally and physically for ages.

I shall be truly delighted, _et cetera_.

A fortnight later, I received the following letter from Father Petcherin:

J.M.J.A., ST. MARY’S, CLAPHAM, _May 3, 1853_.

I answer you in French for reasons of which you are aware. I
could not write to you before, I was burdened with duties in
Guernsey: one has little time for philosophical theory when one
lives in the midst of a reality pulsating with life; one has
no leisure to settle speculative problems of the future destiny
of mankind when mankind in flesh and blood comes to pour out
its sorrows on one’s bosom, and to beg for advice and help.

I must frankly confess that your last letter filled me with
horror, and a very egoistic horror I must admit.

What will happen to us when your culture (_votre civilisation
à vous_) gains the day? For your science is everything, alpha
and omega. Not that broad science which embraces all the
faculties of man, everything visible and invisible, science as
it has been understood by the world hitherto, but a limited,
narrow science which analyses and dissects matter, and knows
of nothing else. Chemistry, mechanics, technology, steam,
electricity—the great science of eating and drinking, the
worship of the individual (_le culte de la personne_) as
Michel Chevalier would have said! Woe to us if _that_ science
triumphs! In the days of their persecution by the Roman
Emperors Christians had at least the possibility of flight into
the wilderness of Egypt, the sword of the tyrants was checked
at that boundary which they could not pass. But whither can
one flee from the tyranny of your material civilisation? It
levels mountains, excavates canals, lays down railways, sends
steamers; its newspapers penetrate to the burning wastes of
Africa, to the pathless forests of America. As once Christians
were dragged into the amphitheatres to be exposed to the jeers
of the crowd greedy for spectacles, so now they will drag us
men of prayer and silence into the public market-place, and
there ask: ‘Why do you flee from our society? You ought to take
part in our materialistic life, in our trade, in our marvellous
industry. Go, make speeches in the market-place, go and preach
political economy, deliberate on the fall and rise of the
exchange. Go and preside at our feasts, paradise is here on
earth—let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!’ That is what
moves me to horror, for where are we to find a refuge from the
tyranny of matter, which is gaining more and more mastery of
all?

Forgive me if I have somewhat exaggerated the gloomy colours
of my picture; it seems to me that I have only carried the
foundations laid by you to their legitimate conclusion. I
should not have left Russia for an intellectual caprice
(_caprice de spiritualité_). Russia has indeed begun with
science as you understand it, and she is continuing with it.
She holds in her hands the gigantic lever of material power.
She calls all talents to serve her and to celebrate her
material prosperity. She will become the most cultured country
in the world. Providence has allotted to her the material
world; she will make a paradise of it for her elect. She
understands civilisation just as you understand it, the science
of the material has always been her strength. But we who have
faith in an immortal soul and a future life, what have we to do
with this civilisation of the present minute? Russia will never
have me for its subject.

I have propounded my views with simplicity, to make our
position clear to each other. Forgive me if I put too much heat
into my words. As I am going back to Ireland on Friday morning
it will be impossible for me to come to you, but I shall be
very glad if it will suit you to visit me on Wednesday or on
Thursday after dinner.—Receive, etc.

V. PETCHERIN.

I answered him next day.

25 EUSTON SQUARE, _May 4, 1853_.

HONOURED FELLOW-COUNTRYMAN,—I went to see you to press the hand
of a Russian whose name was familiar to me and whose position
was so like my own.... Although life and convictions have put
you among the triumphant ranks of the conquerors and me in
the melancholy camps of the vanquished, I had no thought of
touching upon the difference of our opinions. My wish was to
see a Russian, my wish was to bring you living news of your
native land. From a sense of delicacy I did not offer you my
pamphlets, it was your own wish to see them. Hence your letter,
my answer, and your second letter of the 3rd of May; you attack
me, my opinions (exaggerated and not fully held by me), I
cannot but defend myself. I only wrote to you that I reckon the
sum total of our conquests over Nature and of all our culture,
of course, entirely outside the domain of _belles lettres_ and
abstract philosophy.

But this is a lengthy subject, and I have no desire without
special provocation to repeat everything that has so many
times been said about it. Allow me rather to reassure you
in regard to your anxiety about the future of men who love
the contemplative life. Science is not a special school or
doctrine, and so it can become neither a government, an
arbitrary law, nor a persecution. You probably meant to speak
of social ideas, of freedom. In that case, take the most
‘materialistic’ and ‘most free’ country, England. Men of the
contemplative life as well as the advocates of a Utopia find in
it a nook for tranquil reflection and a platform for preaching
their doctrines. And yet England, a Protestant monarchy, is
very far from complete tolerance.

And what is there to fear? The rumble of the wheels bringing
bread to the hungry, half-clad crowd? We do not forbid men
to thrash corn for fear they should disturb our poetic
tranquillity.

There will always and everywhere be contemplative natures;
there will be more freedom for them both as to thought and
stillness; let them find themselves a quiet spot; no one will
disturb and no one will summon them, no one will persecute
them, no one will either oppress them or support them. I
imagine it is wrong to be afraid of improving the life of the
masses because the process of improving it may grate upon the
ears of men who do not want to hear anything external. No one
asks even for self-denial, for kindness, for sacrifice in
this case. If it is noisy in the market-place you should not
carry your wares there but go away from it. But the newspapers
follow us everywhere—what contemplative nature is dependent for
happiness on the first edition in Paris or the first edition in
London?

But, you see, if instead of freedom the anti-materialistic and
monarchial principles triumph, then it will be hard for us to
find a place, not where we may rest undisturbed, but where we
may escape the hangings, burnings, and torturings which are
still to be found to some extent in Rome and Milan, in France
and Russia.

Which then need feel afraid? Of course, death is of no
consequence _sub specie aeternitatis_, but from that point of
view, you know, everything else is of no consequence either.

Forgive me, honoured fellow-countryman, for my frank opposition
to what you say, and consider that I could make no other answer.

My warmest good wishes that you may have a good journey to
Ireland.

With that our correspondence ended.

Two years passed. The grey fog on the European horizon was lighted up by the glare of the Crimean War which made its darkness blacker than ever, and all at once, among the bloody news of campaigns and sieges, I read in the newspapers that somewhere in Ireland the Reverend Father Vladimir Petcherin had been brought up for trial for publicly burning a Protestant Bible in the market-place. The haughty British judge, taking into consideration the senselessness of the action and the fact that the prisoner was a Russian, confined himself to a paternal exhortation to a greater propriety of behaviour in the streets for the future....

Can those chains weigh lightly upon him ... or does he often take off his biretta and lay it wearily on the table?

3

THREE TRIALS

I

THE DUEL

In 1853 the celebrated communist Willich introduced me to a Parisian workman called Emanuel Barthélemy. I knew his name before from the June trial, from his sentence, and finally from his escape from Belle-Île.

He was a young man, short, but of a muscularly powerful build; his pitch-black curly hair gave him a Southern look; his face, slightly marked with smallpox, was clear-cut and handsome. Continual conflict had aroused in him an inflexible will and the power of directing it. Barthélemy was one of the most single-minded natures which it has been my lot to meet. Of bookish school education he had none except in his own line: he was an excellent mechanic. We may note in passing that it was from the ranks of the mechanics, machinists, engineers, and railway workers that the most resolute fighters on the June barricades came.

The thought of his life, the passion of his whole existence was an unflagging thirst like that of Spartacus for the revolt of the working people against the middle classes. This idea was in him inseparable from a savage desire to massacre the bourgeois.

What a commentary that man furnished me on the horrors of 1793 and 1794, on the days of September, on the hatred with which the parties nearest of kin destroyed each other! In him I saw face to face how a man can combine a thirst for blood with humanity in other relations, even with tenderness, and how a man may be at peace with his own conscience while like Saint-Just sending dozens of men to the guillotine.

‘That the revolution may not be for the tenth time stolen out of our hands,’ Barthélemy would say, ‘we must crush our worst foe at home, in our own family. At the counter, in the office, we always find him—it’s in our own camp we ought to destroy him!’ On his proscription lists were the names of almost all the refugees: Victor Hugo, Mazzini, Victor Schœlcher,[64] and Kossuth. He made very few exceptions; among them, I remember, was Louis Blanc. The peculiar object of his most genuine hatred was Ledru-Rollin. The keen, passionate but extremely composed face of Barthélemy would twitch convulsively when he spoke of ‘the dictator of the bourgeoisie.’

He talked in a masterly fashion, a talent that is growing more and more rare. Public speakers in Paris, and still more in England, are endless in number. Priests, lawyers, members of parliament, men selling pills or cheap pencils, hired orators—secular and spiritual—in the parks, they all have a wonderful faculty for preaching, but very few can talk for the benefit of a room.

Barthélemy’s one-sided logic, continually turned in one direction, acted like the flame of a blowpipe. He spoke smoothly without raising his voice or gesticulating; his choice of words, his sentences were correct, pure, and completely free from the three curses of modern French, revolutionary jargon, legal expressions and the easy familiarity of shop-boys.

Where had this workman, brought up in the stifling foundries where iron was forged and wrought for machines, in stifling Parisian alleys, between the pot-house and the forge, in prison and in penal servitude—where had he gained his true conception of beauty and proportion, of tact and grace—a conception lost by bourgeois France? How had he managed to preserve the unaffected naturalness of his language among the frigid rhetoricians, the Gascons of revolutionary babble?

It is indeed a puzzle.

It seems as though the atmosphere must be fresher about the workshops. Here is his life, however.

He was not yet twenty when he was mixed up in some _émeute_ in the time of Louis-Philippe. A gendarme stopped him, and as he began to say something the gendarme gave him a punch in the face with his fist. Barthélemy, who was being held by a _municipal_, tore himself away, but could do nothing. This blow awakened the tiger in him. Barthélemy—an eager, good-humoured young working lad—got up the next day transformed.

It must be observed that though Barthélemy was arrested the police released him, finding him not guilty. As for the outrage done him, no one cared to discuss it. ‘What do you want to run about the streets for when there is an _émeute_ going on? Besides, how could we find the gendarme now?’

So there it was. Barthélemy bought a pistol, loaded it and took to sauntering about that part of the town; he hung about for a day or two, when all at once he saw the gendarme standing at the corner. Barthélemy turned away and cocked his pistol. ‘Do you recognise me?’ he asked the police officer. ‘I should think I do.’ ‘Then you remember how you...?’ ‘Come, go along, go on your way,’ said the gendarme. ‘_Bon voyage_ to you too,’ said Barthélemy, and pulled the trigger. The gendarme fell, and Barthélemy walked away. The gendarme was mortally wounded, but did not die on the spot.

Barthélemy was tried for simple murder. No one took into consideration the greatness of the insult—especially according to French ideas—the impossibility of a workman sending a challenge, the impossibility of taking legal proceedings. Barthélemy was condemned to penal servitude. This was the third school in which he was trained after the forge and the prison. When Crémieux, the Minister of Justice after the February revolution, revised sentences, Barthélemy was released.

The days of June came. Barthélemy, one of the most ardent followers of Louis Blanc, showed himself then in his full strength.

He was seized while heroically defending a barricade and carried off to the forts. Some of the victims were shot on the spot, others were crowded into the cellars of the Tuileries, while others were sent to the forts and were there sometimes shot casually, more to make room than for any other reason.

Barthélemy survived; at his trial he did not dream of defending himself, but turned the prisoner’s dock into a platform from which to attack the National Guard. To him we are indebted for many details of the exploits that the guardians of order performed in secret, privately as it were. Several times the president commanded him to be silent, and at last cut short his speech with a sentence of penal servitude for fifteen or twenty years if I remember right (I have not the record of the proceedings before my eyes).

Barthélemy was sent with others to Belle-Île.

Two years later he escaped and turned up in London with a plan for going back there and arranging the escape of six of the prisoners. The small sum of money which he asked for (six or seven thousand francs) was promised, and disguised as an abbé, with a breviary in his hand, he went to Paris and to Belle-Île, arranged everything, and came back to London for the money. I am told that the plan was not carried out on account of a dispute whether Blanqui was to be released or not. The partisans of Barbès and others chose rather to leave several friends in prison than to release one enemy.

Barthélemy went away to Switzerland. He disagreed with all the parties and cut himself off from them; to the followers of Ledru-Rollin he was a sworn foe, but he was not friendly with his own side; he was too curt and angular, his extreme opinions were unpleasant to the ‘leaders’ and scared the weak. In Switzerland he devoted himself to the manufacture of arms. He invented a special make of gun, which was loaded as it was fired and in that way enabled a succession of bullets to be shot off at the same target one after another. With this weapon he dreamed of killing Napoleon III., but Barthélemy’s wild passions on two occasions saved Buonaparte from the man whose determination was no less than Orsini’s.

In Ledru-Rollin’s party there was a desperate character—a duellist, rake and scapegrace called Cournet.

Cournet was one of that special class who are often met with among Polish Pans and Russian officers, particularly among retired cornets living in the country; to it belonged Denis Davydov and his boon companion Burtsov, Gagarin—‘the skull and cross bones’—and Lensky’s second, Zaryetsky. In a vulgar form they are met with among the Prussian _Junkers_ and in the Austrian barracks. In England they do not exist at all; in France such a man is at home, he is like a fish in water, but a fish with polished, varnished scales. These men are brave, reckless to the point of insolence and senselessness, and very dull-witted. They live all their lives on the memory of two or three incidents in which they have passed through fire and water, have sliced off somebody’s ears, have stood under a shower of bullets. It sometimes happens that they have first bragged of some daring action and have then really performed it to prove their words. They are dimly conscious that their recklessness is their strength; the only point of interest of which they can boast, and they have a mortal passion for boasting. With all that, they are often good comrades, especially in good-humoured talk, and will stand up manfully for their own side till the first tiff with the latter; altogether they have more military daring than civic courage.

Idlers, reckless gamblers at cards and in life, _Lanzknechts_ of every desperate enterprise, particularly if it is possible to put on a uniform with the gold lace of a general, and to get money and decorations—and afterwards to settle down again for some years in a billiard-room or a café. And whether it is in helping Napoleon in Strasbourg, or the Duchess of Berry in Blois, or the red republic in the Faubourg St. Antoine, they do not care.... For them and for all France bravery and success cover everything.

Cournet had begun his career in the fleet during the quarrel between France and Portugal. With a handful of comrades he crept on to a Portuguese frigate, overpowered the crew and took the frigate. This incident determined and concluded Cournet’s future life. All France was talking of this young midshipman; he went no further, and ended his career with the exploit with which he began it, as completely as though he had been killed in it. Later on he was expelled from the fleet. Profound peace reigned in Europe. Cournet was bored to death and began fighting on his own account. He used to say that he had fought twenty duels; we may suppose that he had fought ten, and that is quite enough to show that he could not be considered a rational man.

How he came to be a red republican I cannot tell. He played no particular part among the French refugees. Various anecdotes were told about him, such as that he had belaboured a police officer who had tried to arrest him in Belgium and got away, and other pranks of the same kind.

He considered himself one of the foremost swordsmen in France.

The gloomy courage of Barthélemy, who was full of an unbridled _amour-propre_ of his own sort, in contact with the arrogant valour of Cournet, was bound to lead to disaster. They were jealous of each other. But belonging to different circles, to hostile parties, they might all their lives have avoided a meeting. Kind friends with brotherly zeal helped to bring it about.

Barthélemy had a grudge against Cournet on account of letters sent to him through Cournet from France which had never reached him. It is very probable that Cournet was not to blame in this matter; gossip was soon added to this grievance. Barthélemy had in Switzerland become acquainted with an actress, an Italian girl, and was living with her. ‘What a pity,’ Cournet said, ‘that this most socialist of socialists should have let an actress keep him!’ Barthélemy’s friends promptly wrote to him of this saying. On getting the letter, Barthélemy threw up his work on the gun, and his actress, and galloped off to London.

I have already mentioned that he was acquainted with Willich. The latter was a pure-hearted and very good-natured man, a Prussian artillery officer; he had gone over to the side of the revolution and become a communist. He had fought at Baden for the people, being in control of the artillery during Hecker’s insurrection, and when everything was crushed he went to England. He arrived in England without a halfpenny, and tried to give lessons in mathematics and German, but he had no luck. He gave up his school-books, and regardless of his previous rank as an officer heroically became a workman. With some comrades he set up a workshop for making brooms and brushes. They did not meet with support. Willich did not lose hope either of the resurrection of Germany or of the improvement in his own fortunes; the latter, however, did not improve, and he carried his hopes of a Teutonic republic with him to New York, where he obtained a post as a government surveyor.

Willich perceived that the business with Cournet was taking a very unfortunate turn, and offered his services as a mediator. Barthélemy had the fullest confidence in Willich, and put his case in his hands. Willich went to see Cournet. The Prussian’s firm, quiet tone had an effect on the ‘_première épée_’; he explained the matter of the letters; then in answer to Willich’s question, whether he believed that Barthélemy was being kept by an actress, Cournet said that he had repeated a rumour, and that he regretted it.

‘That,’ said Willich, ‘is quite enough. Write what you have said on paper, give it me, and I shall go home truly delighted.’

‘If you like,’ said Cournet, and took up the pen.

‘So you are going to apologise to a fellow like Barthélemy,’ observed another refugee, who had come in at the end of the conversation.

‘Apologise? Why, do you take this for an apology?’

‘For the act of an honest man,’ said Willich, ‘who having repeated a slander regrets it.’

‘No,’ said Cournet, flinging down the pen, ‘that I cannot do.’

‘Didn’t you say so just now?’

‘No, no, pardon me, but I cannot. Tell Barthélemy that “I said that because I chose to say it.”’

‘Bravissimo!’ cried the other refugee.

‘On you, _monsieur_, rests the responsibility for the misfortunes that will follow,’ Willich said to him, and went away.

This happened in the evening; he came to me before he had yet seen Barthélemy; he walked mournfully up and down the room, saying: ‘Now a duel is inevitable. What a misfortune that that refugee was present!’

‘There is no helping things now,’ I thought. ‘Reason is silent before the wild flare of passions, and when one adds to that French blood, the hatred of coteries and of different members of the chorus in the amphitheatre...!’

Two days later I was walking along Pall Mall in the morning; Willich was striding rapidly along. I stopped him; pale and agitated he turned to me.

‘What is it?’

‘Killed outright.’

‘Who?’

‘Cournet. I am running to Louis Blanc for advice what to do.’

‘Where is Barthélemy?’

‘He and his second and Cournet’s seconds are in prison. Only one of the seconds was not arrested; by the English law Barthélemy may be hanged.’

Willich got on to an omnibus and was carried off. I was left in the street. I stood pondering, then turned and went home again.

Two days later Willich came to me. Louis Blanc had of course taken an active interest in the matter and had tried to consult some well-known lawyers. It had been thought best to put the matter so that it should not be known who fired and who was a witness. To do this it was necessary that both sides should say the same thing. All were persuaded that the English judge would not care to set police traps in the case of a duel.

This had to be conveyed to Cournet’s friends, but none of Willich’s acquaintances visited them nor Ledru-Rollin. He therefore sent me to Mazzini. I found him in great irritation.

‘I suppose you have come,’ he said, ‘about this murder.’ I looked at him, paused with intention and then said, ‘About the case of Barthélemy.’

‘You know him, you are standing up for him; that’s all very well, though I don’t understand it.... Cournet, poor Cournet had friends too....’

‘Who probably did not call him a criminal for having taken part in twenty duels, in which apparently it was not he that was killed.’

‘Is this the time to recall that?’

‘I spoke in answer to you.’

‘Well, now is _he_ to be saved from the gallows?’

‘I imagine that no one will feel any particular pleasure at the hanging of a man who behaved as Barthélemy did at the June barricades. Anyway, it is not a question of him alone, but also of Cournet’s seconds.’

‘He won’t be hanged.’

‘There is no telling,’ a young English radical with his hair done _à la Jésus_ observed coolly. He had not spoken till then, but had approved Mazzini’s words with the motion of his head, the smoke of his cigar, and with indistinct polyphones in which two or three vowels flattened together made up a single sound.

‘Apparently you have nothing against it?’

‘We like and respect our law.’

‘Is not that,’ I observed, giving a good-natured air to my words, ‘the reason why all other peoples respect England more than they like Englishmen?’

‘_Oeua?_’ inquired the radical, or perhaps it was an answer.

‘What is the point?’ Mazzini interrupted. I told him.

‘They have already thought of that themselves and have reached the same conclusion.’

The trial of Barthélemy is extremely interesting. Rarely have the French and English characters revealed themselves in such close juxtaposition, and in such striking contrast.

Everything was absurd about the duel, beginning with the spot chosen for it: they fought near Windsor. To do so they had to go by train (which goes only to Windsor) some dozens of miles away from the coast into the heart of the country, whereas people usually fight duels near the frontier, where ships, boats, etc., are in readiness. The choice of Windsor was moreover unsuitable in itself. The Queen’s palace, the favourite residence of Queen Victoria, is of course guarded by the police with double vigilance. I imagine that this place was chosen very simply because of all the suburbs of London the French only know of two: _Richemon’_ and _Vinssour_.

To be ready for any emergency the seconds took rapiers with sharpened points, although they knew the duel was to be fought with pistols. When Cournet fell, all, with the exception of one second who went off by himself, and consequently managed to make his way quietly to Belgium, returned together, not forgetting to take their rapiers with them. When they reached Waterloo Station in London the police had been warned by telegraph long before. There was no need for the police to search. ‘Four men with beards and moustaches, wearing caps, speaking French and carrying rapiers,’ were arrested as they stepped out of the railway carriage.

How could all this happen? It is not for us, I imagine, to teach the French how to hide from the police. There is no police in the world more vicious, alert, immoral and indefatigable in its zeal than the French. In the days of Louis-Philippe both the seeker and the sought played their parts in masterly style, every move was calculated; now that is not necessary—the police in the Russian style say ‘check’ and ‘mate’ as they move—but Louis-Philippe’s reign is not so far away. How could a man so intelligent as Barthélemy and men so experienced as Cournet’s seconds have made so many blunders?

The explanation is the same in both cases, absolute ignorance of England and English law. They had heard that no one could be arrested without a ‘_óurrand_’; they had heard of a mysterious ‘_abéass korpu_’ by virtue of which a man must be released on the demand of a lawyer, and imagined that they would go home, change their clothes and be in Belgium when next morning the disconcerted constable would come to fetch them, and that he would infallibly be armed with a staff (as described in French novels), and would say on seeing they were gone, ‘_Goddam!_’ All this in spite of the fact that constables do not carry staves nor Englishmen say ‘_Goddam!_’

The prisoners were lodged in the Surrey prison. Then began visits to them; ladies went to see them, and friends of the deceased Cournet went to see them. The police, of course, at once perceived the state of the case and how it had happened, though indeed one cannot give them much credit for that; the friends and enemies of Barthélemy and Cournet talked at the tops of their voices in restaurants and public-houses about every detail of the duel, adding of course many which had not taken place and could not possibly have taken place. But officially the police refused to know this, so when some visitors asked permission to see Cournet’s second, and others asked to see Barthélemy’s second, the police officer went so far as to say to them: ‘Gentlemen, we have no knowledge who are seconds and who are principals; the investigation has not yet discovered all the details of the case. Please call your friends by their names.’ The first lesson!

At last the Assizes came to Surrey, and a day was fixed on which the Lord Chief Justice Campbell would try the case concerning a Frenchman, Cournet, murdered by some one unknown, and concerning the persons connected with his murder.

I was then living near Primrose Hill; at seven o’clock on a cold and foggy February morning I went out into Regent’s Park to cross it on my way to the railway station.

That day has remained very vivid in my memory. From the fog that covered the park and the white swans drowsily floating on the water, shrouded in a reddish-yellow smoke, up to the minute when, long after midnight, I sat with one of the lawyers at Verrey’s in Regent Street, and drank the health of England in champagne. It is as clear as though it were before my eyes.

I had never seen an English court before; the comicality of the mediaeval _mise en scène_ awakens in us rather thoughts of an _opéra bouffe_ than of an honourable tradition, but that could be forgotten on that day.

About ten o’clock the first masqueraders, heralds with two trumpeters, appeared before the hotel in which Lord Campbell was staying, announcing that Lord Campbell would judge such and such a case in the open court at ten o’clock. We rushed to the doors of the court, which was a few steps away; meanwhile, in a gilt carriage, Lord Campbell moved across the square, wearing a wig which was only surpassed in size and beauty by the wig of his coachman, upon which was perched a minute three-cornered hat. Behind his carriage walked some twenty attorneys and solicitors, picking up their gowns and wearing no hats, but instead woollen wigs made intentionally as little like human hair as possible. At the door I almost found myself before the bar at which the Lord was judging Cournet instead of that where Lord Chief Justice Campbell was trying Barthélemy.

In the very doorway the mass of people pressed back by the police from the court and the superhuman crush from behind caused a stoppage: it was impossible to go forward while the crowd kept increasing behind; the police, weary of half measures, joined hands and advanced to a united attack—the front rank so squeezed me that I could hardly breathe—another assault of the besiegers, and we found ourselves pressed out, thrown out some ten paces beyond the doors into the street.

Had it not been for a lawyer of my acquaintance we should not have got in at all, the court was packed full; he took us in by a special door, and at last we were seated, mopping our faces and looking to see if our watches and our money were still on us.

It is a remarkable thing that nowhere is there a crowd so numerous, so close-packed, so terrible as in London, and it never in any case knows how to form a queue; the English always behave with their national obstinacy, they will go on pressing forward for two hours, and at last they arrive somewhere.

I have many times marvelled at the entrances to the theatres; if people would go in one behind the other, they could certainly enter in half an hour, but as they all press forward in one mass, the majority of those in front are thrust aside to the right and the left of the door, and there they are overtaken by a sort of concentrated exasperation, and begin squeezing from the sides on the slowly advancing stream in the middle with no profit whatever to themselves, but as it were avenging their ill luck on the others’ ribs.

There is a knocking on the door. A gentleman, also in masquerade attire, shouts, ‘Who is there?’ ‘The Judge,’ is answered on the other side; the doors are flung open, and Campbell enters, wearing a fur coat and something like a lady’s dressing-gown; he bowed to all four quarters of the compass and announced that the Assizes were opened.

The opinion of Barthélemy’s case formed by the judge, that is, by Campbell, was clear from beginning to end, and he retained it in spite of all the efforts of the French to turn it aside and change it for the worse. There had been a duel. One man had been killed. Both were Frenchmen, refugees, having different ideas of honour from ours; it was difficult to make out which of them was in the right, which in the wrong. One had fought in the barricades, the other was a notorious duellist. We could not leave this crime unpunished, but we ought not to use the whole force of the English law to crush foreigners, especially as they were all straightforward people and had behaved honourably though stupidly. Therefore we shall not inquire who is the murderer; in all probability the murderer is the one who has escaped to Belgium; we charge the prisoners at the bar with being accomplices and ask the jury whether they are guilty of manslaughter or not. If found guilty by the jury, they are in our hands; we shall condemn them to one of the lightest possible punishments, and that will be the end of the case. If the jury acquit them, we have nothing more to say to them, let them go wherever they choose.