“A theatrical fellow, this Trochu,” Frederick told me—it was on August 25. “Such a coup de theâtre has been played off today! You will never guess it.”
“The women called out for military service?” I guessed.
“Well, it does concern the women; but they are not called out. On the contrary.”
“Then are the sutlers discharged? or the Sisters of Mercy?”
“You have not guessed it yet, either. There is something of dismissal in it to be sure, and as to sutlers, too, in the sense that these ladies minister the cup of pleasure, and in a sense the ladies dismissed are merciful too; but in short, without more riddles, the demimonde is exiled.”
“And the Minister of War has taken that step? What connection—?”
“I cannot see any either. But the people are in ecstasies over the regulation. In fact they are always glad when anything happens. From every new order they expect a change, like many sick folks who greet every medicine which is given them as possibly a panacea. When vice is driven out of the city—so think the pious—who knows whether Heaven, now evidently angry, will not again extend its protection over the inhabitants? And now, when people are preparing for the serious time of the siege, with all its privations, what have these silly, wasteful women of pleasure to do here? And so most people, excluding those concerned, think the regulation a proper, moral, and besides, a patriotic one, since a great number of these women are foreigners, English, Southerners, nay even Germans, some of whom may perhaps be spies. No, no; there is only room in the city now for her own children, and only for her virtuous children!”
On August 28 occurred something still worse. Another banishment. All Germans had to quit Paris within three days.
The poison, the deadly, long-abiding poison, which lay in this regulation those who wrote the decree possibly had not in any way suspected. The hatred of Germans was awakened by it. For how long a time even after the war, this misfortune was to go on bearing its terrible fruit, I know at this day. From that time forward, France and Germany, those two great, flourishing, magnificent countries, were no longer two nations whose armies had fought out a chivalrous conflict; hatred for the whole of the opposed nation pervaded the entire people. Enmity was erected into an institution which was not restricted to the duration of the war, but ensured its continuance as “hereditary enmity,” even to future generations.
Exiled. Obliged to leave the city within three days. I had occasion to see how hardly, how inhumanly hardly, this command pressed on many worthy, harmless families. Among the business people who were supplying us with goods for the decoration of our house, several were Germans—one a carriage-builder, one an upholsterer, one an art-furniture manufacture—settled from ten to twenty years in Paris, where they had got their domestic hearth, where they had allied themselves in marriage with Parisians, where they had the whole of their business connection; and now they had to go out, out in three days—shut up their house, leave all that was dear and familiar to them, lose their fortune, their customers, their inheritance. The poor creatures came running to us in consternation, and told us of the misery that had fallen on them. Even the work which they were on the point of delivering to us had to be put aside, and the workshops closed. Wringing their hands and with tears in their eyes, they complained of their sufferings to us. “I have an old father an invalid,” said one, “and my wife is looking for her confinement any day; and now we must go in three days!” “I have not a sou in the house,” another complained; “all my customers who owe me money will be in no hurry to meet their obligations. A week hence I should have completed a large order which would have made me comfortably off, and now I must leave all in confusion!”
And why, why was all this misery brought on these poor people? Because they belonged to a nation whose army did its duty successfully, or because (to go further back in the chain of causes) a Hohenzollern might possibly have allowed it to enter into his mind to assume the Spanish throne if offered to him? No; this “because,” too, has not arrived at the ultimate reason. All this is only the pretext—not the cause of that war.
Sedan! “The Emperor Napoleon has given up his sword.”
The news overwhelmed us. Now there had really occurred a great, an historical catastrophe. The French army beaten, its leader checkmated. Then the game was over, won triumphantly by Germany. “Over! over!” I shouted. “If there were people who have the right to call themselves citizens of the world they might illuminate their windows today. If we had temples of Humanity yet, ‘Te Deums’ would have to be sung in them on this occasion—the butchery is over!”
“Do not rejoice too soon, my darling,” said Frederick in a warning tone. “This war has now for some time lost the character of a game fought out on the chessboard of the battlefield. The whole nation is joining in the fight. For one army annihilated ten others will start out of the earth.”
“But would that be just? It is only German soldiers who have forced themselves into the country—not the German people—and so they ought only to oppose them with French soldiers.”
“How you keep on appealing to justice and reason, you unreasonable creature, in dealing with a madman! France is mad with pain and rage; and from the point of view of loss
