Many of the previous pages have I written with shuddering and with self-compulsion. It was not without inward horror that I could describe the scenes through which I passed in my journey to Bohemia, and the cholera week at Grumitz. I have done it in order to obey my sense of duty. Beloved lips once gave me the solemn command: “In case I die before you, you must take my task in hand and labour for the work of Peace.” If this binding injunction had not been laid on me, I could never have so far prevailed over myself as to tear open the agonised wounds of my reminiscences so unsparingly.
Now, however, I have come to an event, which I will relate, but which I will not, nor can I describe.
No—I cannot, I cannot!
I have tried—ten half-written torn pages are lying on the floor by the side of my writing-table—but a heart-pang seized me; my thoughts froze up, or got into wild entanglement in my brain, and I had to throw the pen aside and weep, bitter hot tears, with cries like a child.
Now a few hours afterwards I resume my pen. But as to describing the particulars of the next event, as to relating what I felt when it happened, I must give that up—the thing itself is sufficient.
Frederick—my own one—was, in consequence of a letter from Berlin that was found in his house, suspected of espionage—was surrounded by a mob of fanatics, crying: “À mort—à mort le Prussien”—dragged before a tribunal of patriots, and on February 1, 1871, shot by order of a court-martial.
XIX
Serious Mental Illness, Consequent on My Husband’s Death—This Recurs Occasionally—Conclusion of My Diary—Additions to “The Protocol of Peace”—Progress of the Peace Movement—Mr. Hodgson Pratt’s Letter—The Emperor Frederick’s Manifesto—I Write the Last Word of My Autobiography—My Grandson’s Christening—My Daughter’s Engagement—Rudolf’s Speech at the Christening—“Hail to the Future!”—Finis.
When for the first time I came to myself again peace had been concluded and the Commune was over. I had been in bed for a month ill, nursed by my faithful Mrs. Anna, without any consciousness of being alive. And what the illness was I know not to the present day. The people about me called it considerately “typhus,” but I believe that it was simply—madness.
So much I darkly recall, that the last interval had been filled with imaginations of crackling shots and blazing conflagrations; probably the events which were spoken of in my presence mingled in my fantasy with the truth, the battles, that is, between the Versaillese and the Communards, and the incendiary fires of the Petroleuses. That, when I recovered my reason and with it the knowledge of my deep misery, I did not do myself some harm, or the pang did not kill me, probably was due to my possession of my children. Through them I could, for them I was forced, to live. Even before my illness, on the very day when that terrible thing broke over me, Rudolf kept me alive. I was shrieking aloud, on my knees, while I repeated: “Die! Die! I must die!” Then two arms embraced me, and a praying, painfully solemn, lovely boy’s face was looking at me—“Mother!”
Up to that time I had never been called by my boy anything but “Mamma.” His using at this moment, for the first time, the word “Mother” said to me, in those two syllables: “You are not alone; you have a son who shares your pain, who loves and honours you above all things, who has no one in this world except you. Do not abandon your child, Mother!”
I pressed the dear creature to my heart, and to show him that I had understood him, I too faltered out: “My son, my son!”
At the same time I recollected my girl, his girl, and my resolution to live was fixed. But the pain was too intolerable. I fell into intellectual darkness; and not at this time only. For the space of years, at ever-increasing intervals, I remained subject to recurring attacks of abstraction, of which afterwards
