The separation between leaders and workers which I had noticed at Geneva in the Temple Unique did not exist in the Jura Mountains. There were a number of men who were more intelligent, and especially more active than the others; but that was all. James Guillaume, one of the most intelligent and broadly educated men I ever met, was a proofreader and the manager of a small printing-office. His earnings in this capacity were so small that he had to give his nights to translating novels from German into French, for which he was paid eight francs—one dollar and sixty cents—for sixteen pages!
When I came to Neuchâtel, he told me that unfortunately he could not give even as much as a couple of hours for a friendly chat. The printing-office was just issuing that afternoon the first number of a local paper, and in addition to his usual duties of proofreader and coeditor, he had to write the addresses of a thousand persons to whom the first three numbers were to be sent, and to put on the wrappers himself.
I offered to aid him in writing the addresses, but that was not practicable because they were either kept in memory, or written on scraps of paper in an unreadable hand. “Well, then,” said I, “I will come in the afternoon to the office and put on the wrappers, and you will give me the time which you may thus save.”
We understood each other. Guillaume warmly shook my hand, and that was the beginning of a standing friendship. We spent all the afternoon in the office, he writing the addresses, I fastening the wrappers, and a French communard, who was a compositor, chatting with us all the while as he rapidly set up a novel, intermingling his conversation with the sentences which he was putting in type and which he read aloud.
“The fight in the streets,” he would say, “became very sharp” … “Dear Mary, I love you” … “The workers were furious and fought like lions at Montmartre” … “and he fell on his knees before her” … “and that lasted for four days. We knew that Gallifet was shooting all prisoners—the more terrible still was the fight,”—and so on he went, rapidly lifting the type from the case.
It was late in the evening when Guillaume took off his working blouse, and we went out for a friendly chat for a couple of hours; then he had to resume his work as editor of the Bulletin of the Jura Federation.
At Neuchâtel I also made the acquaintance of Malon. He was born in a village, and in his childhood he was a shepherd. Later on, he came to Paris, learned there a trade—basket-making—and, like the bookbinder Varlin and the carpenter Pindy, with whom he was associated in the International, had come to be widely known as one of the leaders of the Association when it was prosecuted in 1869 by Napoleon III. All three had quite won the hearts of the Paris workers, and when the Commune insurrection broke out, they were elected members of the Council of the Commune, each receiving a large vote. Malon was also mayor of one of the Paris arrondissements. Now, in Switzerland, he earned his living as a basket-maker. He had rented for a few coppers a month a small open shed, out of town, on the slope of a hill, from which he enjoyed, while at work, an extensive view of the lake of Neuchâtel. At night he wrote letters, a book on the Commune, short articles for the labor papers, and thus he became a writer.
Every day I went to see him, and to hear what the broad-faced, laborious, slightly poetical, quiet, and most good-hearted communard had to tell me about the insurrection in which he took a prominent part, and which he had just described in a book, The Third Defeat of the French Proletariat.
One morning, as I had climbed the hill and reached his shed, he met me, quite radiant, with the words: “Do you know, Pindy is alive! Here is a letter from him: he is in Switzerland.” Nothing had been heard of Pindy since he was seen last on the 25th or 26th of May at the Tuileries, and he was supposed to be dead, while in reality he had remained in concealment in Paris. And while Malon’s fingers continued to ply the wickers and to shape them into an elegant basket, he told me in his quiet voice, which only slightly trembled at times, how many men had been shot by the Versailles troops on the supposition that they were Pindy, Varlin, himself, or some other leader. He told me what he knew of the deaths of Varlin—the bookbinder, whom the Paris workers worshiped—and old Delécluze, who did not want to survive that new defeat, and many others; and he related the horrors which he had witnessed during that carnival of blood with which the wealthy classes of Paris celebrated their return to the capital, and then the spirit of retaliation which took hold of a crowd of people, led by Raoul Rigault, which executed the hostages of the Commune.
His lips quivered when he spoke of the heroism of the children; and he quite broke down when he told me the story of that boy whom the Versailles troops were about to shoot, and who asked the officer’s permission to hand first a silver watch, which he had on, to his mother, who lived close by. The officer, yielding to an impulse of pity, let the boy go, probably hoping that he would never return. But a quarter of an hour later the boy came back,
