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father!' and forthwith asked me to go into a hut. Within, he told me that he was a Mosuto from the far south, naming a distant district that I knew although I did not know the village. He said he had dreamed that he was to seek out this village in which I was; that in his dream he had seen the road, the village, and finally myself; that he had been told that he had but six days in which to make the journey; and that he was to give me this. Thereupon he placed in my hand a golden sovereign.

That is the end of it. He did not want to become a Christian, and could not see that he had been 'called' to be converted. I had no good work particularly languishing for want of a sover

eign, and I did not give him a Bible. No one in the place knew him, and he said he had not been there before. Certainly I had not been near his village, and I had not even come along any part of his road. Also, if he had been a day late, he would not have found me there; and he made nothing out of his journey save only that he shared my evening meal. We went our several ways in the dawn. Maybe we shall meet again in the dusk and understand a little better. In the meantime I confess that this remains the most curious, the most unexplained, the most trivial, and the most bewildering incident that I have known even amongst a people of dreams.

MEMOIRS OF THE PARIS COMMUNE

BY 'W'

From Neue Freie Presse, April 24
(VIENNA NATIONALIST LIBERal Daily)

OUR generation has seen with its own eyes so many horrors that it is callous to the sufferings of the past. The ancients said that no mortal could endure the sight of Medusa's head. But in our hardhearted times that vision hardly passes for a sensation. But yesterday Medusa shook her snaky locks in Berlin and Budapest. She parades to-day the streets of Petrograd and Moscow. Yet the world exhibits that indifference which in olden ages was thought an attribute of the gods. So when a man begins to narrate the horrors of the past, our generation shrug their shoulders contemptuously. Such things are no novelty for them.

fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune perhaps the bloodiest tragicomedy of the nineteenth century - to recur for a moment to its record of human folly and shame. Its birthday was March 18, 1871; and it passed from the stage of history by the end of May. On the former date, a few young hotheads seized the Paris City Hall, at a time when most of the officials were absent, and began to rule Paris, hoping soon to be masters of all France. No one knew who these casual intruders were or whence they came. They just turned up of a sudden, unexpectedly, like devils shot by unseen machinery upon a stage. However, they faced the world Nevertheless, it may repay us, this with an accomplished fact, with that

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'it is the established order,' to which even the shrewd and strong often defer. The slightest resistance would have dispersed the handful of mad adventurers; but in that critical moment of general prostration after the fever of the war, no one nerved himself up even to ask the names of the unbidden guests. Indeed their names then meant nothing. Who was Assi? Who were Roullier, Parisel, Raoul Rigault? A few knew the last of these signatures from seeing it appended occasionally to a mediocre but violent article in La Marseillaise. Its owner possessed no original style, but mimicked Rochefort, that journal's editor, and outdid his master in rant about blood, and knives and daggers. Unhappily this young madman, hardly twenty-five years old, managed to dominate his comrades, who were the obscurest of the obscure, and used them to spread the terror throughout Paris. They intimidated and paralyzed the fairest city, the most brilliant intellectual centre of the world, where a highly gifted and civilized nation had distinguished itself in every field of science. and endeavor for centuries. Surely that alone showed that the nation was sick to the heart. The people of Paris were utterly exhausted by the sufferings and privations of a protracted siege. Even the city's leaders deserted it. The government of France was at Versailles. Parliament met there. Adolph Thiers, President of the Republic, was assembling there the fragments of a beaten army. Paris was republican to the core. Parliament had come up from Bordeau, hostile and distrustful of the Capital. Thiers, in spite of his assertion to the contrary, was believed to be an Orleanist. The generals in his service were nearly all Bonapartists. No one contemplated restoring the defeated Empire, at least for a long time to come. But it was thought that Count Chambord might present himself at Versailles;

and who could guarantee that Thiers might not sooner or later restore the son of Louis Philippe to the Tuileries? Not without reason did Paris fear for the existence of the Republic. The city had been stripped of its rank as Capital, and for weeks pushed back to second place. Versailles was now the true political centre of France. It was inevitable that the two parties should sooner or later come into collision. They stood for incompatible temperaments; the reserved, conservative, prudent provinces, and the headlong radicalism of the metropolis. Most unsuccessful wars have a bloody sequel. Civil discord was in the air, - ready to show its head in a particularly tragic guise, because the Germans were still camped before Paris, watching with mingled delight and aversion, the cruel spectacle.

Wars nearly always start accidentally, while their deeper causes remain hidden. In this case the accident occurred in Montmartre, the hilly suburb where young Clemenceau was then mayor. Naturally that young officer did not foresee that fifty years afterwards he would be an arbitrary peace dictator in Paris. Had he then been able to play that rôle successfully in the narrower circle of his jurisdiction, the civil war might have been avoided. Two Versailles generals, Thomas and Lecomte, seized Montmartre on the night between the 17th and 18th of March, but were immediately captured by members of the Paris National Guard and shot. Clemenceau was notified too late else, with the courage and vigor which never failed him, he would certainly have prevented the execution. That was the beginning of the tragedy. The following day the little group of unknown men seized the City Hall, and began a reign of terror in imitation of their great revolutionary predecessors. Each was ambitious to be a Danton or

Robespierre or, better still, a Hébert or Marat. They all were determined to act the part of 1789 and 1792. Paris was proclaimed a free city, and the other towns of the country were summoned to imitate this action so that France might become a group of free cities, each ruled by a small band of obscure agitators. They were shrewd enough to see, however, that even Paris, exhausted as it was by the long siege, would not tolerate the dictatorship of a few madmen. Therefore they ordered a general election, at which nearly a hundred deputies were chosen. These formed the Paris Commune. These were the communards, as they called themselves, or communeux, as the people of Versailles contemptuously dubbed them. Their first session was held on March 29, or as they dated it, 'the eighth of Germinal'; for they had already restored the old republican calendar with its sonorous and poetical month-names. The first acts of the new assembly were to appoint a committee of public safety, peoples' commanders, and civil commissioners, all copied from the Great Revolution. Already, however, the cannon of Versailles were thundering against the city, and the people of Paris were replying. New war before the echoes of the old war had died away! But this time it was civil war. The forces of the President of the 'Versailles Prussian,' as the communards called him gave no pardon. They shot their prisoners on the spot, and the communards returned as good as they received. The French and Germans had treated each other more humanely. Family quarrels are bitterest of all.

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Various attempts were made to mediate but all failed. The Versailles commanders wanted to refresh their laurels, and hoped to get some compensation for their recent defeats by a victory over Paris. Thiers was inflexible and relentless. He was now in his element. At

last he had a war to play with to his heart's content. Strategy had always been his hobby. As an historian he had explored Napoleon's battlefields and, pen in hand, had won over again the victories of the great Corsican. He felt out of place as a closet statesman, fancied he was a born army leader, imagined himself a hero of history. He could almost fancy that he had won the Battle of Austerlitz and captured Vienna. Had he commanded at the Battle of Waterloo, France would not have lost! So he would hear nothing of a fameless peace or a peace without victory. He might have saved the life of the Archbishop of Paris and the pastor of the Church of the Madeleine, both of whom were held as hostages by the communards. The latter offered to exchange them for Blanqui, the veteran revolutionist, who had languished for months in the hands of the Versaillists. But Thiers would not listen to this exchange which might have opened the way to peace. The solid citizen, the man of the closet, was more relentless than any sabre-rattling fire eater. So in the end the Archbishop of Paris, the Pastor of the Church of the Madeleine, and many other priests were brutally slaughtered. By this time, Raoul Rigault, the bloodthirsty despot, was absolute master of the city. Rochefort, who must have known him well, characterizes him in his memoirs, as a young man of extraordinary energy, but also utterly callous. He was capable of saying to his dearest friend: 'I love you sincerely, my dear fellow, but I find myself compelled to have you shot.' Rochefort describes the hearing of Archbishop Darboy, a man sixty years old, before young Rigault, during which the following dialogue occurred: 'Your occupation?'

"The service of God.'

'Recorder, put it down: "Darboy, domestic in the service of a certain god.”’

'Where does your employer live?'
'He is everywhere.'

'Recorder, put down that the defendant confesses that his employer is a homeless vagrant.'

One almost fancies that the devil himself was making the examination. Even Rochefort, who was not wont to respect any God, seems to have been offended by the 'weird humor' of this death's-head inquisitor. He was not himself a member of the Commune, though he was reported at Versailles to be its secret head. In fact he often attacked the Commune in his paper. Radical as he was, devoted republican as he was, his noble descent did not permit him to betray utterly the blood of the Marquis de Rochefort-Lucay. Now and then he involuntarily rebelled against the strange company in which he found himself. And indeed it was a strange one, like a cruel joke of an intoxicated Fate: men known and unknown, men of standing and of no standing, scoundrels and honorable gentlemen. Nearly all were more or less sincere, these new saviors of the people and reformers of the world. But most of them were also touched with madness. Even Rigault had a certain dignity of conviction, although he was obviously a criminal by nature. He was appointed chief of police and, as procurator and prosecuting attorney for the Commune, he held the power of life and death over his victims. When he threw a man into prison that man was doomed to the scaffold. He was even about to arrest his friend and benefactor Rochefort and have him shot when the latter escaped by flight.

Rigault was the son of a high official and had been carefully educated. In fact among the rulers of Paris at this period there were more members of the bourgeoisie dissipated students and unsuccessful writers than real workingmen. Arthur Rank, who had been

Gambetta's Minister of Police during the war, left the City Hall immediately after the first session, after the first session, and many who thought like him would have been glad to follow. But they remained, some because they hoped to exercise a moderating influence; others because they did not realize what had happened. Among the latter was the painter, Gustav Courbet, a man of European reputation and one of the most famous of the communards. Two souls seemed to tenant his giant body; one that of an artist, the other that of a wayward child. The first controlled him when he stood before the easel in his studio, and left him the moment he engaged in other things. Then the second spirit took possession, and plunged him from one folly into another. It was at Courbet's suggestion that the Vendôme Column was torn down; at least he was bitterly condemned as the instigator of this act by people who forgot that this monument of Napoleon had been threatened previously. In fact his statue had been taken down from its lofty pedestal in 1814, after the entry of the allied monarchs and at their command. Courbet is also said to have proposed to the French and Germans, immediately after the surrender of Paris, that all the bronze of this monument, some twomillion kilograms, with all the French and German cannon which could be collected, should be melted up together and cast into a colossal statue to commemorate the brotherhood of nations. Such childish dreams occupied the mind of this great artist!

Jules Valles, the Minister of Education of the Commune, was a grimmer apostle of destruction, though himself largely a victim of his own high-sounding phrases. He was a very talented writer, rather intimidating in appearance with his heavy jet black beard and fiery threatening eyes, but a kind man at heart. He wrote in the official gazette

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of the Commune, that Versailles need not flatter itself that a single one of its soldiers would ever tread the pavements of Paris. He concluded the article with the following mysterious word, which produced a great sensation at the time: 'If M. Thiers were a chemist he would understand.' At once the most exaggerated and frightful rumors became current in Paris. All the cellars and drains and catacombs of the city were said to be filled with explosives, connected with electric wires centering in the City Hall, and operated by a piano attachment, so that a man had only to touch the keys to blow up any particular house, palace, street or district. When such fancies of a morbid imagination won ready credence, less sensational rumors were universally believed for instance, that a world revolution was imminent, or that a republic had been proclaimed in Russia. The last report anticipated the event by just forty-six years. Myth-makers are never more active or in better repute than in times of political excitement. However, their labors in this case did nothing to promote the military fortunes of the Commune. The new government organized itself quite along traditional lines. It had the same equipment of ministries as any great power; even a foreign office. Paschal Grousset was in charge of this department. He was a polished, highly educated young man, perfectly familiar with the best social usages, an extreme dandy, perhaps the best-dressed man in the metropolis. He could compose beautiful dispatches which he sent to different foreign offices without in any instance receiving a reply. There was also a press department, presided over by Verlaine. That is another riddle. How did this true poet become connected with such a group? Paris is still his debtor; for when the men at the City Hall were seriously debating how and when to

destroy the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Verlaine protested vigorously against such barbarism and rescued that mediæval miracle.

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But the military situation continued to grow worse. The more generals appointed, the more invariable the defeats. The Commune never had competent military leadership. The Versailles people gained one victory after another. Germinal had passed. Before Floreal, the month of spring, had gone, the enemy was pressing hard upon the city walls. Soon the Versaillists were in the city and there was fighting in the streets. Now was the time, if ever, to play the devil's melody of destruction on that famous but mythical piano! But the communards really did plan a terrible and dramatic exit Sardanapalus opera finale. Flames flared up on every side; the glare of conflagrations was visible from Versailles. The Tuilleries, the Hôtel de Ville, the Legislative Palace, and many other buildings were consumed. Meantime the victorious troops from Versailles began a general slaughter, compared with which the night of St. Bartholomew was but child's play. Some thirtyfive thousand followers of the Commune were executed. One of the first was Rigault who really deserved his fate. Women and children were massacred. Wherever one turned, blood drenched the streets. It was indeed as if a Gorgon were raging through the city guided by the glare of its burning buildings burning buildings and destroying men by the mere malignance of his glance.

On May 25, after something more than two months of rule and misrule, the curtain fell and the glory of the communards was at an end. Many had fallen in combat. Rochefort and Grousset were captured in their flight. Valles escaped to England. Courbet was protected by President Thiers, who was a

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