“Aristotle believed that there were levels of lightness in the sky. The layer closest to earth was comfortable and heavy, like a good blanket. The second layer, the layer of water, was cold and wet and turbulent. It was this layer that one reached on the highest mountain peaks, or among the clouds.
“Then, above this, was the Region of Fire. It was hot and dry and peaceful, a region where all troubles vanished. Here flames could not burn, only warm. In this high place were birds with no feet or claws, because they slept, ate and mated in the air. It was a region of perfect tranquility...perhaps heaven itself. I don’t know.
“But I know of the other two regions (and Mary Ann saw the magic lantern show a picture of a snowcapped mountain with the shadow of a balloon on it). This is the top of Mont Blanc. How many have died climbing it? Yet I surmounted it with ease. I stepped out on its peak.
“And this is your region of water (and the magic lantern showed a picture of what looked like icebergs floating in a foaming sea). It looks as if you could step on them, too. But they are clouds, the way they look when you are on top of them.
“And here,” he said, “I show you the region of earth as it looks from above: fields and cities like a patchwork, rivers and distant seas. And from this height, I see with a new perspective. What is a fence, a wall, or a barred gate? What is a border? It means nothing. My fellow Frenchmen, I have German friends, and I tell you, the German people are exactly like we are.”
The crowd rumbled. Hating the Germans was a religion here. But Alain went on.
“Most of them—like us—are forced to live in hovels like The Zone where families are jammed into one room. When there is no running water, they call us dirty, French and German alike. When we are too ill fed to work, they call us lazy. When our daughters sell themselves to feed our families, they call them whores. When we seek refuge from this unhappy life in a bar, they call us drunks.
“We all know who they are. They are the few who own all the wealth, who enjoy what we work 14 hours a day to produce. They are the ones who talk to us in a loud voice because they assume we are too stupid to understand. And for them I have a few simple questions:
“There is food enough in the world for all. So why do children go hungry?
“There is land enough in the world for everyone. So why are so many without a home?
“Man is born free but is everywhere in chains. Why?
“We have more wealth than the Conquistadors brought back from America or the British from the Indies. We have the automobile with the power of 60 horses; we have the white magic of electricity with the power to light cities and run factories; we have refrigeration, the telephone, even a machine to type the words I say.
“But none of these inventions helps us. They are more chains around our neck. In America, they use electricity to shock people to death.”
Harding laughed, and Mary Ann skewered him with an elbow to the ribs.
“It is not enough to find a way up into the sky. That is the easy part. What we must do is make sure that this invention, unlike all the others, is not corrupted, and made to serve the rich and the warlike.
“And this is where I need your help. Throw off the chains that bind us. Where the law discriminates against the poor, or the sick, or those who believe differently than we do, make new laws.
“And as you do your part to break these chains—chains that we have been forced to forge ourselves—I will find a pathway to the sky. In our lifetime we will see flying machines for everyone, as common as bicycles are now. And this is what it will do for us:
“Each person will be free to go wherever he wishes—with his own flying machine, who can stop him? You ask, ‘How can man be free?’ And I say, ‘How can he not be free, with the whole earth and sky below him?’
“War will end. The men who provoke wars will no longer lie safe behind their armies, while others do their fighting for them. Now that anyone can rain bombs down on them, they’ll seek to save their own skins.
“It will end class distinctions. How can you look down on someone when he is in the sky?
“It will change all concepts of distance. The infinite highway of the sky will come to every man’s door, bringing fruits from South America, spices from the Far East, and news from everywhere in the world—uncensored and untaxed by any government.
“People will rise above the smoke of our soiled cities and there will be enough land for everyone. Trackless jungles will become habitable and perhaps even vast stretches on other planets that we now see on clear nights. Property will become of so little value that men will sneeze at it.
“Even time may change if we invent ships that fly fast enough around the Earth and Sun. We could become immortal, build city-stars of materials yet unknown to us, and fly them to distant constellations. And even the poorest man here on Earth will be wanted. ‘Join our star,’ we will say.”
The picture behind Alain had shifted to the night sky.
“And so I leave you,” he said, “not with an ending, but with a beginning. We now live in the Region of Earth. And we are beginning to explore the Region of Air.
“But I believe—and you should believe too—that somehow, some way, we will find this place where there are no more sufferers, no more oppressors, where love will reign among people. This place Aristotle dreamed of—The Region of Fire.”
The applause was deafening. Looking around, Mary Ann saw one man who did not applaud. It was Maximilian, standing by the door. “What is he thinking?” she wondered. It was better that she didn’t know.
“I will have to kill him,” Maximilian said to himself. “The others, like Bishop and that girl, I can dispose of in various ways. But this Chevrier, I must kill. And it will not be easy. If I try and fail, nothing will stop Chevrier from killing me. Nothing. Not society’s feeble version of justice, not all the armies, or all the rules, or all the morals of men. Nothing. If he is close enough, not even a bullet in the brain will stop Chevrier.
“And why must I kill him?” Maximilian thought. “The reason (why hide it from yourself) is that there is not room enough in this world for the two of us.”
Chapter Thirteen: Louise’s Story—Later That Evening
After the speech, Mary Ann found herself walking the streets with Alain, Louise and Harding, too excited to sleep. She had a thousand questions she wanted to ask Louise. Where was Alain’s father? Had he died during the war?
But Louise, with her simple black dress and her hair pulled back in a bun, had a dignity and a distance about her that made it impossible to pester her with questions.
“Let’s find a cafe,” suggested Harding. “All that speechmaking has made me thirsty.”
“Too much and too long,” said Louise, teasing her son. “Why not go to the Café de la Paix? We can watch the crowd come out of the Opéra. That’s always good entertainment.”
Alain chuckled. “You see them strutting across that lopsided plaza like giant blackbirds after you throw the crumbs out in the yard. Pretending they’re not interested, but all the time eyeing each other to see who has the fancier clothes and carriages.”
They sat at a table on the open terrace of the cafe, catty-corner to the opera house, and ordered pastis. The sweet anise-tasting liqueur seemed to make all of them more talkative.
“You know the opera house and I were born in the same year,” said Alain. “Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see it. I was in prison camp.” He stopped for a moment to get their reactions.
Mary Ann’s mouth opened in surprise, but Louise laughed.
“Yes,” he went on, “even at that age I had criminal tendencies. Tell them the story, Mother.”
Louise scoffed. “He makes me tell that story to everyone he meets. Alain, I’m sure your friends aren’t interested in things that happened so long ago.”
“I’d like to hear it,” said Mary Ann.
Louise looked at her, and all pretense of being casual suddenly stopped. Mary Ann felt she was being judged to see if she was wort
hy of this honor.
“All right,” Louise said. “You have heard how we blundered into war with the Germans in 1870 and lost our army. Here in the city we waited for a new army that we heard was coming. But the Germans came first. They surrounded the city and tried to starve us out. They were too cowardly to come in and attack Paris, and we were too few and weak to go out and attack them.
“So we endured the coldest winter in years. We cut down the trees for fuel; we killed the rats and hung them up in the butcheries. Surrounded by soldiers with bayonets, women would line up early in the morning to buy one. My father set sparrow traps on the roof. Even the zoo animals were killed for their meat. I cried when the beloved elephant was shot so that wealthy Parisians could eat steak that night. We would all have starved, even ones like myself who were pregnant, before giving in to the Germans.
“The only thing we would not eat were the homing pigeons, because they brought news from the outside on the little microdots on their feet.”
“Microdots?” asked Mary Ann.
“Yes, miniature pictures of military documents from our forces outside the city to let us know how close the Germans were and when they would attack,” said Alain.
“Whoever thought Parisians would be grateful to see a pigeon?” Louise smiled. “But we were. People would hang out their windows in the evening, searching the setting sun for a pair of wings.
“For me it was a happy time. I met Alain’s father, who had been wounded in the cavalry charge at Sedan. As I nursed him back to health, we fell in love and leaped over the fire.”
“That means they got married without the benefit of clergy, because their families wouldn’t approve,” Alain explained. “In villages, when a man and woman hold hands and leap over a bonfire, it means that they are committed to each other.”
“My husband tried to fly a balloon out of the city to take messages to the army,” Louise continued, “but it was lost over the North Sea. And the army that was supposed to rescue us never came.
“Still we would not surrender, but our government did. And then, to escape the anger of the people, it moved to Versailles, where it was out of touch with the people and could do the Germans’ dirty work.” She almost spat out the words.
“The Germans ordered the Versailles government to disarm the people of Paris. And that was when war started again. This time the people were against both the puppet government and the Germans, who were still camped outside the city.
“Inside the city we set up a Commune that would make all men equal. Even women would have equal rights. Our principles were good. But we were too democratic. Our assembly spent days and days debating while the Versailles government marched against us.
“At the end though—the time we call “Bloody Week”—we were very brave. When the troops came, we gathered up stones from the streets, and built barricades. Frenchman killed Frenchman more mercilessly than they had ever fought the Germans. The air was thick with the smell and smoke of burning buildings. The Hôtel-de-Ville and the Palais-Royal, even the Tuileries, were in flames. We burned down the hated guillotine.
“Men and women mounted the barricades together and loaded and fired their scarce rifles. Every house was a fortress. Every window and roof blazed defiance. The troops of the puppet government paid dearly for every yard of the city they took. But most of them were Catholics from Brittany, ignorant country boys but deeply religious. They were told we were the antichrist, and it was their duty to destroy us. So they pushed blindly onward.”
“Tell Harding and Mary Ann what you did,” said Alain proudly.
Louise shrugged. “I was unimportant. My family was important, though. My father was a colonel in the National Guard that fought the Versailles troops; my brother Theo was an assemblyman in the Commune. I was only a nurse. I did not want to fight, particularly when I learned that I was pregnant.
“But I could not let the men of my family go to battle without helping them. I turned the two-wheeled buggy we owned into an ambulance. Every day I drove out to the barricades to collect the wounded. We had converted the first floor of our home into a hospital and, at one time, nearly 40 men lay on that floor, wounded or dying.”
“And you were six months pregnant then,” Alain added.
Louise shook her head. “Yes, but it made no difference what I did, or anyone else, either. There were too many of them, and we had too few guns. All we had were the stones of our houses and a will to fight. In the end, the barricades crumbled. The crows came down and pecked the eyes of the dead, and we didn’t even have the ammunition to shoot them.
“At the end of May, when all was lost, I went out with our soldiers to their last stand in the Cemetery of Montmartre. How clear it was that night! The shells fired by their cannon lit up the marble statues in the burial ground, making them seem as if they were moving. Our side had no cannon left, but we answered theirs in our own way.
“Someone began to play the organ in a nearby church, and it made a louder noise than the dance of their bombs across the cemetery. The enemy fired and fired at the church, but they weren’t able to stop the sound of the organ. It gave us hope.
“Then they attacked, wave after wave, coming across the graveyard in the moonlight. Our men fired until their ammunition ran out; then they fought with rifle butts and bayonets. I took one man who had been shot in the chest and carried him, his arm over my shoulder, toward the gate. We must have lost our way, because the last thing I remember is tripping over something and hitting my head.
“When I awoke, it was dark all around me, but light above, so I knew it was morning. I was lying inside an open tomb. The man I was trying to help lay on top of me. I knew that he was dead. Underneath me, in a coffin splintered by shellfire, lay another man who had been dead much longer. Yet between these two I had lain safe that night, when all the others had died.
“When I climbed from the grave, the battle was over, and there was no sound. The ground was covered with white as if it had snowed. But I knew it was May. The white powder was quicklime, which had been used to cover the dead; the new dead of last night and the old dead who had been tossed out of their tombs by the shells. Now they lay together, so thick that I could barely step over them.
“I must have looked like a ghost in my white dress covered with blood, because no one challenged me. As I walked through the streets, I could see our men being marched away, their hands over their heads, guarded by the soldiers of Versailles. I reached our house to find my mother inside, sick with fever. She had just been told that my father was killed on the last barricade, and that my brother had gone into hiding.”
Louise’s voice choked and she stopped, unable to go on. Alain started to order another bottle of pastis, but Louise raised her hand. “No...water,” she said. They waited while she caught her breath.
“The rest of the story is even harder to tell. I spent the rest of the day trying to nurse my mother. She was delirious. I don’t think she wanted to live.
“The next day the soldiers smashed their way through the door and came upstairs. The officer wanted to know where my brother was. I told him that I didn’t know. Then he said that if my mother didn’t tell him, they would take me away. They seized me by both arms and dragged me to the door. My mother, still delirious, tried to rise. She mumbled something about Rue Saint-Sauveur two blocks away. Then she stumbled and fell to the floor.
“But the soldiers took me anyway, leaving my mother lying on the floor, where she died that night. And, within a few hours, they had my brother, too.
“They kept us overnight in a stockyard, and the next day we marched to Père-Lachaise, the great cemetery of Paris. There was a long column of us. I found my brother Theo, and we linked hands as we walked.
“When I saw the pockmarked wall and the bloodstains on the ground, I knew what was about to happen. My brother gave my hand a last squeeze and went up first. I searched for something to say, and finally I shouted ‘Good luck!’ It was stupid, I know, but he smiled at me as
they took him to the wall.
“Theo threw his hat down in front of him. They offered him a blindfold. He took it and threw it into his hat. They tied his hands behind him and stood him against the wall. Then the soldiers fired. But most of them missed. Only one or two struck him, but they did not kill him. He fell, and then struggled to his knees. He could not get to his feet because his hands were tied behind his back. ‘Shoot me, you pig!’ he shouted at the captain in charge of the firing squad. ‘Put an end to it!’
“I can still see that officer. He wore big cavalry boots, the kind that came up over his knees, and he carried one of those big nine-shot revolvers. He walked up to Theo casually, as if he wanted to talk to him, and placed the muzzle alongside Theo’s head. He fired twice. After my brother lay in the dust, he kicked his body. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Take the sister next.’
“I was marched up to the wall and turned to face the firing squad. I too refused a blindfold, but I shut my eyes tightly because I didn’t want to die with them open. I heard the same officer give the order to aim, and then a strange thing happened. The sergeant told the captain that his men would not shoot a pregnant woman. They were good Catholics from Brittany, so they believed the unborn child was innocent of sin, and had a right to life.
“Instead they took me into the crematorium at the top of the hill. I looked up at the domed roof and its high black smudged smokestacks, and wondered if they were going to burn me alive. They forced me inside, where three men in civilian clothes sat, looking bored amid the bones and ashes in the ovens. They heard what the officer said and then ordered me to the French convict labor camp at New Caledonia in the South Pacific. ‘All memory of you will be erased from the records,’ said one of them. ‘It will be as if you died at that wall.’”
“How many people did die?” asked Harding.
“More than 25,000 that we know of,” said Alain. “But so many others were never found.”
“And never will be, until the earth gives up her dead,” said Louise. “Down in the Catacombs under Paris, where the government chased the Communards with torches and dogs, are many new skeletons among the ancient bones. Brother turned against brother, and children were promised bread if they gave up their fathers. It was a time of betrayal. Even today in the corners of abandoned cellars or in newly-dug ditches, a broken skull will be found and people will say, ‘That must have been a Communard.’”