Author Note: The title comes from Jean-Baptiste Clément's song, Le Temps des Cerises (Cherry Season), which was published in 1867, but became a kind of anthem for the Commune, after Clément re-dedicated it to an ambulance-woman he had met on the barricades. I recommend Watkins' drama-doc La Commune: Paris 1871 (nearly 6 hrs of it!) to anyone who loves Hugo's equally massive Les Mis.
LE TEMPS DES CERISES
Another revolution: the greatest, the most bloodily suppressed. In one week - this week - over 20 000 will die.
In his apartment at Versailles, a long-serving bureaucrat of the Justice Department glowered at his secretary. "News from Paris? Good, I hope?"
"Yes, Monsieur le Baron: Montmartre has fallen!"
"Good! The only language these people understand is the cannon! They must be smashed!"
"The phrase the army uses is 'total expiation', sir."
"'Total expiation'? - That sounds... thorough!"
"It is, sir. Men, women, young, old. All, sir."
The Baron sighed, and polished his spectacles on his white handkerchief. "They have brought it on themselves... When I was a young man, such notions seemed terribly romantic; but one outgrows them. The damage to society - and so soon after this terrible war..." He shrugged, and returned to writing to his wife, who was safe on their country estate.
At sixty (give or take a few years) he was still a fine-looking man. In his youth he must have been handsome, when the thick waves of hair had not receded so far, and had been more black than grey in hue; when his waist had been slimmer (for his diet had not suffered during the Siege). The years had been kind to him - too kind, perhaps, in that his own lack of want had killed the idealism of his boyhood. He had done well out of the Bonaparte restoration: a successful advocate, promoted to government. He was confident, too, of weathering the current storms: the wake of defeat by Prussia and the Emperor's abdication.
Yes, Baron Marius de Pontmercy had travelled very far from the Café Musain...
