Liberty's Fire Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  ALSO BY LYDIA SYSON

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  March 1871

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  April 1871

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Chapter 20.

  Chapter 21.

  May 1871

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Chapter 24.

  Chapter 25.

  Chapter 26.

  Chapter 27.

  Chapter 28.

  Chapter 29.

  Chapter 30.

  Chapter 31.

  Chapter 32.

  Chapter 33.

  Chapter 34.

  1880

  Historical Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Lydia Syson

  Praise for Lydia Syson

  Copyright

  ALSO BY LYDIA SYSON

  A World Between Us

  That Burning Summer

  For Phoebe

  Macadam [tarmac]: Has put an end to revolutions; barricades no longer possible. Nonetheless very inconvenient.

  Ruins: Something to make you dream. Add poetry to a landscape.

  Dictionary of Accepted Ideas,

  published 1913 from notes made by Flaubert in the 1870s

  ‘There’s more to love than girl meets boy’

  From Red by the Communards, 1987

  MARCH 1871

  This is the story of a revolution, and a city that rose to claim its rights.

  In the summer of 1870, Napoleon III, emperor of France, recklessly declared war on Prussia – the most provocative and powerful of the German states. Instead of glory, the emperor met with humiliation. Instead of victory, he found defeat. France became a republic for the third time in a century, and under a troubled makeshift government the war with Prussia intensified.

  Soon Paris was under siege. Deprivation and disease killed thousands, yet the citizens who stayed refused to give up. But patriotism doesn’t fill an empty belly. Parisians looked for food in the sewers and the zoological gardens: rats, birds, dogs and elephants ended up on plates. Then the bombardment began.

  Twenty kilometres away, in the Hall of Mirrors at the French Palace of Versailles, the King of Prussia was crowned German emperor and the Second Reich was born. Nine days later, to the fury of besieged Paris, France surrendered. The Prussian army marched in triumph through a silent city draped in black, and then retreated to camps all along the eastern walls to watch and wait, wait and watch. This armistice had cost the country a great slice of France, and millions of francs, which all had to be paid. The Prussians would not leave without their spoils. It was a bitter, glowering peace.

  And the shame of it for Paris! The betrayal! They had been sold, not defeated, said the cabmen. The city was seething. Just one false step, and the barricades would rise again.

  1.

  18th March

  Jules stared intently at the image emerging under the sunlight. Blues turning to browns, the tones shifting before his eyes. Trapped behind the glass of the wooden printing frame were the ruins of the emperor’s out-of-town palace: scarred columns, gaping roof, sky and rubble, all slowly appearing in their sudden and terrible decay.

  This sight was even more shocking than the real thing. Face-to-face with the crumbling shell of a building at Saint-Cloud a few days earlier, halfway between Paris and Versailles, Jules’s chief concern had been to get the plate out of the camera and safely developing in his portable darkroom within the ten minutes it took for the collodion to dry. He had managed this not once, but three, four, and finally five times. Three interiors, one view across the water – with some very effective reflections – and this, which you’d hardly know whether to call an interior or an exterior shot. The last plate he had left to print.

  This was the point of decision, the moment that always made his heart thud harder. Now. Precisely now. He unclipped the back of the frame, arresting the print at just that fraction of a second when the image was perfect – neither bleached out of recognition nor too shadowy and dark to make it out. He peeled the albumen paper back from the glass-plate negative and there it was. A true representation. A perfect witness. This is what I saw that day.

  But there was more work to be done before he could admire the print: washing, toning, washing, fixing, washing again. Finally he laid the glistening image on the workbench and stood back. Once again, Jules Hippolyte Washington Crowfield had successfully performed the miracle that was photography. He felt entitled to some applause.

  ‘Anatole!’ he bellowed.

  A violin stopped, listened, and into the pause Jules shouted for his friend a second time.

  Thunderous feet. Anatole burst in, instrument tucked under his arm, bow waving, bringing a nose-tickling cloud of rosin into the room with him, and a half-grown tabby cat who’d overtaken him in her rush to get up the stairs.

  ‘The dust!’ cried Jules. He shooed them both straight out again, slamming the studio door behind them all, and almost caught the nose of the cat. ‘I’ve told you a million times about the dust. How can I be expected to keep my plates clean when you bring in your filth?’

  ‘But you called me,’ protested Anatole. ‘It sounded very urgent. A fire at the very least. All these chemicals – and that lamp! My God! I never know when you’re about to go up in smoke.’

  Jules gently took Anatole’s violin and bow. He placed them on a side table on the improvised landing that linked the attic staircase to a curious construction perched high on the rooftop. An architectural afterthought, it served as both photographic studio and laboratory. When Jules wasn’t curtained in darkness, he had a bird’s-eye view of Paris: roofs, chimney pots and grey tiles stretched out forever. Inspecting Anatole’s jacket, he brushed it down with his hands to remove every last trace of rosin. Then, with a cryptic smile, he led his friend inside.

  The studio smelled of cider orchards in late autumn – a vinegary tang. Anatole’s foot crunched on a discarded eggshell. A chair, a dusty pillar pretending to be a ruin, some velvet drapery and a dying potted palm were arranged at the far end of the room, next to a simple folding screen. They had entered at the business end: a workbench, tripods, hoods, shelves. A broken-spined copy of Rational Photography, propped next to The Silver Sunbeam. Various other manuals in English and French, which, thanks to a Martinique-born mother and a succession of French nursemaids through his childhood in East Liberty, Pennsylvania, Jules spoke perfectly.

  Piled up below the bench was a heap of wooden boxes – baths, Jules called them. On top, stacks of glass and plate-holders, and above that, several shelves of stoppered bottles with labels in alphabetical order – collodion, ether, ferrous sulphate, potassium cyanide, rottenstone and silver nitrate. There was a kind of poetry in these words which Anatole enjoyed, though his attention tended to wander when Jules tried to explain each chemical. In the corner was the darkroom cupboard – red-shaded lamp, dripping tap – into which Jules vanished for hours to practise what Anatole called his ‘black arts’, and where he disappeared now.

  ‘So what exactly did you want to show me?’ Anatole asked. He frowned at a series of photographs leaning against the back wall. They were lined up on the floor like a battalion waiting for action. Most were of Anatole. ‘Haven’t I seen these a
lready?’

  He inspected himself critically, unconsciously mirroring his own expression in each. In some he stared straight at the camera, frank and knowing. Other photographs captured the fresh innocence of a young man new to a big city, a sense of possibility. Jules had also recorded every stage of each of Anatole’s experiment with his whiskers over the past nine months – sideburns long and short, moustaches of varying degrees of lushness, a neat beard, very briefly – not a success, they both agreed. And a few pictures showed Anatole in his old National Guard uniform, adopting the usual military pose: right arm tucked into jacket, eyes fixed steadily on some invisible victory that lay ahead. A reservist during the recent war, he’d done his share of rampart duty, but never quite made it beyond the city walls. In every portrait, his black hair was equally dishevelled, his dark eyes just as compelling.

  ‘Well?’ said Anatole, wondering if Jules would ever look for another sitter for his experiments. Surely he must be tiring of photographing the same face – the same body indeed – for so many months? It would mean a rent rise: when Anatole had joined him in this grand apartment, Jules had generously suggested occasional modelling duties in the studio would do nicely in part-payment – he was only just getting to grips with photography at that point. But the theatres were reopening, and Anatole’s income ought to be on the rise soon.

  ‘One moment,’ called Jules from the darkroom. He reappeared holding the glossy new print by its edges.

  ‘This …’ he said with uncharacteristic drama, setting it on a music stand he’d borrowed from Anatole. ‘This is all that’s left of Saint-Cloud now.’

  They both stared.

  ‘Incredible,’ breathed Anatole.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Even Jules’s voice wobbled a little.

  ‘It’s like … it’s like …’ Anatole had no words to describe the image before him. A gaping vista in tones of brown so rich they were almost purple. A roofless hall with twists of ironwork, convulsed as if by a giant’s hand.

  ‘It’s like Pompeii … or Herculaneum, isn’t it?’ said Jules, twisting one end of his delicately pointed moustache.

  ‘The end of an empire. Who would have dreamed it could come so quickly … unimaginable …’

  ‘I know. Those are the gardens, through that broken archway.’ Jules pointed from a safe distance.

  ‘Oh yes, I can see the remains of the fountains.’

  ‘Damnation … what’s this?’

  They both peered, bending shoulder to shoulder, hands clasped behind backs for fear of fingerprints. Right at the edge of the picture, the faintest of figures could be seen, like a spirit flitting past.

  ‘An apparition!’ said Anatole.

  ‘Blast it! I thought I’d got a clear shot. Not quick enough. Never even saw that fellow, whoever he is … Hmmm … I wonder how I missed him. Yet another ghoul, I suppose, come to stare at horrors.’

  ‘Unlike you, I suppose! Never mind. It all adds to the atmosphere,’ Anatole said, trying to console Jules.

  ‘The ghost of an autumnal guest, you mean? A final trace of one of the empress’s famous house parties? And I never did get that invitation …’

  For months, every time he wrote from America, Jules’s father had repeated the question. An East Coast industrialist, he’d sent his younger son to Paris the year before to learn to trade on the Bourse – and make some useful connections of course. But almost any young man in the world would have been better suited than Jules to a career in financial speculation. And the timing could hardly have been worse. Barely had Jules arrived in Paris than the city began to ring with the cry of ‘To Berlin!’ Within a few months, Emperor Napoleon III was writhing in agony on the battlefield at Sedan, crippled by his gallstones, his army half-slaughtered by the Prussians. When the empire fell but the fighting continued, the richest residents of Paris abandoned the capital for their country estates, and Jules discovered his own spoils of war: a photography business and all its equipment, complete with a horse-drawn darkroom, up for sale for a song.

  ‘Too late!’ said Anatole. ‘And now the Prussians have destroyed the palace completely.’

  Jules shook his head. ‘Oh no! This wasn’t their doing. It was the French army who wrecked the palace, attacking the Prussians when they were occupying the heights of Saint-Cloud.’

  ‘And they say the camera doesn’t lie.’

  ‘Nor does it. You’re the one jumping to conclusions.’

  ‘True,’ said Anatole. ‘So you’ve been round the city outskirts as far as you can now?’

  ‘All the way to Saint-Denis. Where of course I had to stop. Terrible sight.’

  Due north of Paris, Saint-Denis marked the beginning of the German zone of occupation, currently half-circling the city to the east.

  ‘I don’t suppose the Prussians are showing any signs of leaving?’

  ‘Quite the reverse. They’re not going to go without all the billions of francs they’re asking for. It does make you wonder though. Is this peace or just a truce?’

  ‘Maybe it’s no bad thing the rabble rescued their cannon last month,’ suggested Anatole.

  It hadn’t exactly been planned. But before the Prussian victory march, the ‘red’ militiamen of the National Guard – the people’s army – had raided the gun parks and arsenals of central Paris. With the help of women and children, they’d hauled several hundred cannon to the safety of the heights of Montmartre, Belleville and other radical working-class neighbourhoods. When you can’t trust your own government to look after you, you have to take things into your own hands. After all that had happened, they weren’t prepared to be left defenceless. Even the poorest had sacrificed what little they had to help pay for these cannon.

  ‘Something’s definitely up now,’ he continued. ‘Every time I look out of the window, there seems to be another troop of militiamen marching by … Did you hear the church bells hammering away earlier? As soon as I’ve got Act II under my belt, I’m going out to see what’s happening.’

  Jules glanced at the window. From the studio you had to go right out onto the roof to see down into the street below. ‘I heard drums when I let the cat out, and I wondered. Well, no doubt you’ll get a message from the battalion, if you’re really needed.’

  ‘No, I won’t,’ said Anatole. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I resigned last week. Handed my uniform back and everything. Didn’t seem much point any more. No more thirty sous for me!’ He was distracted by the sight of another print, equally melancholic. ‘Have I seen this before?’

  ‘No, I went through the Bois on the way to Saint-Cloud.’

  This one showed the elegant parkland of the Bois de Boulogne, now looking more like a graveyard than a pleasure garden. Lines of hacked tree stumps stretched out like tombstones. A few bare branches lay on the grass, about to be dragged away for fuel. A couple of ducks swam right in the middle of the lake, where they couldn’t be reached to be eaten, but the swans were all gone. Round the edge of the lake wandered a few wraithlike shapes, living shadows. Jules was still experimenting with his exposure times.

  ‘Not one of my better efforts.’

  ‘I like the effect. That blurriness. Almost romantic, which is no bad thing. It’s depressing to see the Bois like this. Don’t you remember how lovely it was last summer?’ said Anatole, draping a friendly arm round Jules’s shoulders. The cat, Minou, wound herself round their legs. ‘Oh well. Life’s getting much brighter now – gas back in the streets, shops opening, boulevards busy again. Paris will soon fill up. And spring’s just round the corner – everything will look different then.’

  ‘I hope so.’ But Jules’s voice sounded ominous. He obviously wasn’t thinking about daffodils. ‘By the way,’ he continued, changing the subject but staying close to Anatole. He pointed to one of the prints that had been leaning against the wall. Anatole was looking over his violin, about to play. ‘I was thinking of framing that portrait – you wouldn’t mind? We could put it in the dining room.’

  Anatole shook his head. Why
should he mind? He’d never been very aware of his own beauty before he met Jules. It tickled his vanity to see himself – quite literally – through a photographer’s eyes. Whether it was the light, or the angle of the camera, or just the way Jules kept him talking while he set up the shot, he had a trick of making him look good, and he couldn’t help feeling good too.

  But you couldn’t grow up with so many clever, teasing older sisters and take yourself too seriously. Nobody in their hard-working family – all musicians and school teachers in Limoges – was allowed to preen or rest on any imagined laurels for a moment. It was one reason why he’d come to Paris the year before: he wanted to make a go of his career alone. ‘Paris isn’t going to know what’s hit it,’ Anatole’s sisters had joked at the railway station when he left, straightening his tie for him and spit-polishing his boots. Very funny.

  ‘Good,’ said Jules, then held up his hand to listen. Another burst of drumming rose from the street below. ‘And whatever the fuss is about now, let’s hope everything calms down before any news reaches Philadelphia,’ said Jules.

  ‘Or even Limoges.’ Anatole also owed his family a letter.

  ‘At least your family approves of what you’re doing here. Mine never will. Have you told your father about the new show?’

  ‘Not yet, but I will. Good and distracting. Especially if I mention Marie.’

  The muscles in Jules’s back hardened.

  ‘Marie?’ he said. ‘That new soprano? How’s she getting on? Do you think she’s going to be any good?’

  He shrugged Anatole’s arm off his shoulders, and began to tidy up the studio. Still in shirtsleeves from his violin practice, Anatole shivered, suddenly colder, so Jules quickly tossed him a jacket of his own, which had been hanging on the coat stand by the door.

  ‘She could be,’ said Anatole, pulling on the sack coat with pleasure. The material and the cut were both finer than anything he owned himself. Jules had arrived in Paris with strict orders from his father to buy his shirts and cravats only from Charvet, and it was one of the few instructions he’d carried out to the letter – until the war. He’d promised to take Anatole for a fitting, when the shop reopened. ‘But it’s never easy going from the chorus to the spotlight. She’s feeling the pressure.’