The holiday weeks on which his mind had been fixed so many years had passed as swiftly as a dream, and the daily yoke of professional work must again be put on. The last day of his stay in Paris fell on the anniversary of All Souls. Rudolf, with the great majority of Parisians, used it to visit the cemeteries. He spent the first hours of the afternoon in Pere la Chaise, where, beside the old, well-known graves, he inspected with great interest the monuments erected since his residence in Paris—of Musset, Rossini, Michelet, Regnault, Countess d’Agoult and other celebrities. From Pere la Chaise he drove to the cemetery of Montmartre, where he merely wished to place a wreath of immortelles on Heine’s grave. But once there, he could not go away without looking about the place a little.
He strolled slowly along the streets of graves, in which, amid commonplace stone slabs and insignificant iron crosses, stately monuments rose at brief intervals, though they rarely bore inscribed on their fronts a name of sufficient distinction to afford a justification for attracting the attention of the wanderer; while as a rule they were only memorials of the vanity extending beyond the grave of the poor obscure mortal whose ashes they sheltered.
The graves were adorned in various ways for the great festival of the dead. The narrow walks around them were strewn with fresh yellow gravel and river sand; pots of blossoming plants stood on the slabs and at the foot of the crosses; on the arms of the latter hung garlands of evergreen and yellow or red immortelles, but also the ugly wreaths of painted plaster and glass beads with affected inscriptions, which dishonour Parisian industry. Beside these mounds, where the work of a loving hand was apparent, and whose dead were evidently united by filaments of love to a tender human being still breathing in the sunshine, forsaken and neglected ones often appeared, on which only a few rain-soaked, decaying leaves of paper wreaths were mouldering, where moss and weeds grew rankly, and in which lay dead for whom no one grieved, and who were now remembered by none in the world of the living. But how speedily one is forgotten in Paris. How soon the ocean of the world’s capital swallows up, not only a human being, but his family, all his friends and acquaintances, and even his memory! A chill ran down Rudolf’s spine as he pondered over the melancholy thought of living and dying in Paris as a stranger.
As he drifted aimlessly on with the flowing human stream, he suddenly found himself in a narrow side-path before a monument surrounded by a specially dense throng. Several rows of people, principally workmen and their wives, were standing around it, those behind thrusting their heads over the shoulders of the front ranks, the new arrivals pressing impatiently upon those who had taken the place before them and now, as though spell-bound by an absorbing spectacle, stood motionless, making no sign of moving on. Yet the whole crowded group was pervaded by a calmness, a solemn earnestness, not often found among the worshippers in church. Rudolf, whose curiosity was awakened, forced his way through the living wall to the front rank, and suddenly stood—before the monument of Baudin, the republican representative of the people who, on the 3d of December, 1851, was shot down in the streets of Paris by drunken soldiers, as, girdled with the tri-coloured sash, which made him recognizable as a member of the legislature, he protested from the top of a barricade against Bonaparte’s coup d’etat. A familiar anecdote is associated with the death of this hero. As, surrounded by a few persons of similar views, he was preparing to ascend the barricade, some workmen passing by shouted derisively: "There goes a twenty-five franc man!" This was the insult with which the proletarians, who were systematically incited against the National Assembly, designated the representatives of the people, alluding to their daily pay. Baudin calmly answered: "You will see presently how one can die for twenty-five francs!" and a moment after, fell under the bullets of the soldiery.
At the sight of the monument Rudolf felt the emotion which it awakens in every spectator. On a rectangular stone pedestal lies the life-size bronze figure of Baudin, draped to the breast in a cloak, the left hand hanging in the relaxation of death, while the right convulsively clutches a symbolical table of laws, with the inscription "La Loi," through which passes a treacherous rent. Baudin’s face is that of a middle-aged man, with commonplace features, smooth-shaven lips and chin, and the regulation whiskers. But this ordinary countenance becomes grand and heroic by a horrible hole in the forehead, from which blood and brains have gushed. Oh, how such a hole in the brow, pierced by a bullet sent to murder liberty, transfigures a man’s visage! A supernatural radiance appears to stream from this tragical opening, into which we cannot gaze without having our eyes overflow with tears.
Rudolf was more touched by the unspeakably pathetic monument than any of the others who reverently surrounded it; for he remembered how narrowly he, too, had escaped a fate akin to that of the martyr before whose statue he had unexpectedly wandered. As he followed the path toward the exit from the cemetery, he again saw himself on the terrible night of December 3d and 4th, 1851, lying weltering in his blood, with failing consciousness, upon the wet pavement of the Rue Montmartre, a bullet in his right hip. The memory of that moment was so vivid, that he fancied he again felt the pain in his hip and began to limp, as he had done for months after the wound. In the broad avenue leading to the main entrance new visions rose before him, made still more intense by the recollections of the coup d’etat evoked by the sight of Baudin’s grave. At the right he saw the monument of Gottfried Cavaignac in the midst of the great common grave, into which all the nameless victims of the street fights were thrown in a horrible medley. This blood-stained bit of earth surrounds a circular border of flowers, in whose centre, above a low mound covered with stone slabs, rises a plain iron cross. Rudolf entered the sinister circle and paused beside it. Very peculiar emotions stole over him. It seemed as though he were standing within a cabalistic line which divided him from the world and life. The air within the magic circle appeared more chill than without. He imagined he felt a stir and tremor in the ground beneath his feet as if the dead below were moving, and scraping with their bony fingers on the cover of their narrow abode.
"I should now be lying there with the rest, if the bullet had taken a little different course!" he thought, drawing a long breath of relief. He glanced around him. At the foot of the cross was a heap of wreaths and bouquets, and several women were kneeling on the stone slabs, murmuring silent prayers. "Are there still, after the lapse of twenty-seven years, mourners who remember the dead? No one would have come for my sake, if they had thrown me there too."
He was standing beside one of the kneeling women, at whom he gazed with deep sympathy. She was dressed in black, a long black veil hung from her head, and she seemed wholly absorbed in her fervour. Feeling a steady gaze fixed upon her, she involuntarily looked up. Their eyes met. She sank back with a stifled cry which seemed to issue from a throat suddenly compressed. Involuntarily stretching her arms toward him, while her eyes half closed and consciousness seemed failing, her blanching lips whispered:
"Rudolf! Rudolf!"
He had retreated a step, astonished and bewildered, at the first cry, now he caught the fainting woman in his arms, drew her to his breast, and murmured in a hollow tone:
"Pauline! Is it possible! Pauline!"
She tottered to her feet, her knees trembled, she laid both hands on his shoulders and gazing steadily at him with head thrown back and dilated eyes, said:
"Is it really you! Is it you, Rudolf. You are alive!"
"So you believed me dead?" he asked in a trembling voice, bowing his head.