I
Behind thick, tightly sealed walls remained those who were beyond the reach of the plague.
In the death-flooded fields of Paris, in the silent hour of the tide’s ebb, three islands of human life emerged, swaying on the ebbing waves like bald white shoals on the dead calm of the waters.
These were the islands of shaven-headed Robinsons, cut off from the rest of the world by the icy gulf stream of the law.
Lost among the deltas of streets, barricaded by the isolating liquid seeping from their walls, subject to their own internal laws like self-contained organisms in a different reality, they survived through the long weeks untouched, indifferent, like strange floating houses swept by flooding at night, bobbing to the surface in the morning, their inhabitants drowsy and unsuspecting.
The half-crazed prison guards, afraid of being held responsible and anticipating sudden orders, surrounded the inmates with a double ring of the tightest isolation. Their tongues were tied in fear of the crowded prisons learning about the epidemic and the chaos rampant outside, and of the cue to revolt.
The prisons had their own water reservoirs, so by sheer circumstance they avoided contracting the deadly bacteria from the outset. Their abundant supplies of food combined with the tight seclusion did the rest.
What had occurred was as improbable as it was undeniable: in its journey through the city the plague repeatedly bumped against the high medieval walls of these strange islands with their hermetically sealed gates, and then continued on into the night, into the gloom, into the tangle of streets and alleyways.
In the center and on the outskirts of the infected city, three untouched islands remained, surrounded by the dikes of their walls, inhabited by throngs of the shaven-headed pressed into their square allotments, long cut off from the outside world and fingering their monotonous rosaries of prison days, oblivious to what was taking place beyond the walls.
From the very first day of the epidemic, newspapers stopped seeping through the prison walls, causing the prisoners to protest and demonstrate. When this had no effect, a hunger strike was called. The hunger strike lasted four weeks and ultimately capitulated without bringing any results. Its only real outcome was to conserve provisions, which thus held out a few more days.
After the newspapers stopped arriving, the daily meals deteriorated, and then were reduced. Exhausted from the hunger strike, the prisoners saw this as another notch in the punitive regime. The deterioration of the food led to several more longer or shorter hunger strikes, which preserved some of the provisions but only delayed the inevitable.
The food portions grew more meager with every passing day. In fear of the prisoners’ retaliation, the tiny group of guards who were also barricaded in this inadvertent Noah’s Ark on the waves of the deluge suddenly cut the daily strolls, too afraid to release this riled human mass from their cells.
Denied their basic privileges and packed into the cramped barrels of their cells, the mob fermented until it seemed ready to blow, and the cells, filled ten times beyond capacity after the recent crackdowns, shuddered in their stone joints.
As the petrified prison guards scraped the bottoms of the food crates, terror filled their eyes. The certainty of execution at the hands of the despairing prisoners, ready to rip the bolted doors off their hinges, tempted them to flee for their lives, to the city. Yet their fear of the plague raging outside stopped them in their tracks.
A solution presented itself.
On the day of September 4, four days after the plague had claimed the last living Parisian soul and then marched out of Paris, the famished mob held at Fresnes Prison tore open the cell doors and poured through the prison building. Hiding in the attic, the guards were ripped to shreds. At ten o’clock in the morning the restless mob came crashing through the open gates and into the square.
To their considerable surprise, there was no police or military cordon to stop them. More disquieted than elated, the crowd silently flowed toward the city without encountering a single living soul on their way.
Someone cried for the release of the fifteen thousand prisoners locked up in La Santé Prison. The stoked mob moved toward Boulevard Arago. The prison gates were taken by storm before reinforcements could be brought up. The astonished prison staff were put to death.
Upon hearing of the unexpected relief, the prisoners forced the cell doors and spilled into the yard. The brownish meat of the gathered masses boiled over from the narrow troughs of the courtyards and into Boulevard Arago.
On Boulevard Arago, the crowd formed a procession and drew upward in a sturdy wave. Someone piped up with The Internationale. That lonely, timid voice was like a match igniting the crowd. The alcohol of twenty-eight thousand voices burst into melodious flames. The mob had swollen as heavy as a lead-colored cloud, and now the rain of song poured from it. Like on a sweltering day charged with electricity, so dry that one seems to hear the crackle of sparks in one’s hair, the refreshing downpour suddenly gave the air the fragrance of freshly soaked earth. With the protracted shudder of an electric current, the song ran through the gigantic serpentine body of the mass, from the head to the tail, joining the scattered human cells into one nimble organism, animated through the artery of its uniform rhythm. Twenty-eight thousand pairs of legs hit the hard shell of the pavement in unison with every turn of an invisible steering wheel, and the earth flashed sparks from the quick kiss of their feet.
The extraordinary procession moved through the deathly quiet of this ghost town, down the silent ravine of the boulevard, a demonstration of miserable men with shaved heads and gray prison garb. They had no banners, only the red flag of the sun raised high above their heads, and in the empty inlets of the streets this song of retribution struck an oddly menacing note, this song of the last fight, whose refrain hit the empty, shattered windows like the butt of a rifle.
At the end of Boulevard Montparnasse the front of the procession unexpectedly balled up in one spot, and the whole snake halted in its march and rippled with thousands of fists.
The crowd convulsed at the sight of what was unfolding before its eyes, as if the cold paw of terror had touched its naked heart.
On the streets and sidewalks, in the wicker chairs on the bistro verandas, human corpses lay in the twisted and incomprehensible poses chosen by death. They were starting to reek.
Consumed by fear, the procession continued on in silence.
The appeals and decrees in various languages plastered on the walls of the various district-states told the story of the past six weeks; it slowly unfolded before the crowd’s wondering eyes in all its grotesque horror.
The procession turned onto Grands Boulevards, everywhere encountering the same tableau: a vast mortuary, staring through the glaze of one million eyes into the clear blue sky.
At the end of Boulevard Haussmann the crowd splintered into two groups, one of which flowed toward Saint-Lazare, to the women’s prison. The closed prison gates met the demonstrators with a hollow silence. They forced them open using iron rails from the train station. Nobody inside tried to put up any resistance. The guards, it turned out, had fled to the city four days earlier in fear of the prisoners’ revenge, condemning the three thousand women in their cells to death by starvation. The inmates hadn’t eaten for ten days.
In ransacking the Gare Saint-Lazare, they unexpectedly found ample food reserves in its warehouses and stations, which had been stored there by the thriftiest of the district-states, the Anglo-American territory. A provisions committee was assembled ad hoc, and they at once took to organizing food distribution.
Spontaneous patrols spread from the Saint-Lazare train station to the rest of the city to inspect the remaining prisons. The patrols returned before evening empty-handed, one after another. The prisons were found open, full of rotting, plague-infested corpses. No other living beings remained in all of Paris.