Comrade Gaillard spoke up in a steady voice:
“Comrades, I am putting Comrade Courreau and Comrade Maraq’s motion to a vote. Who’s for? Please raise your hands.”
Twelve hands rose.
Comrade Duffy abstained.
“Comrade Courreau’s motion is passed,” Gaillard laconically announced.
They proceeded to the remaining topics on the day’s agenda.
III
An animated crowd was still burbling on the square outside when the first committee members appeared in the doorway to the ministry. Someone bellowed:
“They’re coming!”
The crowd fell silent, swayed, and cracked open in a zigzag, only to close up again, swallowing the people exiting the building. For a moment the rafts of heads bobbed around the spot like ripples from a stone. Soon the people who were sucked in started to flow out, one by one, onto the reefs of the monuments protruding above the surface. Their words were inaudible, you could only see the violent gestures of their hands slicing the air, as if twelve demented conductors wanted to capture the chaotic din of the polyphonic sea into the harmonious notations of a score.
A bony man was speaking from the plinth of the Strasbourg Virgin. The ongoing flood of applause dappled his face with great drops of sweat.
“Instead of the plague, which was to have spread across the entire world, but in fact only made room to start building anew, we hereby ignite the great plague of the idea that will spread across this old continent in a sea of cleansing fire, scorching the armies, cordons, and borders. Paris, the first to show Europe the great Commune, will be first to blow the winds of change through all of Europe!…”
Leavened by the yeast of their enthusiasm, the crowd swelled and boiled over with a refrain of The Internationale. The thin, spindly man was carried forward, directionless, on swiftly flowing shoulders like a cork swept by a current.
The rushing human waves poured into the pools of squares and the straits of alleyways.
To tear this highly combustible crowd from its unbridled elation and channel it into concrete action, they had to yank out its seams and splice it with the scissors of organization.
By the afternoon, the mass had been segmented, yoked once more by the iron clamp of discipline, and was a viable source of power.
The first task was to clear the streets of the rotting corpses, which were threatening to cause a new wave of infection. There was no question of burying such a mass of bodies or of burning them in small impromptu crematoriums, so it was resolved to cremate them in the open air.
For the next three days, small divisions of shaven headed, disciplined troops made gigantic pyres out of furniture and waste paper in the squares of Paris and piled the corpses on top. Work was completed on the fourth day. The mounds were doused with gasoline and oil and set alight.
There was no wind to put the neighboring buildings at risk. The fire punched the sky with a black spiral of smoke, and the burning heavens collapsed like a thatched roof in flames, covering the city with a fur cap of soot.
On September 8, newspapers all over the world carried news of the fire in Paris. Crowds gathered on the hills and highlands of France to see it for themselves. The black geyser of smoke gushed hundreds of feet up into the sky. It was an unforgettable sight.
A brave French pilot hit upon the idea of flying over burning Paris, but was forced by the plumes of caustic smoke to turn back, and was unable to say anything beyond the fact that Paris was ablaze from end to end.
Kindly old Grandma Europe was touched that day by the fate of the unfortunate city – and it was not crocodile tears she shed. Elderly gentlemen all around the world wistfully recalled the days of their youth: the Moulin Rouge and Maxim’s, midinettes and mannequins. From high on their pulpits, priests made vague references to the Lord’s wrath and exhorted penance. In the Chamber of Deputies, the gray-haired, immortal Briand railed against the communists.
The following day, the Continent’s radios picked up the first signals from Paris after a long period of silence. The bulletins reported on the fire, the disorder, and the raging epidemic.
The events of the following months – during which the daily reports from Paris were as bleak as ever – turned French attention away from their capital for a long time.
Taking advantage of the turmoil in France, Germany categorically refused to make further reparation payments, as the Dawes Plan had outlined, on the pretext that their economy was struggling. War was in the air. The bourgeois newspapers, spearheaded by the socialists, called for the occupation of Berlin, to settle the score with their unruly neighbor. The sailors of the Mediterranean fleet responded with a revolt, hoisting red flags up their masts. The Lyon garrison clearly sympathized with them, and joined with the workers to demonstrate against war.
An emergency session of the League of Nations concluded with memos filling two cartloads of official stationery, an all-out attempt to mollify the swelling conflict. Under pressure from the working masses, the French government was forced into a compromise, thereby undermining the integrity of the Treaty of Versailles. The immediate threat of war seemed to have been averted.
Radio Paris continued to report the escalation of the plague and riots erupting in the infested city. According to the most recent news, the eastern quarters of Paris had been overtaken by an anarcho-nihilist cult bent on destroying the city. Three government aircraft that tried to fly over Paris were shot down by these alleged cultists. This deplorable incident took away the last of the government’s desire to meddle with the plague-infested city, which from then on was abandoned to its cruel fate.
Months passed. France, a floozy with a short memory, slowly came to terms with the loss of its beloved capital city. More painful than the loss itself was the absence of tourists stuffed with dollars, who had proved quite difficult to lure back. It was imperative that they create a new capital as soon as possible, one that was in no way inferior to Paris in terms of its comforts and titillating attractions. A special consortium was established for the expansion and exploitation of Lyon.
Upscale, eight-story hotels soared up on either side of Lyon’s boulevards with lightning speed. Theaters, dance halls and cabarets opened up, and lavish brothels, for men and women both, sprang up from nowhere. Historical monuments were hastily transported from all corners of France.
Telegraphs trumpeted the sensational news of the new and glittering capital to all corners of the globe in the blink of an eye.
This extraordinary news met with a fevered response worldwide. Every country hustled to pitch in their two cents to the growing population of Lyon.
America, France’s obliging ally, who had overcome its fear of the ongoing fires of the plague in the name of a profitable transaction, daily sent off huge ocean liners, loaded to the tops of their funnels with armies of jazz bands, dancing girls, hotel maître d’s, stewards, and grooms. The more courageous Americans were already packing their bags to take the first Cook voyage and to be the first to set foot on a re-conquered patch of Europe.
From all the world over, cocottes, madams, and common prostitutes came rushing to the Rhone on serpentine rails at breakneck speed, a live cargo of all nations and races, for whom the thoughtful French government was obliged to introduce additional train services.
In the shadows of the brand new homes, popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm of dollars, there appeared the immortal potbellied hoteliers.
The clatter of advertisements and signboards being hammered in place filled the entire city.