‘Do not fire at them, Republicans, do not fire because they want you to fire. And do not allow yourself to be killed, heroic coward, when there is still much to be done; when as our country mourns, there is a revolution underway.’

‘An heroic coward. That’s what I am. An heroic coward.’ His steps beat time to the oxymoron as he made his way home through the dark, gas having made only niggardly appearances since the lifting of the siege. He had just left the Tivoli-Vauxhall theatre where meetings of the National Guard central committee were being held. Off he went, every evening, boiling over with conviction and passion, consumed by the need to act, wishing desperately that he might be called on to defend the glory of the Commune. But there again, while he begged for responsibility in this new army of Communards, the old revolutionaries from 1848 continued to reject him in an amiable fashion, calling him whippersnapper or young ’un, and promising him that one day his turn would come. True, he admired them, some having endured solitary confinement or deportation, but the guarded caution of their arguments he found acted as a dampener on his own eagerness.

At the top of Boulevard Magenta, he noticed small groups of soldiers appearing here and there through the evening mist, gripping their rifles with both hands as if departing for the front. ‘But where are they all going?’ the young man wondered, leaning against a building in Place du Château d’Eau. He encountered others in Rue Saint-Denis, similarly silent, swift, inscrutable. He decided to do an about-face and follow them discreetly, keeping to the building façades from one carriage entrance to the next. In this fashion he made his way up the boulevard, all the way to the hill of Montmartre, where other groups of soldiers were converging from the direction of Rue Mercadet and Rue Mont-Cenis. Hundreds of soldiers.

From where he was standing, he could see the slopes of the Butte Montmartre, where he witnessed men from the engineering corps busy demolishing the protective barriers surrounding the cannons under the direction of a general on horseback.

‘They’re removing our artillery!’ he murmured softly to himself.

He started running, breathlessly climbing the hill until he reached the Solferino tower, where he knew a group of National Guards were on duty. There, at the foot of the building, lay a man in uniform, with a woman dressed in grey skirts and black corset leaning over him. It was Louise Michel, whom he recognised from the numerous times he had heard her speak at the Tivoli-Vauxhall.

‘Citizen, Thiers’ troops are disarming the Champ des Polonais at Montmartre. What should I do?’

‘Follow me,’ she replied. ‘We must alert the city!’