On The Eve
Victor Serge
FROM THE PORTE DE
LILAS
the suburb of Pantin appeared to be
covered with an immense blanket of suspicious-looking bluish fog
rising towards Bellevue and Montmartre. The gasoline tanks at
Rouen were said to be on fire. The neighborhood of the Gare du
Nord was deserted and wan in the twilight, the shop-shutters down,
people on the doorsteps listening to the throb of distant guns. Taxis
roofed with mattresses rushed in all directions. The Boulevard
Sebastopol was in complete darkness and deserted, but underneath
it was the Reamur-Sebastopol subway station, with its human
magma waiting in animal fear for bombs that did not come. There
was a mob atmosphere around the Gare de Lyon: no more trains,
no more room in them, no more room in the station. A providential
taxi with a one-eyed driver took us over jammed roads under
artillery fire through the forest of Fontainebleau. Helmeted men
cried from the edge of the black road "For God's sake, lights out!
There's an alarm!" But no one gave a damn.
We fled with a feeling of relief that verged at moments on
light-heartedness. Everything one possessed had been reduced to
a few bundles. The day before yesterday I had worried about not
finding a note among my papers-Now my books, personal belong–
ings, documents, all my work, everything, had been abandoned,
yet without any real emotion. (It's true that as far as I was con–
cerned this sort of thing was almost habitual.) We would go on
feeling this relief, this light-heartedness, even when mixed with
bitterness. A piece of old Europe was crumbling, something was
happening that had to happen. We had been stifling in a blind–
alley. For years, it seems to me, France--perhaps the entire West
-had been possessed by the feeling that "It can't go on this way."
None of it could go on, none of it. The frontiers, Danzig, all the
varieties of fascism, the parliaments, the whole heap of iniquities
and absurdities, all the rotten literature and journalism, the blinded
working class. Not that we were defeatists. Not at all. Like the
French people as a whole, the revolutionists would have fought
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