While I waited for deportation, I was kept in the Auberive prison. Once again I can see that prison, with its enormous cell blocks and its narrow white paths running under the pines. There is a gale blowing, and I can see the lines of silent women prisoners with their scarves folded at their necks and wearing white headdresses like peasants. In front of the pines burdened with snow during the long winter of 1872–73, the tired women prisoners passed slowly by, their wooden shoes ringing a sad cadence on the frozen earth.
My mother was still strong then, and I waited for my deportation to New Caledonia without seeing what I have seen since: the terrible and silent anguish under her calm appearance. She was staying at her sister’s in Clermont, which was very near the Auberive prison, and I knew she was well. She brought me packages of cake and biscuits the way she used to when I was a student at Chaumont.
How many little gifts her old hands sent me, even in the last year she was alive. We revolutionaries bring so little happiness to our families, yet the more they suffer, the more we love them. The rare moments we have at home make us intensely happy, for we know that those moments are transient and our loved ones will miss them in the future.
According to the few pages remaining from my journal of the trip to New Caledonia, we left Auberive on Tuesday, 5th August 1873, between six and seven in the morning. The night before we left my mother came to say goodbye, and I noticed for the first time that her hair was turning white.
When I left for exile I wasn’t bitter about deportation because it was better to be somewhere else and not see the collapse of our dreams. After what the Versailles government had done, I expected to find the savages in the South Pacific good, and perhaps I would find the New Caledonian sun better than the French one.
We were put on a train and while we were crossing through Langres on the way to Paris, five or six metalworkers with bare arms black up to their elbows came out of their workshop. One white-haired worker flourished his hammer and let out a yell that the noise of the railroad carriage’s rolling wheels almost drowned out. “Long live the Commune!” he cried. Something like a promise to stay worthy of his salute filled my heart.
Translated from French by Elizabeth Gunter and Bullitt Lowry