The Gentle Barbarian by V. S. Pritchett Page A

Paris were demonstrating. George Sand was editing
Le Bulletin de la République:
socialism had almost arrived. But by the time of the bloody “June days” the middle classes had triumphed: the Republic was dead and Louis Napoleon was nosing his way towards the throne. Turgenev wrote to Pauline Viardot, who had gone on to Hamburg and Berlin to take the part of Valentine in
The Huguenots,
describing the disturbances in the Paris streets, and was struck by the now half-festive, indifferent, expectant state of the crowds. He was amused by the cigar pedlars. He questioned the workers when they marched on to the Constituent Assembly. They were waiting, the workers said. But he couldn’t for the life of him, he said, find out what the workers wanted or what side they took. Was history an act of God, accident, irony or fatality? He was asking the same question about his impossible love for Pauline Viardot.
    Twenty years later, he put down in his
Reminiscences
a remarkable account of the insurrection in June:
My Mates Sent Me!
Healways said that he was a physical coward; but if he hated and feared violence his eyes were not cowardly. They were alive to every change of scene and mood. A column of the National Guard, occupying one side of the Boulevard, turned to face a barricade. The day was hot:
    In spite of the arrival of such a considerable number of people everything grew much quieter around; voices were hushed, bursts of laughter became less frequent and shorter; it was as though a haze had fallen over the sounds. An empty space suddenly appeared between the barricade and the National Guard, with two or three small, slightly spinning columns of dust whirling along over it and—looking round apprehensively, a little black and white dog walked about on thin legs in it. Suddenly—it was difficult to say whether from the front or from behind, from above or below—there came a short, loud report; it was more like the sound of an iron bar falling heavily on the ground than a shot and immediately after this sound there came a strange, breathless silence. Everything seemed to grow tense with suspense—and suddenly over my head there came an unbearable loud rattle and roar, like the instantaneous tearing of a huge canvas. That was the insurgents firing through the Venetian blinds of the top floor of the Jouvin factory they had occupied.
    He bolted with some of the crowd to a side turning, catching sight as he ran of a man on all fours in front of the barricade, a man in a cap with a red pompom and the black and white dog spinning in the dust. He reached a small barricade in one of the back streets where a boy of twelve was pulling faces and waving a Turkish sword and a fat national guardsman white as a sheet ran stumbling past, moaning, with blood dripping from his sleeve.
    Herwegh, the German poet, had fled from the fighting in Baden-Baden and was hiding in the flat above Turgenev’s and a workman had come across Paris, risking his life, to tell Herwegh where his baby son was. Turgenev gave the man something to eat and thanked him and offered him money. He refused it. Turgenev asked his name. He refused to give it.
    There is no need for you to know my name. To tell you the truth what I did I didn’t do for you. My mates sent me. Good bye.
    Turgenev’s comment tells us everything about his humanity as a man and his truthfulness as a writer:
    It was impossible not to admire the old man’s action and the unconscious, almost majestic complicity with which he accomplished it. It evidently never occurred to him that he was doing anything extraordinary, that he was sacrificing himself. But it is impossible not to admire the people who sent him, either, those who at the height of the desperate fighting, could remember the worry and anxiety of a “bourgeois” they did not know and took care to set his mind at rest. It is true that 22 years later men like these set Paris on fire and shot their