Read Chapter 29: The Day of the Barricades

The Communards came for him at dawn, not as a mob but as an execution squad moving with military precision. Émile heard their boots on the stone steps of the basilica before he saw their faces—six men in ragged National Guard uniforms, rifles leveled, eyes hard with the particular hatred reserved for traitors.

He did not run. There was nowhere to run to, and his arm still throbbed beneath the bandage Céleste had tied the night before. He raised his hands.

“You’re making a mistake,” he said.

“You’re the photographer,” said the man in front, a sergeant with a scar splitting his left eyebrow. “The one who shot the massacre at Montmartre.”

Émile’s stomach turned cold. Moreau’s false versions had already done their work.

“I shot the truth.”

“Truth,” the sergeant spat. “The Versaillais are paying you to make us look like butchers. The Committee wants you at the Hôtel de Ville.”

They took his camera bag, his coat, his satchel. They did not find the plate in his boot heel, and they did not find the second glass negative Luc had made, wrapped in cloth and taped to the inside of his thigh. They bound his wrists and marched him through streets that had become a labyrinth of barricades overnight. Wagons overturned, paving stones torn loose, sandbags stacked waist-high. Women loaded cartridges at tables set up in doorways. Children ran messages between posts.

Paris was preparing for the end.

At the Hôtel de Ville, they shoved him into a chamber that had once hosted civic receptions. The chandeliers still hung, but the gilded mirrors were cracked and the parquet floors scarred by soldiers’ boots. A long table dominated the room, and around it sat the men Émile recognized from the Commune’s posters and proclamations. De Valois stood at the head, his goatee trimmed, his uniform immaculate even now.

“Monsieur Chardin,” de Valois said. “How good of you to join us.”

“Your men were persuasive.”

De Valois gestured to the empty chair before him. “Sit. We have matters to discuss.”

Émile sat. The Communard guards remained behind him, bayonets fixed. De Valois did not sit himself; he circled the table slowly, a predator enjoying the approach.

“I’ve seen your photographs,” he said. “The ones in Colonel Moreau’s possession. Powerful images. Damning ones. Our own soldiers executing prisoners—what a catastrophe for the cause.”

“They were staged.”

De Valois’s eyebrow rose. “Staged? By whom?”

“By Moreau. By you. By everyone who profits from this war continuing.” Émile met his eyes. “I have the proof.”

“You have decoys. Moreau showed me your little tricks. Clever man, that colonel. Sold the same falsehoods to both sides and stood back to watch us tear each other apart.”

“Moreau took a false plate from my camera. The real one is still mine. And I have a second, taken by a man you may remember—Luc Marchand. He filmed Moreau meeting with your own general outside the city walls, two days before the massacre.”

A flicker crossed de Valois’s face. Doubt, or calculation. Perhaps both. “Luc is dead.”

“That’s what you were meant to believe.”

De Valois stopped circling. He leaned across the table, palms flat, his voice dropping to something intimate and dangerous. “Then show me. If you have the plate, produce it. If you have proof Moreau has been playing both ends against the middle, I will walk you out of here myself and give you a horse to ride to Versailles if you wish it.”

Émile studied him. The man was a capable liar—all politicians were—but his eyes kept returning to Émile’s coat, to the camera case they’d confiscated, which now sat on the table between them like a dead thing.

“The plate is in the camera,” Émile said. “False bottom. Your men took it when they searched me.”

De Valois’s lips curved. “Then open it.”

A guard handed Émile his camera. The familiar weight of it settled into his hands, the brass fittings cool against his palms. He worked the catch on the side panel—the one he’d installed himself, years ago, for a job in Mexico where carrying exposed plates openly would have cost him his life. It slid free with a soft click.

Behind him, he heard the guards shift. De Valois leaned closer.

Émile had no plate in the false bottom.

What he had was a cake of flash powder—a small, palm-sized brick of magnesium compound he’d packed for night work and never used. He’d put it there this morning, before the Communards came, a desperate gamble that now paid off.

“Here,” he said, and opened the compartment fully.

He struck the striker against the camera’s metal frame. The flash detonated in a searing white bloom that filled the room like a miniature sun.

De Valois screamed. The guards staggered back, hands flying to their faces. Émile dropped to the floor, rolling under the table as the echoes of the blast rang off the gilded walls. Through the burning afterimages in his vision, he saw de Valois clawing at his eyes, stumbling backward into an ornate chair that toppled beneath him.

A hand seized his arm and pulled him hard to his feet.

“Move,” Céleste hissed.

She had a pistol in one hand—where she’d gotten it, he didn’t know and didn’t ask—and she fired twice into the chandelier above them. Glass rained down in a sparkling curtain, sending the guards diving for cover.

They ran.

The corridor outside was a chaos of shouting men and drawn weapons. Céleste fired again, wide and over their heads, and the Communards scattered. They burst through a service door and into a narrow staircase that smelled of damp stone and coal dust.

Behind them, de Valois’s voice rose above the din, raw and furious.

“Find them. Find the plate. Kill them if you must, but bring me the photograph.”

Émile’s heart hammered as they descended into the darkness of the cellar. His hands still shook with adrenaline, his vision still swam with the ghost of the flash.

“That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” Céleste said, breathless.

“Did it work?”

She glanced back at him, a wild grin cutting through the grime on her face. “We’re still alive, aren’t we?”

The stairs ended in a wide, vaulted cellar. Barrels of wine, crates of ammunition, a floor of packed earth. Émile scanned the walls for another exit, for anything, and found a rusted iron grate at the far end, half-hidden behind stacked crates.

The sewers.

“There,” he said, pointing.

Footsteps clattered on the stairs above them. Céleste seized his hand, squeezing once, hard, and then they were running again toward the darkness.