The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror by John Merriman Read Free Book Online Page A

was more directly addressed to Élisa:
     
I see around me the angels
And goddesses of love
All running up and, each in turn,
Coming to sing me their praises.
     
But they all murmur: "Hope"
And I, who know they are liars
Feel my sorrows revive
Because they laugh at my misery.
     
I cannot have hope
After these verses I will be quiet;
But always I will love you
And I will consecrate my suffering.
     
I will suffer silently
And you will always be my lady
The beautiful ideal of my soul
Dreaming of love under the high heavens.
     
    Émile's poems "amused" Élisa, but she did not attach any significance to them. Shortly thereafter, she and her husband spent several weeks in the country at Brévannes. Fortuné and Élisa's husband shared a commitment to anarchism, and such a visit seemed perfectly normal. During their stay, the smitten Émile stayed at Élisa's side, constantly looking for opportunities to talk to her, and more. A friend remembered "how many afternoons he spent in the garden, lying on the grass at the foot of the coquette he loved, gazing at her in silence, like a true believer on his idol." On one occasion, he tried to kiss her neck when her husband was not around. Among the "thousand" incidents she would later recall, one day in the garden Élisa kissed her husband, who offered her his arm. Émile became quite pale and left suddenly. Shortly thereafter, he went to bed with a fever. His mother did not know what to think. Élisa went to see him, asking him what was wrong. Émile expressed astonishment that she did not understand. She had kissed her husband right in front of him. This hurt him very deeply, and he confessed that he loved her "desperately." The object of his thoroughly unrequited passion now began to laugh. Émile reproached her for treating him like a child, telling her, "You will learn later how much I love you."
    In September 1891, Émile sent filisa several letters. In clear, elegant script he asked her to excuse the incoherence of his words. So many ideas were swirling about in his head. Sadly, he wrote, she did not understand "the extent of my love ... I have so much need for affection, consolation, and loving caresses that I see myself alone and isolated, lost in this vast morass of human egotism." Sometimes life itself filled him with horror. At such times, "I would like simply to disappear, to annihilate myself, in order to escape the perpetual anguish that strangles and breaks heart and soul. To love someone so much and not to be loved!"
    However, a vestige of good sense now allowed Émile to see the absurdity of his current state. He begged filisa to be patient with him and excuse his "painful ruminations." What exactly was "this mysterious affinity" that can push one person toward another, "throwing him without any compulsion at the feet of his conqueror?" He was trying to understand "this accursed passion, which annihilates all of a person's faculties, which takes over the entire brain, which can turn even the most resilient person into a toy in the hands of someone he adores." He hated this passion because it "caused so much harm, suffering, tears, disillusionment, and discouragement." He wanted to flee far from her, in the hope of curing his heart and mind, because for now he could do nothing but sleep, inert, "like an animal without any conscience!" However, such a separation would compromise his very existence. He would conclude the letter, because the more he wrote, the less reasonable he became, "such that madness would take me over if I followed along with my thoughts."
    Yet Émile's thoughts had already begun to turn away from filisa Gauthey. In Paris, he was increasingly appalled by the omnipresence of grinding poverty. Every day he encountered the miserably poor, the jobless, the hungry, the desperate. They became his passion. A friend remembered that when "he saw a poor wretch wasting away of hunger and had nothing of his own to share with him, he stole"—including, on one