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He was witness to a Paris in ruins, with ashes and destruction everywhere. But despite the terrible damage and the enormous amount of suffering, the shattered city was already showing surprising signs of life. The day after the Commune had been annihilated, Goncourt sanguinely wrote: “This evening one can hear the movement of Parisian life starting up again, and its murmur like a distant tide.” Two days later, he added: “Across the paving-stones which are being replaced, the people of Paris, dressed in their travelling-clothes, are swarming in to take possession of their city once more.”
Zola, writing to Cézanne soon after his return, put it more succinctly: “Paris is coming to life again.”
Sarah Bernhardt agreed. One morning soon after her own return, she received a notice of rehearsal from the Odéon theater. “I shook out my hair,” she wrote, “stamped my feet, and sniffed the air like a young horse snorting.” She had realized, with typical exuberance, that “life was commencing again.”
But perhaps Edouard Manet put it best of all. Writing to Berthe Morisot on June 10, he told her, “I hope, Mademoiselle, that you will not stay a long time in Cherbourg. Everybody is returning to Paris; besides, it’s impossible to live anywhere else.
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Mary McAuliffe (Dawn of the Belle Epoque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and Their Friends)