A Heroine of the Commune.

Today is the Eighteenth of March, the anniversary of the Paris Commune, a glorious date in the calendar of Liberty. It is the day we celebrate. But this year it is Fortune’s will that we should celebrate it at the grave whither one of the Commune’s many heroines has lately gone. Marie Ferré, sister of the brave Théophile Ferré who was shot at Satory by the infamous Thiers, was buried at Paris in the cemetery of Levallois-Perret on February 27. From various Paris papers we glean the following facts concerning the sad event:

Marie Ferré succumbed to a disease of the heart complicated with rheumatism. She died at the house of a friend, Mme. Camille Bias, No. 27 Rue Cendorcet. From this house at nine o’clock in the morning the procession started. A civil burial, it is needless to say. Very simple obsequies. The hearse, one of the most modest, bore three large crowns of red and white roses, to say nothing of immortelles. Following the hearse, to the number of about fifteen hundred, were the principal survivors of the Commune: Henri Rochefort, Clovis Hugues, General Eudes, Alphonse Humbert, Louise Michel, Emile Gautier, and many others. It was a long way to the cemetery, where the deceased was to be buried beside her brother, and it took an hour and a quarter to make the journey, which was effected in the most tranquil manner. At the head of the procession walked three citizens carrying large crowns of red immortelles. At the grave there were several addresses, among which was one by Louise Michel, who said:
“Citizens, soon this open tomb will close forever on the dearest possession of the democratic and social revolution. Marie Ferré, whom we all admired, manifested all the virtues of woman, all the energy of man, whenever there was occasion to struggle for the end which we all pursue. Her memory will live always in the hearts of those who knew her. In her whose body is now to join the body of her assassinated brother we behold another conquered victim, and we shall not forget it. But, though dead, she will ever live, for she will serve as model and exemplar for the women of the revolution. She will recall to all the task which it remains for us to finish, the levelling of all social iniquities by justice and equality. Marie Ferré, adieu, and success to the revolution!”
Henri Rochefort penned the following touching tribute to this noble woman’s memory in the columns of “L’Intransigeant,” under the head, La Sœur du Fusillé (The Sister of the Shot):
She is called, or rather, since they bury her this morning she was called Marie Ferré. Search the volumes of Shakspere, re-read Victor Hugo, traverse the range of bloody tragedies from Corneille to Æschylus, we defy you to find anything as dark as the story of this poor flower-girl, who died yesterday almost unexpectedly, we might say in the odor of sanctity: had that phrase not been damaged in the juggleries of the Catholic Church.
In May, 1871, Marie Ferré lay sick of typhoid fever in a small room on the Rue Frasilleau, where she lived with her mother and brother. A police commissioner, followed by police agents and soldiers, burst into her room:
“Where is Théophile Ferré, member of the Commune?”
“I do not know.”
“Perhaps your mother will know.”
They spring upon Mme. Ferre, the mother, and warn her, with that delicacy which characterized the Versaillists in all their exploits, that she must make known the retreat of her son or be immediately shot.
Marie Ferré sprang from her bed, and begged to be executed instead of her mother.
“It is veil; dress yourself, for we are going to take you away,” said the chief of the squad.
At seeing her daughter shivering with fever while donning her garb of death, Mme. Ferré could hold out no longer; her brain gave way. Of her two sons one, the younger, was already a prisoner in the hands of the versaillists; the other probably could not long elude them. To top all, they were about to slay the sister under her very eyes. The unhappy woman fell senseless, and of the incoherent words that passed her lips the police carefully retained this address: Rue Saint-Sauveur.
Thither they ran, ransacked the street until they found Théophile Ferré, and, being unable to take the mother, who was struck with a sort of congestion, dragged off her daughter Marie, who spent a week in a fetid prison amid the prisoners huddled there by hundreds.
On restoring her her liberty the turnkeys told her that her father and her two brothers had been arrested, and that her mother, whom the last shock had driven mad, had been removed to the Saint-Anne asylum, where, for the rest, she died shortly after. Merle alone remained, with her courage and her industry, to supply her relatives with the food that the jailers refused them, for in the prisons of Versailles without money there was no eating, and I have personally had the pleasure of saving from death by starvation two or three fellow-prisoners, with whom I shared the meals, much too abundant for myself, which were brought to me from without.
But after the week of May and the stories which the venomous newspapers had fabricated concerning the men of the Commune, at what door could one knock to obtain work who bore the name of Ferré? Moreover, at what hour of the day could we orphan labor, when she continually had to be on the road from Levallois to Versailles in order to try to see her brothers, to whom she brought the meagre extras that constituted the major portion of their daily fare?
The night following Ferré’s death sentence I was awakened by piercing cries and a noise of broken furniture. At first I thought some prisoner had committed suicide. It was the brother of the condemned, who, occupying the cell above mine, had been plunged by the news of the fate in store for his elder brother into a sort of nervous attack complicated with wild delirium.
They called Ferré, who slept stoically, and for some hours the kindness of the director allowed to remain together in one cell these two members of the same family, of whom one had lost his head and the other was about to lose his life. It was the latter who consoled and succeeded in calming the former. Only my guard, a man who, though very thoroughly hardened to human suffering, had, the profoundest respect for the admirable bravery of the condemned man of the Commune, told me that on re-entering his cell Ferré, who had contained himself from fear of adding fuel to his brother’s excitement, seated himself on his bench and, placing his two elbows on the oaken table fastened to the wall, burst into tears.
Marie, who refrained from sleep in order to procure for her relatives a few of the extras so necessary to them, learned, on arriving at the prison, that the elder of her two brothers had been condemned to death and that the younger had just been seized with a fit of burning fever. As for her father, there was nothing against him. Consequently they did not release him. They kept on waiting for something to turn up.
Marie Ferré’s torture lasted five months. When I lately saw her again on my return from exile, I still retained all indelible remembrance of the young girl which her unexpected death has just revived. I still see her gliding like a shadow, in her black garments, along the corridor which led to the parlor. Three of us, Rossel, Ferré, and myself, generally met in these box-like enclosures which constitute an entire room, a sort of cellular omnibus. Being all three marked for death, we had been placed side by side on the ground floor of the prison, with two overseers, who, through our open grates, kept their restless eyes steadily upon us.
In the parlor Mlle. Rossel, Mlle. Ferré, and my children gathered with a common feeling of anxiety. I shall never forget, when they learned that I was sentenced only to perpetual exile in a fortified district, the look of sympathetic envy which the two young girls out upon my daughters, seeming to say:
“Your father is simply destined to end his days six thousand five hundred leagues away among cannibals; are you not happy enough?”
The sister of Ferré, like the sister of Delescluze, struggled bravely against the bitterness of her sorrows, and then fell conquered. The day when the clerical calendar, which the postman brings us every year, shall be replaced by the republican calendar, the name of this martyr will shine among the most memorable; and if ever civil baptism succeeds religious baptism, honest women will place their infants under the shield of her memory and her virtue.

Samuel Johnson.

Liberty hears with regret of the death of Samuel Johnson. Of the religious radical who, since the death of Parker, have come into notice as apostles of Reason in Religion, Mr. Johnson, less widely known than many others, easily stood foremost. In breadth of view, clearness of thought, he had among the radical writers no superior. His many and carefully prepared contributions to the “Radical” show the vigor and temper of his mind. A transcendentalist of most consistent parts, he knew always where he stood, and was never found lapsing into uncertainty and compromise. The materialist found in him a man with both the courage of his convictions and the “preparedness” to state them. He knew his own ground thoroughly. Probably no writer has presented the transcendental philosophy with more satisfaction to transcendental believers than did Mr. Johnson in an elaborate paper published in the “Radical Review,” nearly five years ago. For nineteen years he was the preacher to a Free Society in Lynn. He was a firm believer in individual, personal influence and power, and instinctively avoided the organizing, sectarian purposes and plans so beguiling to others. The bond of organized religious propagandism, however liberal in protestations, was to his mind still a fetter. To swap the “Lordship of Christ” for the mastership of even a tacit understanding among radicals as to matters of belief was to make no signal advance. The mind, to be free, must follow its own laws with not even the implied duty of social argument. Each man must do his own work in his own way on his own ground, and without fear or favor. For this duty of freedom, this absolute necessity for independent activity, he ever did valiant and successful battle. And herein, more than in any other fact of his life, does Liberty rejoice. In spirit Mr. Johnson was ever a Liberty’s side. But not always could he see o’er what seemingly dangerous passes the aspiring dame led. If he did not follow her to the length of her leading, it was not that he lacked the courage, but that, to his ardent vision, the goal had been touched. Nevertheless, in his philosophy the foundations of Liberty were laid deep and strong. Sincerity, honesty of thought and expression ennobled and strengthened his whole life. Not shrinking from the world, as some mistakenly have said, but retiring to his appointed tasks that he might well and faithfully do them, he toiled happily and unremittingly. Twenty years and more he had worked upon the three large volumes devoted to the “Oriental Religions,” two of which, published by J. R. Osgood & Co., are before the public,— “India” and “China.” This last-named volume is well worthy the widest circulation. It treats of the Chinese people, their religion, philosophy, government, their whole social life and history, in the most learned and intelligent manner, and has the most practical of bearing upon this now exciting question in American politics. From its pages one learns that the much hated “heathen Chinee” is, in nearly all the essentials of real manliness, quite beyond the imitation even of his Christian detractors.

Mr. Johnson’s death occurred suddenly, and gave a sad surprise to his many personal friends. A brave, true man, whose memory Liberty will ever cherish! Had he begun life to-day with the same fervent zeal and clear-sightedness that characterized his anti-slavery career thirty years ago, there is no doubt where he would have taken his stand and what new battles he would have helped Liberty fight. But age and death, foes and destroyers of us all, chained and claimed him. Much he did, yet much remains behind. In his day and generation he did Liberty noble service. But nobler, higher, profounder meanings the ages unveil, and we who still live must needs press forward into their newer and stronger light.

“Freedom all-winged expands,

Nor perches in narrow place,

Her broad van seeks unplanted lands.”

These lines of Emerson he loved to quote, and now that his lips are still, his voice silent, Liberty to his memory repeats them, and adopts them as her own.

The End of a Religion.

Under the above title, Henri Rochefort, the day after the civil burial of M. Herold, the eminent French freethinker, recently dead, who for so many years was prefect of the department of the Seine and consequently administrator of the municipal affairs of Paris, commented upon the services in the following words, translated from “L’Intransigeant”:—

The civil burial of M. Herold is the most serious service that that senatorial functionary ever rendered in his life, or rather in his death, to the cause of the Republic and of liberty of conscience.
His conduct in persisting in his freethought even to the tomb and including it was the more meritorious in that he was born a Protestant, and that the adepts of that religion, which calls itself reformed although it has a horror of reforms, are devotees even more fanatical than the Catholics.
Littré, in dying under the auspices of the church, forever compromised his memory. Herold has just assured his. The example that he, prefect of the Seine, has had the courage to set to the city whose affairs he administered will do more to scatter the mass pf absurdities agglomerated under the name of Christianity than all our articles and all our preaching. Not ten years ago the absence of the priest from the obsequies of a citizen was considered by the least devout as an eccentricity in bad taste, and by the faithful as the last word of scoundrelism. Such prefects as the Ducros and the Nadaillacs could post decrees with impunity, obliging bodies intended for civil burial to be taken away at five o’clock in the morning, at the same hour as the rubbish heaped before our doors.
Relatives were not even allowed to follow to their last resting-place the bodies of these pestiferous persons, and there was talk of adding a corner for them to the cemetery set apart for the executioner’s victims.
The old St. Simonian, Félicien David, having refused the aid of holy water and of the last prayers, the detachment which accompanied the hearse of this officer of the Legion of Honor received from its colonel an order to turn back as soon as he learned that they were proceeding directly from the house of the dead to Pere-Lachaise.
To-day, the first magistrate of the capital of France disdainfully rejects the aspergill, the De profundis, the mass for the dead, even though in music; and all those who, but a few years ago, would have veiled their faces before an atheism so pronounced,— the president of the senate, the prefect of police, I the president of the chamber of commerce, the governor of Paris, the president of the Republic in the person of his representative,— have marched in the procession with the air of people scandalized not the least in the world, talking of matters quite other than the eternal flames which the deceased nevertheless could not escape.
Now there is no room for delusion concerning the significance of a civil burial. It is no longer simply the negation of the bagatelles of Catholicism, such as the immaculate conception, the infallibility of the pope, the real presence of Jesus Christ in a wafer of flour which serves to make angels and which might serve quite as well to make pancakes; it is the rejection in toto of all the dogmas on which rests the immense mystification which is the basis of the Christian as of every other religion. No more immortality of the soul, no more last judgment, no more paradise, no more creator: uncreated matter, whence the body came and whither it returns. For the great argument of the priests is this:
“Who could have created the world, if not God?”
But they have never answered the question with which the atheists ever confront them:
“If nothing can create itself unaided, tell us, then, who created God ?”
These are the theories that have been sanctioned by the senators, deputies, high dignitaries, and official personages who ranged themselves around M. Herold’s tomb.
Though some may not have attached to this deeply serious fact all the importance which it merits, surely the clergy have measured its potent consequences.
Henceforth civil burial, no longer a matter of private conviction merely, is a constituent part of the public morals. Yesterday religious obsequies were the rule. To-morrow they will be the exception.