Excerpt
On the afternoon of May 4, 1897, Léon stepped into a cab on the Champs-Élysées on his way to yet another amorous encounter. He was in an excellent mood. It was a beautiful late afternoon, and for the next several hours he would be enjoying the delights and attentions of a well-known actress with whom he had become intimate. All of a sudden, he noticed that there were not many other carriages about, and then his attention was drawn to a crowd gathering on the side of the avenue Montaigne. A large cloud of smoke billowed up in the distance, and he could see enormous flames shooting up over the rooftops. He jumped down from the cab and ran over toward a crowd of people who were standing and pointing at the ghastly sight. “The Charity Bazaar is burning!” someone screamed.
The Charity Bazaar had been organized by some of the city’s most sought-after and fashionable women. Underneath a huge, striped canvas tent on a vacant lot, surrounded on three sides by buildings, the ladies had set up various counters, where they sold luxury items and colorful novelties. As an added attraction, a giant movie projector had been mounted high above the stands to project a new film, The Disappearance of a Lady at Robert Houdin’s, by Georges Méliès. Stretching across the top of the tent was a vast awning meant to shield those assembled from the light and heat. Onlookers gathering in the street outside gaped as streams of elegant ladies and gentlemen descended from their carriages and swept into the tent in a cloud of soft muslin, cologne, and feathers as the event got underway. Everything was proceeding as expected when a fire broke out suddenly by the projector and flames spread quickly across the awning. Warning cries of “Fire” gave ways to terrified screams and moans, as smoke filled the tent. Most of the crowd ran away from the fire and toward the back of the tent, where the exit was blocked. Men and women, their clothes aflame, rushed about in panicked frenzy, spreading the fire to their companions, as people began to die from asphyxiation and bodies piled up. One woman, Genevieve Straus, who was a friend of Marcel Proust and hostess of one of Paris’s most exclusive salons, somehow knew that the only way to safety lay in walking straight into the fire. By doing so, she managed to make her way to the front exit and to survive the inferno. By the time the flames had been extinguished, 140 lives had been claimed from the close ranks of Paris’s most elite, glittering members of society.
Later that evening, Léon went to the Grand Palace, where he ran into Paul Mariéton, an old family friend. Both of them entered the vast, cavernous and dimly lit room where many of the bodies pulled out from the fire had been placed. Léon could not believe his eyes. Corpses, twisted and charred, lay everywhere. Shreds of burnt gowns clung weakly to bodies only recently brimming with life; faces that earlier in the day had registered excitement at the novelty of the film had been shrunken into grimacing expressions, empty eye sockets expressing horrible pain. He could hear the wailing and sobbing of the victims’ families and friends, as they came upon the charred remains of a daughter, wife, sister or friend. After he left, he walked for a long time in the deserted streets, unable to escape the violent images that now weighed down upon him. It was difficult not to find in the catastrophe an ominous sign of some great dislocation in the world and an unwelcome reminder that even the finest members of society are vulnerable to the ravages of chance. The priest at the well-attended memorial service at Notre Dame on May 8 took it a step further, explaining that the cause of the fire was God's terrible anger at the newfangled scientific and social ideas of the young Third Republic and the rise of secularism.
