The Red Window
a tale of the Paris Commune
1
Montmartre, Paris. Late spring, 1871.
The candle sputtered as a draught slipped through the attic window, stirring the faded red curtain. The flame leaned, stuttered, then straightened again. Lucienne paused mid-brushstroke, the tip of her paintbrush suspended above the canvas like a held breath. Red light filtered through the worn fabric, bathing the room in its glow, soft and violent all at once. It touched her walls, her floorboards, her hands. It turned everything to blood.
She stood back. The canvas was incomplete, figures half-born, sketched in charcoal and washed with ochre. In the centre, a woman raised a tattered flag, her face still a smear, neither joyous nor grieving. Just red. That was all Lucienne had managed today.
Outside, the light shifted. The sun was sinking low over the rooftops of Montmartre, fire-edged smoke curling through the sky. The city flickered with motion, people scattering, clustering, shouting. But, from up here in her garret, everything moved in silence. She stepped to the window and touched the edge of the cracked pane, where the curtain had torn and snagged months ago during the first riots. Through it, Paris looked like a dream caught in a fever. The red made it unreal. Beautiful. Brutal.
A gunshot echoed from somewhere near the Butte. Then another, closer, sharp, and flat. Below, a voice cried, “Aux armes!” and was swallowed by laughter, wild and breathless. Somewhere, someone cheered. Then silence again.
Lucienne didn’t flinch. Her heart beat steadily, neither fast nor slow. These noises were no longer intrusions. They were the new rhythm of her days.
She turned back to the canvas and dipped her brush in a pot of crimson. The bristles dragged across the cloth, laying down a single curved stroke. A shoulder, maybe, or the edge of a cloak. She hadn’t decided yet. The mural beside her stretched along the slanted wall, men and women locked in movement, mouths open mid-cry or mid-command, arms reaching upward. Some bore torches. Some carried their dead.
The attic had once been her father’s studio. It had become her sanctuary, her cell, her chapel. Now it was a vault, her Sistene. Every surface bore witness. Here, a procession of widows beneath black flags. There, children huddled behind barricades made of broken chairs. She didn’t know if these images would ever be seen. That no longer mattered. She painted because the Commune had to be remembered. Even if it was only the walls that remembered.
The candle flickered. Shadows danced over her murals as if the painted ghosts themselves stirred in the half-light. The flame gave one final twist, then sputtered out, vanishing into smoke.
Lucienne didn’t move. She let the darkness settle around her like a shawl. From outside, the red glow still filtered through the curtain, faint now, but steady. It was enough. She set her brush down, crossed to the window, and looked out once more.
The city was burning.
2
The attic air stank of turpentine. Lucienne’s tongue felt thick and dry against her teeth, her stomach curling in on itself like burnt paper. The candle was gone, and the red light outside had faded to nothing. She sat listening to the silence until even that began to feel oppressive. Somewhere deep below, a door slammed sharp and decisive, like a warning.
She rose. Water. Bread if there was any left. Just enough to keep going.
Her shawl clung to her as she opened the attic door and stepped into the stairwell. The wooden stairs groaned beneath her weight. She moved slowly, her fingers trailing along the cracked plaster wall for balance. The air here was colder, damper. A chill crept beneath her skin.
Then she saw it. A shape on the landing. A body.
Her breath caught. She froze, halfway down. He lay collapsed, one arm twisted beneath him, coat soaked through with something dark. A thin trail of blood gleamed on the wood in the dimness. His chest barely rose and fell. But he was alive.
A moan escaped him, hoarse and muffled. His head lolled to the side, eyes slitting open, unfocused. A torn rosette glinted faintly at his collar, red and gold, the Commune. A federate.
Lucienne’s heart beat hard against her ribs. She glanced down the stairwell, but heard no movement. Leave him, said the voice in her head. He’ll bring soldiers, death, fire.
Instead, she knelt beside him. His skin was cold and damp. The bullet hadn’t gone deep, but it had torn his side badly. Blood clung to him like a second shirt. When she tugged his arm over her shoulder, he groaned but didn’t resist. He was light, wiry, but heavy with unconscious weight. It took all her strength to haul him up the stairs, step by step. Her legs shook. Her breath rasped loud in the gloom.
At last, the attic door creaked open. She dragged him inside and bolted it shut behind her. Then she let him fall gently onto the old mattress beneath the wall of unfinished murals. She leaned against the door, chest heaving.
For a moment, nothing. Then: a voice, dry and amused. “What is this? Purgatory?”
Lucienne turned. He was blinking at the ceiling, lips twitching in what might have been a smile.
“Be quiet,” she hissed. “You’ll get us both killed.”
He laughed, then winced, pressing a hand to his side. “You’re not a ghost, then. Or a nun. Maybe both.” He looked her over. Paint-streaked apron, hair twisted into a loose knot, hands still stained red. “An artist?” he added.
She said nothing, only knelt beside him again and pressed a damp cloth to the wound. He flinched, but didn’t pull away. His eyes never left hers.
“I’m Éloi,” he said after a pause. “What’s your name, morte vivante?”
She met his gaze for a long moment. “Lucienne.”
She stood and poured water into a chipped tin cup, fingers trembling just enough for her to notice. Behind her, Éloi groaned softly and tried to sit upright.
“I won’t stay long,” he muttered. “Just need a day. Maybe two.”
He reached for the cup. His hand shook. She gave it to him without a word.
“You’ll stay,” she said quietly, “until you can walk. Then you go.”
But even as the words left her mouth, she knew something had shifted. The attic was no longer hers alone. A man had entered the room, the murals, the silence. Nothing would be so simple again.
3
Morning light seeped through the attic’s red curtain as soft as breath. It washed the cracked floorboards, touched the edges of the blanket where Éloi lay, and turned Lucienne’s walls into a theatre of flame.
The pain in his ribs had dulled to a steady throb. He shifted under the blanket, careful, slow. Lucienne didn’t look up. She stood before one of her murals, brush in hand, gaze focused, posture as taut as a wire. She moved like someone accustomed to silence, shaped by it.
He turned his head, scanning the walls. Dozens of painted figures stared back at him: faces contorted in rage or ecstasy, limbs reaching, fists raised. Crowds stormed across walls in ochre and crimson, immortalised mid-shout. Fires bloomed like poppies in the alleys of Montmartre. One figure near the bottom, bare-headed, cloak flaring, flag thrust aloft, was so vividly rendered it seemed to breathe.
Éloi’s throat tightened. “You’re turning out corpses into theatre,” he said.
Lucienne didn’t hesitate. “They’re already theatre,” she replied softly. “Every speech, every march, every dying word.” She indicated the murals. “You’re just angry because it doesn’t look the way you remember.”
“I remember smoke in my lungs,” he said, trying to sit. The pain flared sharp and immediate. “I remember comrades bleeding in the gutter, not some holy tableau in brushstrokes.”
She turned, brush poised in the air. “So don’t look.”
Her voice was quiet, but it cracked like a whip. He held her gaze, though it took effort. Her eyes were dark, unreadable.
“You think painting changes anything?” he said, bitter.
Lucienne set her brush down with great care. “If no one remembers, it’s as if it never happened. Is that better?” She crossed to the basin and began rinsing her hands, each motion precise. “Your bullets can’t stop forgetting.”
Éloi looked away. The red curtain fluttered in a sudden gust. Somewhere down in the city, a volley of gunfire snapped like dry twigs. The world was shifting, dying, and she was painting it.
That afternoon, he didn’t speak. He watched. Lucienne painted with a different energy now, faster, fiercer. Her strokes carried weight, intent. Red surged across the wall like spilled wine. New figures emerged from the void, the faceless wounded, women with rifles, a child gripping her mother’s sleeve. And behind them, half-hidden in the crowd, a bent figure limped forward, bandaged leg angled precisely like his own.
Éloi saw it instantly. He said nothing. She didn’t look at him. The brush kept moving, but more slowly now, almost gently. Outside, voices rose and fell, carried on the wind from the streets below.
He lay back, eyes tracing the mural. The painted version of himself looked so still, so certain, that he barely recognised the man.
Lucienne wiped her hands on a rag. She didn’t turn. “You’re in it now,” she said. “You can hate that if you want.”
Éloi closed his eyes. Behind his lids, the mural remained, a sea of painted faces, the red flag slicing through them like a wound. And there he was, caught in it, unable to look away.
4
The knock was quiet but urgent, three brisk taps against the attic door. Lucienne froze, brush poised over a wash of drying crimson. She hadn’t expected visitors. No one came up this high, not unless they had something they didn’t want overheard.
She opened the door a finger’s width. Madame Fournier stood on the landing, cheeks flushed from the climb, her voice a papery whisper. “They’re coming. Versailles troops. Just south of the barrier now. Two days, maybe less.”
Lucienne felt her pulse flutter against her ribs. “How do you know?”
“Jules at the bakery. He heard from a courier. Captain Thibault Dargier is among them.” The name was spoken with hesitant reverence. “You know him, maybe? He was an artist once, they say.”
Lucienne’s grip tightened on the doorframe. “No,” she said, too fast.
She closed the door before the silence could deepen. Behind her, the attic felt too small, too warm. The red curtain fluttered faintly in the draft. Éloi stirred on the mattress across the room.
“What was that?” he asked, voice rough with sleep.
“Nothing,” she replied. “Rumours.”
She crossed to the far wall, knelt beside her paints. The brush was still in her hand; she couldn’t recall picking it up. Her chest ached. Her eyes stung. The attic swam with memory. Two children on their knees beneath this very window, painting side by side. Thibault’s brush had danced in yellows and oranges, rooftops bathed in sunlight. She’d filled the sky with birds. They’d laughed then, smearing colour on each other’s faces like war paint.
She looked at the patch of yellow near the window’s edge. It had never faded, never been covered. Was it his?
Later, older, he had said to her: “We see the same city, Luci, but we’ll never paint it the same way.” And on the night he left for the south: “You want chaos. I want order.”
Now he was returning with an army.
Her hand reached out and pressed against the mural. Beneath her palm, the red flag billowed in its painted wind. The figures around it blurred, her breath fogging the wall.
From the mattress, Éloi watched her. He said nothing, but his eyes tracked every movement.
She turned away from his gaze. “We’ll need to be ready when they arrive,” she said.
But inside, she knew, the war had already breached her door.
5
Éloi bent slowly, biting down a curse as he pulled the laces tight on his scuffed boots. The healing wound in his leg tugged sharply with every movement. Across the attic, the red light slanted through the window, washing everything in the colour of fresh blood. Outside, the city murmured and rose with shouts, whistles, a bugle in the distance. The barricades were calling.
He straightened and tested his weight. It held. Barely. The mural loomed behind him, still wet in places. He was there, in the crowd, his bandaged leg unmistakable beneath the raised red flag.
“I’m going,” he said.
Lucienne stood at the far end of the attic, as still as one of her painted ghosts. The brush sagged in her hand.
“You’ll be shot before you reach the corner,” she said softly.
Éloi gave her a sharp, humourless smile. “Then at least I won’t bleed on your floor.”
She didn’t smile back. Her eyes were dark, unreadable. “You don’t have to do this.”
He stepped toward the door, then paused. Her voice followed, frayed with anger. “You think this fight only lives down there? That if you die in the street, you’ve earned some kind of martyrdom?”
He turned to face her. “And you think hiding up here behind saints and symbols makes you brave?”
Her chin lifted. “I’m not hiding.” She walked to the mural, gesturing toward it with the paint-streaked brush. “I remember every face. Every name. I put them here so no one forgets. That’s my fight.”
Éloi looked again. The figures surged across the wall, men and women, faceless and furious, frozen mid-chant, mid-charge. The flag cracked in the wind above them, the wound on his leg, immortalised in ochre and black. He swallowed, suddenly unsure. She had made this place into something sacred, a reckoning in red and ash.
He stepped closer to her. Lucienne didn’t flinch. Her gaze held his. Clear. Not pleading. Just there.
Éloi raised a hand to her cheek, rough fingertips grazing the paint smudged on her skin. Then he kissed her, lightly, just once. No fire. No farewell. Only understanding.
She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her voice was quiet. “You’ll be alone out there.”
“We all are,” he said. Then, softer: “But I’ll carry this. What you’ve done.”
She nodded. Already, she was reaching for her brush again. Outside, another bugle. A cry: Rue des Martyrs! Hold the line!
Éloi turned. His limp was more pronounced than he’d have liked to let on, but he didn’t slow. At the threshold, the mural cast his shadow back across the floor one last time. Then it was gone.
6
The knock came just after midnight. A soldier’s knock.
Lucienne froze, brush still in hand, candle casting long shadows on the attic wall. For a moment, she thought the wind had played a trick on her. But then it came again. Three slow taps.
She crossed the floor without a word. Her hand hovered at the latch. No one should know she was here. Not now.
She opened the door. Thibault stood before her.
He was leaner than she remembered, his once-careless curls darkened with ash and sweat, eyes rimmed with the grey fatigue of too many nights without sleep. A military coat hung over his frame, weighted with dust. He didn’t smile.
“I wasn’t sure you’d still be here,” he said quietly.
“Neither was I,” she murmured.
She stepped aside. He entered slowly, as though afraid the room might vanish. The attic welcomed him with silence, the walls lined with red-drenched murals. He looked at them with something between reverence and suspicion.
“I looked for you,” he said at last. “After Prussia, I tried, but I couldn’t...” He stopped.
“You didn’t come back,” Lucienne replied, turning away. “That’s what I remember.”
He didn’t argue. He sank onto the edge of the low cot near the window. His eyes swept the walls, the easel, the candlelight dancing across her stained hands.
“Do you still make coffee like Mother did?”
She gave a quiet laugh, brittle as frost. “No. I drink it cold now. Like paint-water.”
His chuckle echoed hers, the sound of two people remembering the same house from opposite sides of a river.
Then, the warmth faded. “I can’t stay,” Thibault said. “We’ve orders to move through Montmartre at dawn. If there’s resistance…”
His voice drifted.
Lucienne turned sharply. “What orders?”
“If there’s resistance,” he repeated, “we burn the district.”
Her chest tightened. “You’d set fire to this hill? To these homes?”
“Not me,” he said. “Not personally.”
“But you’re here. In uniform.”
Thibault didn’t flinch. “You think I chose this?”
She stepped closer, voice barely above a whisper. “You chose not to come back. You chose to become one of them.”
He said nothing. She led him to the wall. The mural towered before them, bleeding red and ochre, faceless figures marching, fighting, dying. And there, in a sunlit corner of memory, two children at a window. A scrap of red fabric between them. The attic. This attic.
His breath caught. “You painted me,” he said, not quite a question.
“You were always here,” Lucienne replied. “Even when you weren’t.”
Thibault reached out, fingers brushing a faded corner of the wall. “We used to share brushes. Mix paints in teacups.”
“And argue about sky colours,” she said. “You always wanted everything to be real. I wanted it to mean something beyond itself.”
He smiled faintly, then let it fade.
Outside, footsteps echoed on the cobbles, distant but steady. A bugle cry from further down the hill. The morning was beginning its slow burn.
Lucienne stepped in front of him. “Don’t let them burn this place,” she said. “Not this street. Not this house.”
His eyes flicked to the murals once more. “There are orders.”
“I don’t care.”
He looked at her then, truly looked, and she saw the boy beneath the brass and grime, the boy who’d once painted stars on the underside of the attic roof.
But he said nothing. He moved toward the door. She followed him only with her eyes.
At the threshold, he paused. The red curtain shifted in the breeze, casting bloodlight across his features. For a heartbeat, she thought he might speak. Might offer some word of mercy.
But he didn’t. He stepped into the stairwell. Boots on wood, one by one, fading. She didn't call after him.The door closed behind him with a whisper.
Lucienne stood in the silence, her fists clenched at her sides, the murals at her back glowing in the slow birth of morning.
7
Dawn broke with gunfire. A sharp crack split the air, echoing up the slope of Montmartre. Lucienne didn’t flinch. She dipped her brush in red pigment and pressed it to the wall. The mural was nearly complete, just a few more lines, a few more strokes, before the city was swallowed.
Another volley sounded, louder, closer. Beneath her attic window, the street stirred with chaos. Boots pounded cobblestones. A man’s voice rose in pleading, cut off by a single shot. Somewhere, a woman screamed. The sounds were distant but clear, as if the house itself were listening.
Smoke drifted through the cracked glass, acrid and curling, brushing against the hem of the red curtain. Lucienne reached up and drew it tighter. The attic glowed with bloodlight, thick and warm. Her hand shook once, then steadied.
A figure in the mural began to take shape, a girl, standing at a window, arm raised, brush poised. The red light bled into the paint, giving it a strange, living hue. Around her, Lucienne filled in the world, broken stones, slashes of shadow, the distant form of a barricade collapsing into dust.
Voices rose and fell beneath her, human noise churning in violence. Lucienne didn’t stop painting. She forced herself to listen. Every sound was part of the story. Every scream, every gunshot, every silence.
Plaster sifted down from the ceiling in a light shower of dust. Somewhere nearby, a building had fallen or been felled. The attic floor trembled faintly under her bare feet. She thought of Éloi. Was he still in the streets? Still limping toward a barricade already lost? Or was he gone, already buried beneath rubble?
Lucienne dabbed her brush in dark grey and added a shadow near the girl’s foot, vague, uncertain, as if someone had once stood there and vanished.
Footsteps thundered up the stairwell below, rapid and urgent. She froze, brush in mid-air. But they passed, fading upward, then away. No knock came. No voice called her name.
She turned back to the wall. The girl in the mural watched her now with eyes full of resolve. Lucienne added the final details, the curve of the mouth, the light in the window, the sweep of her hair.
Then came the scent of fire. Real and near. It licked at the beams beneath her feet, sharp and hungry. The walls began to warm. She could hear a low roar beginning to build.
She stood back from the mural. There was nothing else to do. No one was coming. Not Éloi. Not Thibault. No one at all.
The girl in the mural remained, still holding the brush aloft. Lucienne reached for the smallest brush she owned. Dipped it in red. Kneeling low, she signed her name in the painted folds of the girl’s dress, an L, half-lost among the strokes.
The flames would come. The house would fall. But the image, the image at least was finished.
8
Montmartre, Paris, 1891.
The townhouse on the Rue des Martyrs stood like a husk, blackened and hollowed by time. Half of its windows were boarded up, the other half broken, and ivy had begun to claw its way up the stone as if trying to stitch it closed. At the top, the attic sagged forward, its roof eaten away by rain and fire.
Étienne Marceau hesitated at the threshold, fingers tightening on the strap of his satchel. He’d followed a rumour, whispers in cafés, half-myths in artists’ studios. A muralist no one remembered. A studio lost to war. Something still hidden behind the skin of this ruin.
The street behind him was empty. He climbed the rusted gate.
Inside, the air was close and cold, thick with ash and damp. His boots creaked on the warped floorboards as he moved from room to room. Wallpaper peeled like old parchment. A burnt mirror hung crooked in the hall. The house was silent except for the soft groan of the stairs as he climbed.
At the top, a narrow door leaned from its frame. The attic. He touched it. It shifted, swollen with age, and yielded with a sigh. Light spilled across the threshold.
He stepped into a different world. Every wall breathed with colour, faded, fractured, but unmistakable. Murals stretched from floor to ceiling, vast, sweeping images rendered in charcoal, ochre, blood-deep red. Some scenes were half-gone, cracked open by years of damp. Others still shimmered through the soot with startling clarity. A figure standing atop a barricade. A woman weeping beneath a tattered flag. A crowd watching fire consume a church.
Étienne turned slowly, overwhelmed. He’d never seen anything like it.
And then, at the far wall, he saw her. A girl in a red-lit window, brush raised like a banner. Her eyes were steady. Not afraid. Not pleading. Simply watching, eternal.
He moved closer, heart thudding. Kneeling, he studied the folds of her dress, layered with pigment, crumbling at the edges, and saw something glint faintly beneath the grime. Étienne reached into his coat, pulled out a handkerchief, and gently rubbed at the paint.
Letters emerged. Lucienne Dargier.
He stared at the name for a long time. He didn’t know it, but he could feel it settle into his chest like a secret he’d carried since birth.
The light shifted through the shattered window, catching flecks of red in the air. Étienne pressed a hand softly against the wall, just beside the signature, reverent, and let the silence speak.
He opened his sketchbook, and began to draw.