V. GOLIATH THE SPY--AN AWFUL VENGEANCE…

V. GOLIATH THE SPY--AN AWFUL VENGEANCE

That icy December evening Silvine and Prosper were alone with Charlot in the large kitchen of the farmhouse, she sewing and he engaged in making himself a fine whip. It was seven o'clock; they had dined at six without waiting for old Fouchard, who must have been detained at Raucourt, where there was a scarcity of meat; and Henriette, whose turn it was that night to sit up watching at the ambulance, had just gone off after instructing Silvine to fill Jean's stove with coals before she went to bed.

Out of doors the sky hung very blackly over the white snow. Not a sound came from the buried village, and in the room nothing could be heard save Prosper's knife as he diligently cut rosettes and lozenges in the bark of the dog-wood whip-stock. At times he paused and looked at Charlot, who, overcome by drowsiness, was nodding his big fair head. When the child had at last fallen asleep it seemed as though the silence had become yet more intense. The mother had gently pushed the candle aside so that the light might not fall upon her little one's eyelids; and, still plying her needle, she sank at last into a deep reverie.

Then it was that Prosper, after again hesitating, made up his mind to speak: 'I say, Silvine, I've something to tell you. Yes, I was waiting to be alone with you to tell you about it.'

These words sufficed to render her anxious, and she raised her eyes.

'This is what it is. Forgive me for distressing you, but it is best that you should be warned. Close by the church this morning, at Remilly, I saw Goliath just as I see you now, full in the face, so that there was no mistaking him.'

She became quite livid, her hands trembled, and she could only stammer a hollow plaint: 'Oh! my God, my God!'

Prosper continued talking in his prudent way, relating what he had learnt during the day by questioning one and another of the villagers. Not one of them now entertained a doubt but that Goliath was a spy and had formerly taken up his abode in the district in order to become acquainted with its roads and resources, and the most trifling details of its inhabitants' mode of life. Folks remembered his stay at old Fouchard's farm, the abrupt fashion in which he had taken himself off, and the situations which he had afterwards held over towards Beaumont and Raucourt. And now he had come back again, holding an equivocal position at the Commandature of Sedan and once more scouring the surrounding villages, as though it were his business to denounce certain folks and tax others, and exercise a surveillance respecting the requisitions with which the inhabitants were being overwhelmed. That morning he had terrorised Remilly with respect to the delivery of some flour which was not being supplied with sufficient promptitude or in sufficient quantities.

'Well, you are warned,' repeated Prosper as he finished his narrative, 'so you will know what to do when he comes here.'

She interrupted him with a cry of terror: 'You think he will come here then?'

'Well, it seems to me sure enough. Especially if he's at all inquisitive, for he has never seen the little one, though he must know that he exists. And besides there's you whom he may wish to see again.'

She silenced him with an entreating gesture. Charlot, awakened by the talking, had raised his head. With a vague expression in his eyes, as though he were emerging from a dream, he recalled an insulting phrase which some village joker had taught him, and with the grave air of the three-year-old urchin that he was, declared: 'They're pigs, the Prussians.'

At this his mother distractedly caught him in her arms and sat him on her lap. Ah! the poor little fellow, at once her joy and her despair whom she loved with her whole soul, but whom she could not look at without weeping, this son of hers whom to her grief she often heard called the Prussian by the youngsters of his own age who played with him on the road. She kissed him as if to drive his words back into his mouth. 'Who taught you such naughty words? You mustn't say them, my darling.'

With childish obstinacy, however, Charlot stifled a laugh and made all haste to repeat: 'The Prussians are pigs!'

Then, on seeing his mother burst into tears, he also began to cry, winding his arms round her neck. Ah, Lord! what new misfortune was in store for her! Was it not sufficient that she had lost in Honoré the only hope of her life, the certainty of forgetting and of becoming happy once more? At present that other man must needs reappear to make her misery complete.

'Come,' she murmured, 'come to by-by, my darling. Mother loves you very dearly all the same, for you don't know that you grieve her.'

Then she went off, leaving Prosper for a moment alone. He, in order not to embarrass her by his glances, had pretended to be wholly absorbed in carving his whip-stock.

However, before putting Charlot to bed, Silvine habitually took him to say good-night to Jean, with whom he was great friends. That evening, as she entered the room candle in hand, she perceived the wounded man sitting up in bed with his eyes wide open. So he wasn't asleep, then? Well, no, he had been ruminating on all sorts of matters, in the silence of that wintry night. And whilst she crammed the stove with coals, he played for a moment with Charlot who rolled about on the bed like a kitten. Jean was acquainted with Silvine's story and had a friendly feeling for this brave, docile girl, so severely tried by misfortune, now in mourning for the only man she had ever loved, with no other consolation remaining to her than that little child whose birth had proved her everlasting torment. And thus, when, after closing the stove, she drew near to the bed to take Charlot in her arms again, Jean, detecting by the redness of her eyes that she had been weeping, began to question her. What was the matter, then? Had somebody been grieving her again? But she would not answer: later on, if it were worth while, she would perhaps tell him all about it. Ah! good Lord! had not her life now become a life of ceaseless grief?

She was on the point of taking Charlot away when all at once a sound of voices and footsteps was heard in the yard. Jean listened in surprise. 'What's up? It can't be Fouchard coming back, I didn't hear the cartwheels.'

Whilst lying in that lonely, distant room he had ended by acquiring a knowledge of all the inner life of the farm, the slightest sounds of which had become familiar to him. Still lending an ear, he promptly resumed: 'Ah, yes, it's those fellows, the Francs-tireurs of the Dieulet Woods, who have come for some grub.'

'Quick, I must make haste to give them their bread,' muttered Silvine as she went off again, leaving him in the darkness.

Fists were hammering loudly on the kitchen door, whilst Prosper, annoyed at finding himself alone, was hesitating and parleying. He hardly liked to open the door when the master was away, for fear of any damage that might be done, the responsibility of which would have been thrown upon his shoulders. Luckily, however, just at that moment, old Fouchard's cart came down the sloping road, the clatter of the horse's trot being deadened by the snow. And thus it was the old fellow himself who received the men.

'Oh! all right, it's you three. What have you brought me in that barrow?'

Sambuc, with his spare bandit figure quite lost in a blue woollen blouse considerably too large for him, did not even hear Fouchard, such was his exasperation with Prosper, that honest brother of his, as he put it, who had only just made up his mind to unlock the door.

'I say,' shouted the Franc-tireur, 'do you take us for beggars that you leave us outside in such weather as this.'

Prosper, however, remained quite calm and shrugged his shoulders without answering a word; and whilst he went out to take the horse and cart to the stables it was again old Fouchard who intervened. 'So you've brought me two dead sheep,' said he, leaning over the barrow. 'It's lucky that it's freezing, or they wouldn't smell at all pleasant.'

At this, Cabasse and Ducat, Sambuc's two lieutenants who accompanied him on all his expeditions, began protesting. 'Oh!' said the first with his loud-mouthed Provençal vivacity, 'they haven't been dead more than three days. They came from the Raffins farm, where there's a lot of nasty illness among the animals.'

''Procumbit humi bos,' declaimed his comrade, the ex-process-server, who had lost caste through his immorality and who was addicted to quoting Latin.

Tossing his head, old Fouchard went on disparaging the merchandise, which, said he, was 'altogether too far gone.' However, on entering the kitchen with the three men, he ended by exclaiming: 'Well, well, they'll have to content themselves with it. It's lucky that they haven't a cutlet left at Raucourt. A man eats anything when he's hungry, eh?' And then, in reality quite delighted, he called to Silvine who was coming back after putting Charlot to bed: 'Bring some glasses, we'll drink a drop to Bismarck kicking the bucket.'

In this fashion did Fouchard keep up an intercourse with the Francs-tireurs of the Dieulet Woods who, for nearly three months now had been crawling out of their impenetrable thickets at nightfall, prowling along the roads, killing and rifling such Prussians as they were able to surprise, and falling back on the farms and levying contributions on the peasants whenever there was a scarcity of German 'game.' They were the terror of the villages, the more so as each time a convoy was attacked, each time a sentry was butchered, the German authorities avenged themselves on the neighbouring localities, accusing their inhabitants of connivance, fining them, carrying off their mayors as prisoners, and burning their homesteads. And if the peasants, despite all their longing to do so, failed to betray Sambuc and his band, it was simply through fear of being hit by a bullet at some turn of a pathway, in the event of the attempt to capture the Francs-tireurs resulting in failure.

Fouchard for his part had the extraordinary idea of doing business with these fellows. Beating the country as they did in all directions, the ditches as well as the cattle-sheds and sheep-cots, they had become his purveyors of diseased meat. Not an ox nor a sheep died within a radius of three leagues but they came at night to pick it up and take it to him. And he paid them in provisions, especially in bread, big batches of loaves which Silvine baked expressly for them. Moreover, although the old fellow scarcely liked the Francs-tireurs, he had a secret admiration for them, cunning rogues that they were, plying their calling without caring a rap for anybody; and, although he was realising a fortune by his dealings with the Prussians, he laughed inwardly, with the laugh of a savage, whenever he learnt that another of them had been found by the wayside with his throat cut.

'To your health!' said he, chinking glasses with the three men, and, after wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he added: 'I say, what a row they've been making about those two Uhlans whom they found near Villecourt with their heads missing. You know that Villecourt has been burning since yesterday; it's a sentence, as they say, that they've passed on the village to punish it for having harboured you. You must be prudent, mind; and don't come back here for a time. Your bread shall be taken to you.' Shrugging his shoulders, Sambuc began to sneer. Pooh! the Prussians might run as fast as they liked, they wouldn't catch him! Then all at once he flew into a violent passion, and, thumping on the table, exclaimed: 'Thunder! yes, it's nice to get hold of the Uhlans, no doubt, but it's the other chap that I'd like to say a word to--you know him, the spy, that fellow who worked for you----'

'Goliath,' said Fouchard.

Quite startled, Silvine, who had just taken up her work again, ceased sewing and listened.

'That's the man, Goliath! Ah! the brigand! he knows the Dieulet Woods as well as I know my pocket, and he's quite capable of getting us caught one of these mornings. In fact, he bragged to-day at the Malta Cross that he'd settle our business for us within a week. The dirty rogue! it was certainly he who guided the Bavarians through the woods, on the day before the fight at Beaumont--wasn't it, you fellows, eh?'

'As sure as that's a candle lighting us!' declared Cabasse.

'Per amica silentia lunæ,' added Ducat, whose quotations were not always apposite.

With another thump of his fist, Sambuc made the table shake. 'He is judged and condemned, the brigand! If you should happen to know where he's going at any time, just warn me, and his head shall join those of the Uhlans in the Meuse--yes, thunder! I'll answer for it!'

Silence fell. Silvine, who was very pale, gazed fixedly at the Francs-tireurs.

'Well, well, these are not things to talk about,' resumed Fouchard, prudently. 'Here's to your health, and good-evening!'

They finished emptying the second bottle. Silvine had already stowed the bread away in a sack; and Prosper, who had now returned from the stable, helped to hoist it on to the barrow in place of the two dead sheep. However, he turned his back without so much as answering when his brother and the others went off, disappearing with the barrow through the snow, and repeating: 'Good-night, everyone--to the pleasure of meeting again.'

The very next day, whilst old Fouchard was sitting alone after breakfast, he saw Goliath himself walk in, tall and fat, with the same pink face and quiet smile as formerly. If the old man was startled by this sudden apparition, at all events he did not allow it to be seen, but sat there blinking, whilst the other stepped forward and gave him a fair and square shake of the hand. 'Good day to you, father Fouchard!'

Not till then did the old fellow appear to recognise his visitor. 'Hallo! is it you, my lad! Why, you've grown even bigger than you were. How fat you are!'

And thereupon he scanned him from head to foot. Clad in a kind of capote of thick blue cloth, with a cap of the same material on his head, Goliath had the prosperous appearance of a man well pleased with himself. He spoke without any foreign accent, in the drawling fashion of the peasants of the district: 'Why, yes, it's I, father Fouchard--I didn't like to pass this way without bidding you good-day.'

The old man remained mistrustful. What was the real motive of this fellow's visit? Had he heard of the Francs-tireurs coming to the farm on the previous evening? That was a point to be ascertained. At all events, however, since the scamp had presented himself in a polite fashion, the best policy was to give him an equally polite greeting.

'Well, my lad, it's very kind of you, I'm sure, and as you've come we'll drink a glass together.'

He went in person to fetch a couple of glasses and a bottle of wine. The consumption of so much liquor made his heart fairly bleed; but then in business it was necessary to stand treat. And, now, much the same scene as that of the previous evening was enacted: they chinked glasses with similar gestures and similar words.

'To your health, father Fouchard.'

'Here's to yours, my lad!'

They drank, and Goliath complacently tarried there, looking around him like a man who is well pleased to orate old times and things. However, he did not speak of the past, nor, for the matter of that, did he refer to the present. The conversation mainly turned on the severe cold weather, which would interfere with the work in the fields; though fortunately there was some good in the snow, for it killed the grubs. Scarcely did the spy indulge in an expression of vague chagrin with reference to the covert hatred, terror, and scorn with which he had been received in the other houses of Remilly. Every man has his country, hasn't he? And it is only natural that he should serve it as he thinks fit. However, French people had funny ideas about certain things. Whilst he talked on in this strain the old man looked at him and listened to him; and on finding him so reasonable and so conciliatory, so placid, too, with his broad smiling face, he concluded that this honest fellow had certainly not come to the farm with any evil intentions.

'And so you're all alone to-day, father Fouchard?' said Goliath at last.

'Oh no--Silvine's giving the cows their feed. Would you like to see her?'

Goliath began to laugh. 'Well, yes. To tell you the plain truth, it was to see Silvine that I came.'

This answer raised a great load from old Fouchard's mind. Springing from his chair, he called in a loud voice: 'Silvine! Silvine! Here's some one for you.' And thereupon he went off, henceforth without any fears, since the girl was there to protect the house. When a man still hankers after a woman like that, after so many years, he is as good as done for.

When Silvine came in, she was in no wise surprised to find herself in presence of Goliath, who had retained his seat and looked at her with his good-natured smile, albeit he felt somewhat uncomfortable. She had been expecting him, and on crossing the threshold gave no sign of emotion save that she stopped short with a sudden stiffening of her entire frame. Charlot, who had run after her, threw himself among her skirts, astonished to see this man, whom he did not know.

There was a brief interval of silence, an embarrassment of a few seconds' duration.

'So that's the little one?' Goliath ended by asking in his conciliatory voice.

'Yes,' Silvine answered harshly.

The silence fell again. He had left Remilly prior to her accouchement, and, although he knew very well that there was a child, he now saw it for the first time. He therefore wished to explain his conduct, like a practical-minded man who is convinced that he has some good reasons to urge on his behalf. 'Come, Silvine,' said he, 'I can understand very well that you have harboured a grudge against me. And yet it's not altogether just. If I went off as I did, if I caused you all that grief, you ought to have bethought yourself that it was perhaps because I wasn't my own master. When a man has superiors and is under orders he must obey them, mustn't he? They might have ordered me on a journey a hundred leagues away on foot, and I should have gone. And naturally I couldn't speak out. It pained my heart, and no mistake, to have to go off like that without a parting word. I won't say that I was certain I should come back again; however, I always expected to do so, and you see, here I am----'

She had turned her head aside and was looking through the window at the snow in the courtyard, as though determined not to listen. Disturbed by her contempt, her stubborn silence, he paused in his explanations to exclaim: 'Do you know you are prettier than ever?'

She did in fact look very beautiful, with her creamy pallor and those superb large eyes lighting up her face. Her heavy tresses of jet black hair crowned her head as with a diadem of eternal mourning.

'Come,' said Goliath, 'be a little more amiable! You must know that I don't want to harm you. If I didn't still love you I shouldn't have come back, of course not. But now that I'm here and everything is settling down we'll be good friends again; we'll make it all up, won't we?'

She abruptly drew back and looked him full in the face: 'Never!'

'Why never? Aren't you virtually my wife already, isn't that child ours?'

Without taking her eyes off him, she slowly answered: 'Listen; it is best to have done with it at once. You knew Honoré; I loved him, I never loved any one but him. And he is dead; you killed him over yonder. Never again will I be yours--never!'

She had raised her hand, and she swore her vow in a voice ringing with such bitter hatred that for a moment he remained quite amazed, merely muttering: 'Yes, I knew it. Honoré is dead. He was a very nice fellow certainly, but it can't be helped; others are dead too. Such is war. And, besides, it seemed to me that as he was dead there could be no further obstacle--for you must let me remind you, Silvine, I was not brutal with you----'

He did not finish his sentence, however; such a look of wild distracting agony appeared upon her face, to which she raised her hands as though to lacerate it.

'Oh! it is that--yes, that which drives me mad!' she exclaimed. 'That I should have yielded when I did not love you! I cannot remember, I was so sad, so ill after Honoré's departure, and you talked about him and appeared to like him. 'Twas that perhaps which brought it to pass. O God! how many nights have I spent in weeping over my fault!--Yet he came back, and forgave me, and told me that if you Prussians did not kill him, he would marry me all the same, as soon as he got his discharge. And you think that after that I could consent to become yours? Ah, no! under the axe I should still answer no, no, never!'

This time Goliath became gloomy. He divined that her fierce resolution was a firm one. But, on the other hand, he considered himself to be the master, and if he did not as yet seek to impose his will by violent means, it was because he was naturally inclined to prudence, instinctively prone to artifice and patience. This big-fisted Colossus was not partial to blows. And accordingly he bethought himself of another means of forcing her to submit.

'All right,' said he, 'since you won't take me I shall take the little one.'

'What do you mean?'

Charlot, momentarily forgotten, had remained among his mother's skirts, making an effort not to burst out sobbing in the midst of the quarrel. Goliath, who had at last risen from his chair, drew near. 'Eh! you are my little boy, aren't you? A little Prussian, eh? Come, and let me take you away.'

But Silvine, quivering from head to foot, had already caught the child in her arms and was pressing him to her bosom: 'He a Prussian? No, he's French, born in France!'

'French! Why look at him and look at me! He's my very portrait. Is he at all like you?'

It was only then that she really saw that tall fair fellow in front of her, with his curly beard and hair, broad pink face, and big, blue eyes, glistening with the brilliancy of porcelain. And what he said was indeed true--the little one had the same yellow, curly crop of hair, the same fat cheeks, the same light eyes as himself; in a word, all the physical characteristics of the race dwelling over yonder. She herself felt that she was of a different nature, with her heavy locks of raven hair, which, in her disordered state, were slipping from her chignon over her shoulders.

'I brought him into the world; he is mine!' she resumed in a tone of fury; 'he's a French boy who will never know a word of your dirty German; yes, a French boy who will one day go and kill you all to avenge those of ours whom you have killed!'

Still clinging to his mother's neck, Charlot had now begun to cry and call: 'Mammy, mammy, I'm frightened, take me away!'

Thereupon Goliath, who doubtless did not wish to provoke a scandal, drew back and contented himself with declaring in a stern voice: 'Listen carefully to what I'm going to tell you, Silvine. I know everything that goes on here. You receive the Francs-tireurs of the Dieulet Woods, your farm-hand's brother, that fellow Sambuc, a brigand whom you supply with bread! And I know too that the farm-hand, that man Prosper, is a Chasseur d'Afrique, a deserter, who belongs to us; and I am also aware that you are hiding a wounded man, another soldier who on a word from me would be sent to a fortress in Germany. There! you see that I am well informed.'

Silent and terrified, she was attentively listening to him now, whilst Charlot, with his mouth close to her neck, repeated in his faltering, infantile voice: 'Oh! mammy, mammy, take me away, I'm frightened!'

'Well!' resumed Goliath, 'I'm certainly not malicious, and I've no liking for quarrels, as you must know, but I swear to you that I'll have them all arrested, old Fouchard and the others, every one of them, if you don't give me a favourable answer. And I will take the little one away and send him to Germany, to my mother, who will be very pleased to have him; for, since you want to break off everything, he belongs to me. So you hear me, eh? I shall only have to come and take him when there is nobody left here. I am the master, mind, and I do what I please. Come, what is your decision?'

She gave no answer, however; she was pressing the child yet more closely to her bosom, as though she feared that Goliath might there and then tear him away from her; and into her large eyes there came an expression of mingled terror and execration.

'Well,' he resumed, 'I'll allow you three days for reflection. I shall come for your answer on Monday evening; see that the window of your room, overlooking the orchard, is left open. If on Monday evening at seven o'clock I do not find it open, I will have all your folks arrested the very next day, and I'll come back to fetch the little one. So till Monday, Silvine.'

He went off quietly, whilst she remained standing there, her head buzzing with such terrible, such monstrous ideas that it was as though she had suddenly become an idiot. And thus, throughout the whole day, a tempest warred within her. At first she instinctively thought of carrying her child away in her arms, of going off straight before her, no matter whither. But then, what would become of her when night fell; how would she be able to earn a living for him and for herself? Besides, the Prussians scouring the roads might arrest her and possibly bring her back. Then the idea occurred to her of speaking to Jean, of warning Prosper and even Fouchard, but again she hesitated and recoiled. Was she sure enough of their friendship to be certain that she would not be sacrificed to their tranquillity? No, no, she would say nothing to anybody; she alone would extricate herself from this danger, which she herself had created by the stubbornness of her refusal. But what scheme could she devise? in what manner could she prevent that misfortune? for all her native honesty revolted at the thought; she would never have forgiven herself if through her fault a catastrophe should fall on so many people, and especially on Jean, who showed himself so kind to little Charlot.

Hours elapsed, the following day went by, and yet she had not been able to devise any plan. She applied herself to her work as usual, swept the kitchen, attended to the cows, cooked the soupe. And hour by hour, amid her absolute silence--the frightful silence which she still stubbornly maintained--her hatred of Goliath ascended with increasing force to her brain and poisoned it. He was her sin, her damnation, the serpent who had tempted her to her fall. But for him she would have waited for Honoré, and Honoré would be still alive and she would be happy. In what an arrogant tone had he declared that he was the master? Forsooth it was true, there were no more gendarmes, no more judges to whom she could appeal for protection--might had become right. Oh! to be stronger than he was, to seize him when he came, he who talked of seizing others! She was now entirely bound up in her child, the flesh of her flesh; his chance father went for nothing, had indeed never counted. She was not a wife, and when she thought of that man only a feeling of anger inflamed her, the rancour of one who had been vanquished. Rather than surrender her child to him she would have killed the boy and herself afterwards. And she had told him plainly, she would have liked to have seen that child already grown to manhood and capable of defending her; and she pictured him in years to come, armed with a rifle, and riddling the bodies of all that hateful race over yonder. Yes, indeed, a Frenchman the more, a Frenchman to slay the Prussians!

However, only one day now remained to her, and she must come to a decision. An atrocious idea had at the very outset passed through her poor, ailing, disordered brain: she might warn the Francs-tireurs, give Sambuc the information he desired. But the idea remained fugitive and indeterminate, and she brushed it aside as being too monstrous even for examination; after all, was not that man her child's father? She could not have him murdered. Then, however, the idea came back again, slowly enveloping her, growing, little by little, more and more importunate; and now it was imposing itself upon her with all the victorious strength of its simplicity and absoluteness. If Goliath were dead, Jean, Prosper, and Fouchard would have nothing more to fear. She herself would retain possession of Charlot, and nobody would ever again challenge her right to the child. And there was something else, too, something deep-rooted that ascended from the innermost recesses of her being: a needment to have done with it all, to efface the paternity of the child by suppressing its father, a savage joy at the thought that she would emerge from the issue with her transgression amputated as it were, and as the one parent, the sole possessor of the child, whom henceforth she would share with no man. All day long did she dwell upon this plan, no longer possessing the energy to repulse it, but ever and ever brought back to the details of the ambuscade that would be necessary, planning and arranging its most trifling incidents. So now, then, the idea had become a fixed one, an idea which once sown is bound to germinate, and which one ceases to discuss; and when at last she began to put this idea to execution, to obey this impulse of the inevitable, she proceeded on her course like one in a dream, carried along by another's will, by a force which she had never felt within her before.

On the Sunday, old Fouchard, who felt uneasy, had sent word to the Francs-tireurs that their sack of loaves would be carried to the Boisville quarries, a very lonely spot, not much more than a mile away; and, as Prosper had other things to see to, he despatched Silvine thither with a barrow. Was not fate thus deciding the issue? She interpreted it, indeed, as a decree of Destiny, and spoke out, giving Sambuc an appointment for the following evening, in a clear, calm voice, as though she were not able to act otherwise. On the morrow there were further signs, positive proofs that people and even things had willed the crime. First, old Fouchard was abruptly summoned to Raucourt, and left word that they were to dine without him, for he foresaw that he would be unable to get back before eight o'clock. Then, too, Henriette, whose turn to sit up watching at the ambulance only came on Tuesdays, received notice, late in the day, that she must that evening take the place of the person on duty, who had fallen ill. Accordingly, as Jean never left his room, no matter what noise he heard, there only remained Prosper whose intervention was to be feared. He was certainly not in favour of combining with others to slaughter a solitary man. However, when he saw his brother and the latter's two lieutenants arrive at the farm, the disgust with which these rascals inspired him became blended with his execration of the Prussians. He was certainly not going to interfere to save one of those dirty rogues, even though he might be sent to his account in a foul way, and he preferred to go to bed and bury his head under the clothes, so that he might not hear anything and might not be tempted to act like a soldier.

It was a quarter to seven, and Charlot seemed determined not to go to sleep, though as a rule his head fell upon the table as soon as he had eaten his soupe. 'Come, go to by-by, my darling,' repeated Silvine, who had carried him into Henriette's room, 'you see how comfortable you are on friend's big bed.'

But the child, enlivened by this treat, tossed about and laughed to suffocation: 'No, no, stay with me, mammy--play with me, mammy----'

Silvine evinced great patience and gentleness, tenderly caressing the child and repeating: 'There, go to sleep, darling. Go to sleep to please mammy.'

And at last, with a laugh on his lips, the youngster fell asleep. She had not taken the trouble to undress him, and after wrapping him up warmly she went off without locking the door, knowing that as a rule he slept very soundly.

Never had Silvine felt so calm, so clear and alert of mind. She displayed a promptness of decision, and a lightness of motion as though she were detached from her body and were acting under the impulsion of that other being within her which she did not know. She had already let in Sambuc, together with Cabasse and Ducat, cautioning them to observe the greatest prudence; and she led them into her room and posted them on the right and left of the window, which she opened, notwithstanding the intense cold. It was a dark night; the room was but faintly illumined by the reflection of the snow. A death-like silence lay over the country-side; long minutes went by. At last, on detecting a light footfall which was approaching, Silvine went off into the kitchen, where she seated herself and waited, quite motionless, with her large eyes fixed upon the candle flame.

Then another long interval elapsed; Goliath prowled around the farm before he would risk approaching. He fancied, however, that he knew the young woman well, and had therefore ventured to come with merely a revolver in his belt. Nevertheless, an instinctive uneasiness warned him, and he at first pushed the window wide open, and thrust his head into the room, softly calling: 'Silvine! Silvine!'

As he had found the window open it must be that she had thought the matter over and was disposed to consent. This greatly pleased him, though he would have preferred to have found her there to greet him and allay his uneasiness. But doubtless old Fouchard had summoned her away to finish some work. 'Silvine! Silvine!' he again called, slightly raising his voice.

Still no reply, not a sound. And thereupon he sprang over the window-sill and entered the room, intending to wait there for the girl; so bitter cold did he find it out of doors.

All at once there was a furious scuffle; the stamping and slipping of feet resounded amid stifled oaths and gurgling groans. Sambuc and the others had rushed upon Goliath, but although they were three to one they could not master the Colossus, whose strength was increased tenfold by his sense of peril. The cracking of joints, all the panting effort of gripping and straining, could be heard in the darkness. Fortunately the spy's revolver had fallen. 'The ropes, the ropes!' stammered Cabasse in a choking voice, whilst Ducat passed Sambuc the coil of cord with which they had taken the precaution to provide themselves. Then came a savage operation, performed to the accompaniment of blows and kicks, Goliath's legs tied together, to begin with; then his arms fastened to his sides, then his whole body bound in a fumbling, random fashion wherever his despairing efforts would allow, and with so much winding and knotting that at last he was as though caught in a net, the meshes of which cut into his flesh. He was still calling out and Ducat kept on repeating: 'Hold your jaw!' But all at once the cries ceased, for Cabasse had brutally gagged the prisoner with an old blue handkerchief which he tied behind his head. Then they at last drew breath and carried him like a parcel into the kitchen, where they laid him upon the large table beside the candle.

'Ah! the dirty Prussian!' swore Sambuc as he wiped his forehead. 'What a lot of trouble he's given! I say, Silvine, light another candle so that we may get a good squint at the pig.'

With dilated eyes and a white face, Silvine had risen to her feet. She said not a word, but lighted a candle and placed it on the other side of Goliath's head, which appeared to view brilliantly illumined, as though between two funeral tapers. And at that moment Silvine's eyes encountered those of her child's father; he was supplicating her, frantic, seized with an intense dread; but she did not appear to understand him; she stepped back to the sideboard and remained standing there with a frigid, stubborn demeanour.

'The beggar bit half my finger off!' growled Cabasse, whose hand was bleeding. 'I must do for him.'

He was already raising the revolver which he had picked up in Silvine's room when Sambuc disarmed him: 'No, no--no humbug, please! We are not brigands, we are judges. Do you hear, you dirty Prussian? We are going to try you; and you needn't be alarmed, we respect the rights of the defence. Only, you won't be allowed to defend yourself, for you'd simply deafen us if we took your muzzle off. By-and-by, though, I'll provide you with a lawyer and a fine one too!'

He took three chairs, placed them in a row, and in this way formed what he called the tribunal, his own place in the centre, with his lieutenants flanking him on right and left. They all three sat down, and then he, Sambuc, stood up again and began speaking with a derisive drawl, which he gradually set aside till at last his voice swelled with vengeful anger.

'I am here both as presiding judge and as public prosecutor,' said he. 'This is not quite as it should be perhaps, but there are not enough of us to manage otherwise, so I accuse you of having come to spy on us here in France, and of paying for the bread which you ate at our tables with the most filthy treachery. For you were the first cause of the disaster, you, the traitor, who after the fight at Nouart guided the Bavarians, at night time, through the Dieulet Woods as far as Beaumont. Only a man who had long lived in the district could have been so well acquainted with the smallest paths; and our minds are made up on the point; you were seen guiding the artillery along those awful forest pathways which the rain had turned into rivers of mud, and where the difficulties were so great that eight horses had to be harnessed to each gun. On looking at those roads to-day one can hardly credit it; one asks oneself how an army corps ever managed to pass along them. Had it not been for you and for your crime in coming to amuse yourself among us and then betraying us, the surprise of Beaumont wouldn't have taken place, we shouldn't have gone to Sedan, and perhaps we should then have ended by licking you. And I don't speak of the disgusting calling which you are still plying, of your cheek in coming back here in triumph, denouncing and frightening the poor country people. You are the most ignoble blackguard there can be, and I ask that you be sentenced to the penalty of death!'

Silence prevailed. Sambuc had seated himself again; at last he said: 'I appoint Ducat to defend you. He was a process-server once, and would have made his way in the world had he only been able to bridle his passions. You see that I deny you nothing and that we behave fairly.'

Goliath, unable to move a finger, turned his eyes upon his improvised defender. Nothing now appeared alive in him save his eyes, eyes burning with ardent supplication, under his livid brow, moist with the sweat of anguish, despite the cold.

'Gentlemen,' began Ducat, rising from his chair, 'my client is certainly the most disgusting scoundrel there can be, and I would not undertake to defend him were it not that I have one point to urge in his favour, which is that all the people of his country are of precisely the same stamp. Look at him: you can tell by his eyes that he is greatly astonished at what I say. He has no perception of his crime. In France we only touch our spies with tongs, whereas over yonder spying is an honoured profession, a meritorious fashion of serving one's country. I will even venture to say, gentlemen, that possibly they are not wrong. Our noble sentiments do us honour, but they have unfortunately brought us defeat. If I may so express myself, quos vult perdere Jupiter dementat--you will take that into account, gentlemen.'

Thereupon he sat down again whilst Sambuc resumed: 'And you, Cabasse, have you anything to say for or against the prisoner?'

'I have to say,' shouted the Provençal, 'that all this is a lot of unnecessary fuss about settling that beggar's account. I have had no few worries in my time, but I don't like trifling with legal matters, it brings bad luck. To death! to death with him!'

Sambuc solemnly rose to his feet again: 'So that is the sentence which you both pronounce--death?'

'Yes, yes, death!'

The chairs were pushed back and Sambuc approached Goliath, saying: 'You are sentenced, you are about to die.'

The two candles were burning with tall flames, like death-bed tapers, on either side of Goliath's distorted face. He was making such an effort to beg for mercy, to shriek forth the words which were stifling him, that the blue handkerchief over his mouth became saturated with foam; and it was a terrible sight indeed--that man reduced to silence, already as mute as a corpse, and about to die with all that torrent of explanations and prayers pent in his throat.

Cabasse cocked the revolver. 'Shall I smash his skull?' he asked.

'Oh! no, no!' shouted Sambuc, 'he would be only too glad.' And stepping up to Goliath he added: 'You are not a soldier; you don't deserve the honour of being despatched with a bullet. No, you shall die like the dirty hog of a spy that you are!' Then turning round he said politely: 'By your leave, Silvine, I should very much like to have a tub.'

Silvine had not once stirred during the trial-scene. With rigid features, she stood there waiting, her mind elsewhere, absorbed in the fixed idea that had been goading her on for two days past. And when she was asked for a tub she simply complied with the request, vanished for a moment into the adjacent store-house, and came back with the large tub in which she usually washed Charlot's linen.

'There, put it under the table, close to the edge,' said Sambuc.

She placed it as requested, and as she was rising up her eyes again met Goliath's. In the wretched man's glance a final prayer for mercy was mingled with an expression of revolt--the revolt of one who would not die. But at that moment nothing womanly was left in her, nothing but her unswerving desire for that death which she awaited like deliverance. She again drew back to the sideboard and remained there.

Opening the table-drawer, Sambuc had just taken from it a large kitchen-knife, the one that was used for cutting bacon. 'As you are a hog,' said he, 'I'm going to bleed you like a hog.'

He proceeded in a leisurely manner, discussing the slaughtering with Cabasse and Ducat in order that it might be accomplished in proper fashion. And a dispute even arose through Cabasse declaring that in his part of the country, Provence, pigs were bled hanging head-downwards, whereat Ducat expressed great indignation, holding this method to be both barbarous and inconvenient.

'Bring him close to the edge of the table with his head well over the tub so as not to stain the floor.'

They drew him forward, and Sambuc then set about his task in a quiet, cleanly fashion. With one stroke of the large bacon knife he slit the wretched man's throat crosswise, and the blood from the severed carotid at once began dripping into the tub with a gentle plashing like that of a fountain. He had made but a small incision, so that only a few drops spurted forth, impelled by the action of the heart. If, in this way, death came more slowly, none of its convulsions were seen, for the ropes were strong and the body remained quite motionless. There was not a start, not a groan. It was only by the dying man's face that one could observe the progress of his agony--his face furrowed by fright, whence the blood departed drop by drop, leaving the skin quite colourless, as white as linen. And the eyes were emptying also. They became dim and at last their light departed from them.

'I say, Silvine, we shall want a sponge all the same.'

She gave no answer, however. She stood there as though rooted to the tiled floor, with her arms all unconsciously folded across her bosom, and with her throat gripped as by an iron collar. But all at once she noticed that Charlot was there, hanging to her skirts. No doubt he had awakened and managed to open the doors, and nobody had seen or heard him creep into the kitchen like the inquisitive child he was. How long had he been there, half hidden behind his mother? He also was looking on. From under his shock of yellow hair, those big blue eyes of his were watching the dripping blood, the little red streamlet which was slowly filling the tub. Possibly the sight amused him. Perhaps he had at first failed to understand it; and then, maybe, some sense of horror had dawned upon him, an instinctive consciousness that he was witnessing an abomination. At all events, he suddenly raised a wild cry of affright: 'Oh! mammy, mammy, I'm afraid--take me away!'

And this cry gave Silvine a shock of such violence that she reeled. This was the last straw; something gave way, crumbled to pieces within her; horror was at last sweeping away that strength and excitement, born of her fixed idea, which had buoyed her up for two days past. She became a woman once more, burst into tears, and made a mad, wild gesture as she took up Charlot and distractedly pressed him to her heart. And then she rushed away with him at a terrified gallop, unable to see or hear more, feeling nought but an imperious need to go and annihilate herself, it mattered not where, in the first secluded hole that she might fall into.

At that same moment Jean had just made up his mind to open his door. Although as a rule he never troubled himself about the sounds wafted to him from in and around the house, he had ended, that evening, by feeling surprised at all the comings and goings and bursts of shouting that he heard. And it was into his quiet room that Silvine now swept, dishevelled, sobbing, shaken by such a paroxysm of wretchedness that he could not at first catch the disjointed words which she stammered through her clenched teeth. And again and again did she make the same wild gesture as though to drive away the atrocious scene. At last, however, Jean understood her, and then he also--in his mind's eye--beheld the ambuscade, the slaughtering, the mother standing by with the little one among her skirts, both gazing at the father, whose blood was trickling from his cut throat; and at the thought of so much horror he felt icy cold, his heart was fairly overturned with anguish.

Ah! War, abominable War, which transformed all these poor folks into ferocious wild beasts, which sowed the seed of such fearful hatred--the son bespattered with his father's blood, perpetuating the enmity of races, growing up in execration of the paternal family which some day or other he might perhaps help to exterminate! Ah! the villainous seeds whence only frightful harvests could spring!

Silvine, who had fallen on a chair, covered Charlot, who clung, sobbing, to her neck, with frantic kisses, again and again repeating the same phrase, the one cry that rose from her bleeding heart: 'Ah! my poor little one, nobody will say any more that you are a Prussian! Ah! my poor little one, nobody will say any more that you are a Prussian!'

Meantime old Fouchard had arrived and was in the kitchen. He had rapped on the door like the master he was, and the others had decided they must let him in. And, truly, the surprise he experienced was scarcely a pleasant one--that corpse lying upon his table, with the tub full of blood underneath. He was of anything but an enduring nature, and naturally he waxed wrathful at the sight.

'Couldn't you do your dirty work out of doors, you filthy beasts?' he shouted. 'Do you take my house for a manure pit, that you come here and spoil my furniture in that style?' Then as Sambuc began to apologise and explain matters, the old fellow, growing alarmed and more and more irritated, continued: 'What the ---- can I do with your corpse? Do you think it at all reasonable to stick a corpse in a man's house like that, without knowing if he can dispose of it? Suppose a patrol came in, I should be in a nice fix! But you fellows don't care a rap, you never considered that this business might cost me my skin. Well, curse you, you'll have to deal with me if you don't carry your corpse away at once! You hear me! So make haste, take it up by the head, or by the legs, or in whatever way you like, but don't dawdle, and mind that there's not so much as a hair of that fellow's head left here in three minutes from now!'

In the end Sambuc prevailed on Fouchard to provide him with a sack, though it made the old fellow's heart bleed to give anything away. As it was, he chose one of the most damaged sacks that he could find, declaring that one full of holes even was still far too good for a Prussian. Then Cabasse and Ducat had all the trouble in the world to get Goliath into the sack, the body being so broad and so long; and, pack it as they would, they could not prevent the feet from protruding. At last it was carried into the yard and placed on the barrow which was used for conveying the bandits' bread to them.

'Upon my word of honour,' declared Sambuc as he went off, 'we are going to fling him into the Meuse.'

'And mind,' insisted Fouchard, 'mind you fasten two big stones to his legs so that he mayn't come up again.'

And thereupon the little cortège went off over the pale snow, vanishing into the pitchy night, unheard, save for a faint, plaintive creaking of the barrow.

Ever afterwards Sambuc would swear by his father's memory that he had fastened the two big stones to the legs of the corpse. Nevertheless it came to the surface again, and three days later the Prussians discovered it among the rushes at Pont-Maugis; and their fury was extreme when they pulled out of the sack this dead spy of theirs, who had been bled like a porker. There were terrible threats, all sorts of vexatory measures, and perquisitions. Some of the villagers no doubt let their tongues wag too freely, for one evening a party of soldiers came and arrested both the mayor of Remilly and old Fouchard on the charge of keeping up an intercourse with the Francs-tireurs, to whom Goliath's death was naturally imputed. And in this extremity Fouchard really cut a fine figure, exhibiting all the stubborn impassiveness of an old peasant who knows the value of silence and a calm demeanour. He allowed himself to be marched off, without evincing the slightest uneasiness, and without even asking for any explanations. The other folks would soon see how he would dish the Prussians. It was whispered through the district that he had already made a large fortune by his dealings with the enemy, bags upon bags of silver, which he had buried away somewhere, one by one, according as his profits increased.

When Henriette heard of all this dreadful business, she felt terribly uneasy. Jean, fearing lest he might endanger those who sheltered him, again wished to go off, though the doctor still considered him too weak. Henriette, however, insisted upon his remaining another fortnight; her sadness had become deeper still at the thought that before long their separation must become an absolute necessity. On the day of old Fouchard's arrest Jean had managed to escape a like fate by hiding among the forage in the barn; but was he not in danger of being taken and led away captive at any moment, in the event of further perquisitions, which were quite possible? Moreover, Henriette was anxious concerning her uncle's fate; and she resolved that she would go to Sedan one morning to see the Delaherches, on whom, it was said, a very influential Prussian officer was quartered.

'Silvine,' said she, as she was about to start, 'take good care of our patient; mind you give him his broth at noon and his draught at four o'clock.'

The servant, wholly absorbed in her daily toil, had become the same courageous, docile girl as formerly, superintending everything at the farm in its master's absence, whilst Charlot gambolled and laughed around her.

'Don't be uneasy, madame,' she answered, 'he shall want for nothing. I'm here to take good care of him.'

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VI. THE CONQUEROR'S SWAY--GIDDY GILBERTE

At the Delaherches' house in the Rue Maqua at Sedan, life had started on a new lease after the terrible shocks of the battle and the capitulation, and for nearly four months now the days had been slowly slipping by under the gloomy, oppressive sway of the conquerors.

There was, however, one corner of the vast factory buildings which remained closed as though untenanted; it was the room which Colonel de Vineuil still occupied, a room overlooking the street at one end of the principal apartments. Whilst other windows were often thrown open and gave egress to sounds of coming and going, to all the buzz and stir of life, those of this particular chamber remained condemned, dead as it were, with their shutters invariably closed. The colonel had complained of his eyes paining him, especially when exposed to the daylight. No one knew whether he told the truth or not, but to humour him a lamp was kept burning, day and night, at his bedside. Although Major Bouroche had only found a crack in his ankle, the wound refused to heal, and all sorts of complications having ensued he had been compelled to remain in bed during two long months. He was now able to get up; but his mental prostration remained very great, and he had been attacked by a mysterious ailment which proved so tenacious and invading that he spent his days lying upon a couch in front of a large wood fire. He was wasting away, becoming a mere shadow; yet the doctor who attended him and whom his condition greatly surprised could find no lesion to account for this slow death. Such indeed it was; like the flame of a lamp whose oil is almost exhausted, the colonel was fading away.

Madame Delaherche senior had shut herself up with him on the morrow of the capitulation. Doubtless they had briefly and once for all come to an understanding as to their desire to cloister themselves together in that room, so long as any Prussians should be billeted in the house. Several Germans had spent a few nights there, and a captain, Herr von Gartlauben, was quartered there permanently. However, neither the colonel nor the old lady had ever again spoken of these matters. She rose every morning at daybreak, despite her eight-and-seventy years, and came and seated herself in an armchair in front of her old friend, on the other side of the fireplace; and there, by the steady lamp-light, she would sit knitting stockings for the children of the poor, whilst the colonel, with his eyes fixed on the embers, remained unoccupied, in a state of increasing stupor, seemingly living and dying from one and the same thought. They certainly did not exchange twenty words a day; he silenced her with a wave of the hand whenever she involuntarily alluded to any news from the outside world--news that she picked up when she occasionally went about the house. And thus no further tidings penetrated to that chamber, no news of the siege of Paris, of the defeats on the Loire, the daily renewed afflictions of the invasion. And yet, although the colonel in his voluntary entombment refused to look upon the light of day, although he closed his eyes and stopped his ears, it was all of no avail; some rumour of the frightful disasters, the deadly mourning, must have stolen through chink and crevice into the room, have been wafted to him by the very air he breathed; for hour by hour he was as though poisoned afresh and drew nearer and nearer unto death.

Meantime, in the broad daylight, Delaherche, with his need of life was bestirring himself and endeavouring to reopen his factory. There was so much confusion, however, with regard both to workmen and customers that he had as yet only been able to set a few looms going; and by way of employing his gloomy, enforced leisure it had occurred to him to make a complete inventory of his belongings and to study certain improvements which he had long thought of introducing into his business. To assist him in this work he had at his elbow a young fellow, a customer's son, who had stranded in his house after the battle. Edmond Lagarde, who had grown up at Passy in his father's little drapery shop, and who at three-and-twenty years of age--though he looked hardly more than eighteen--was a sergeant in the 5th of the Line, had fought so valiantly and stubbornly on the day of the battle that he had only come into the town by the Ménil gate at about five o'clock, and then with his left arm broken by one of the last bullets that the enemy had fired. Since the other wounded had been removed from the sheds, Delaherche had good-naturedly kept the young fellow with him, so that Edmond formed one of the family, eating, sleeping, and living in the house, and, now that his wound was healed, acting as secretary to the manufacturer, pending the time when he might get back to Paris. Thanks to Delaherche's protection and his own formal promise that he would not abscond, the Prussian authorities did not interfere with him. He was fair, with blue eyes, as pretty as a girl, and so shy and timid that he was for ever blushing. His mother had brought him up, stinting herself and expending the profits of their little business in paying for his terms at college. He was extremely fond of Paris, which he spoke of with passionate regretfulness, when talking with Gilberte, who had nursed this wounded Chérubin[45] like a comrade.

Finally, the house had yet another new inmate, Herr von Gartlauben, a captain in the Landwehr, whose regiment was now quartered at Sedan in place of the regular troops. Despite his modest rank, the captain was a personage of importance, for he was nephew to the Governor-General of Champagne whom the Germans had set up at Rheims, and who exercised unlimited power over the entire region. Herr von Gartlauben also prided himself upon being fond of Paris, upon having lived there, and upon being acquainted both with its courtesies and its refinements; and indeed he affected the irreproachable bearing of a well-bred man, a polish under which he strove to conceal his natural coarseness. Tall and fat, he was always tightly buttoned up in his uniform, and lied outrageously about his age, being quite in despair that he should have already reached five-and-forty. Had he been more intelligent he might have proved a terrible customer, but his vanity kept him in a state of imperturbable self-satisfaction, and he was quite incapable of imagining that anybody could trifle with him.

Later on, he proved a veritable saviour for Delaherche. But how doleful were the earlier days following upon the capitulation! Overrun, peopled with German soldiers, Sedan trembled with the fear of pillage. Then, however, the victorious troops streamed back to the valley of the Seine again, only a garrison being left behind, and the town sank into the deadly quiet of a necropolis; the houses invariably closed, the shops shut, the streets deserted as soon as the twilight fell, and from that moment re-echoing only the heavy footsteps and hoarse calls of the patrols. Not a newspaper, not a letter arrived. In the ignorance and anguish that prevailed respecting the fresh disasters which were felt to be at hand, the town was like a walled-up dungeon, suddenly shut off from the rest of France. To render their misery complete the townsfolk were threatened with a dearth of provisions; and one morning indeed they awoke with no bread and no meat. It was as though a swarm of locusts had passed that way, the whole district having been stripped bare by the hundreds of thousands of men who for a week past had been pouring through it like a torrent. Having only two days' provisions left, the town had to apply to Belgium for sustenance; and now everything came from the neighbouring country, across the open frontier whence the customs' service had disappeared, carried off in the catastrophe like everything else. Then, too, there were endless vexatious measures, a struggle which began afresh every morning between the Prussian Commandature established at the Sub-Prefecture and the Municipal Council sitting en permanence at the Town Hall. The resistance which the members of the latter offered was heroic, but it was in vain that they argued and contested the ground inch by inch; the inhabitants were fast succumbing beneath the enemy's ever-growing demands, the fancifulness and excessive frequency of the requisitions.

During the earlier days Delaherche suffered a good deal from the soldiers and officers who were billeted on him. Men from all the various German states defiled through his house smoking their big pipes. Not a day passed but two or three thousand soldiers, infantry, cavalry, artillery, fell unexpectedly upon the town, and although they were by right only entitled to shelter and firing, it was often necessary to run about and procure provisions for them. They left the rooms which they occupied in a repulsively filthy state. The officers often came home drunk, and proved more insufferable even than their men. Discipline, however, so restrained the foreigners, that acts of violence and pillage were of rare occurrence. In all Sedan only two women were reported to have been violated. It was not till later on, when Paris supplied proof of its determination to resist, that the Germans made their domination severely felt, exasperated as they were at finding the struggle prolonged, anxious too with regard to the demeanour of the provinces, fearing a rising en masse of the population, and a general, wolfish warfare such as the Francs-tireurs had already declared against them.

Delaherche had just been lodging a major of cuirassiers, who slept in his boots and went away leaving his room one mass of filth, when Captain von Gartlauben presented himself at the factory one evening in the second fortnight of September, when the rain was pouring down like a deluge. The first hour was somewhat unpleasant. The captain began bawling, demanded the best room in the house, and dragged his sabre with a clatter up the stairs. Having caught sight of Gilberte, however, he became decorous in his behaviour, shut himself up in his room, and in passing in and out would depart from his rigid demeanour to bow to her politely. He was treated with great deference, for it was known that a word from him to the colonel commanding Sedan would suffice to secure the abatement of a requisition or the release of a prisoner. His uncle, the Governor-General at Rheims, had recently launched a ferocious proclamation, decreeing not only the state of siege, but also the penalty of death for every person shown to have assisted the 'enemy,' whether as a spy, or by leading the German troops astray when appointed to guide them, or by destroying the bridges and cannons, or by damaging the telegraph wires and the railway lines. The 'enemy' of course was the French; and the hearts of the inhabitants bounded with indignation when, on the gate of the Commandature, they read the large white placard, which converted their anguish and their hopes into crimes. It was already terribly hard to be informed of the fresh German victories by the cheers of the garrison. In this wise every day almost brought its affliction; the soldiers would light large fires, sing, and get drunk throughout the night, whilst the inhabitants, compelled to be within doors by nine o'clock, listened to the revelry from the depths of their dark houses, distracted by the uncertainty in which they were plunged, but divining some fresh misfortune. It was on one of these occasions, about the middle of October, that Herr von Gartlauben for the first time gave proof of some delicacy of feeling. Since the morning Sedan had been awakening to hope again, for there were rumours abroad of a great victory achieved by the army of the Loire on its way to relieve Paris. Ofttime already, however, the best of news had become transformed into tidings of disaster, and in the same way it was learnt that evening that the Bavarian army had secured possession of Orleans. Some soldiers in one of the houses of the Rue Maqua, just in front of the factory, thereupon began brawling so loudly that the captain, seeing Gilberte greatly affected, went and silenced the men, being himself of opinion that such an uproar was uncalled for.

The month went by, and Herr von Gartlauben had occasion to render a few more little services. The Prussian authorities had reorganised the various governmental departments and a German sub-prefect had been installed at Sedan, though this did not prevent the vexatious measures from continuing, albeit the new functionary showed himself comparatively reasonable. Among the many difficulties which constantly arose between the Commandature and the Municipal Council, a frequent cause of trouble was the requisition of vehicles; and quite a to-do arose one morning when Delaherche was unable to send his calash and pair to the Sub-Prefecture. The mayor was momentarily arrested, and the manufacturer would have been sent to keep him company in the citadel, had it not been for Captain von Gartlauben, whose intervention at once appeased the wrath of the authorities. On another occasion, at his intercession, the town was granted a delay for the payment of a fine of thirty thousand francs imposed upon it as a punishment for its alleged dilatoriness in rebuilding the Villette bridge, a bridge destroyed by the Prussians themselves--altogether a deplorable business, which half ruined Sedan and turned it topsy-turvy. It was, however, more particularly after the fall of Metz that Delaherche contracted a debt of gratitude towards the captain. The frightful tidings fell like a thunderbolt upon the inhabitants, annihilating their last hopes; and the very next week the town was again burdened with passing troops, all the torrent of men that streamed down from Metz--Prince Frederick Charles's army directing its course towards the Loire, General von Manteuffel's army marching on Amiens and Rouen, and other corps on their way to reinforce the besiegers around Paris. For several days the houses were full of soldiers, the bakers' and butchers' shops were swept bare to the last crumb, the last bone, whilst the paving of the streets exhaled a greasy stench such as might have followed the passage of vast migrating flocks and herds. The factory in the Rue Maqua alone did not suffer from this irruption of human cattle, protected as it was by a friendly hand, and required to shelter merely a few well-bred officers.

It thus happened that Delaherche ended by departing from his frosty demeanour. The middle-class families of the town had shut themselves up in their most remote rooms, avoiding all intercourse with the officers quartered upon them. But with his irrepressible longing to talk, please, and enjoy life, this part of the antagonist sulking after defeat caused the manufacturer intense suffering. His large bleak, silent, house, whose inmates lived apart from one another, swayed by unbending rancour, made him feel quite miserable. And so one day he began by stopping Herr von Gartlauben on the stairs to thank him for the services he had rendered. Then, little by little, they fell into the habit of exchanging a few words whenever they met; and at last the Prussian captain found himself one evening in the manufacturer's private room, smoking a cigar and chatting in friendly fashion, whilst comfortably seated beside the fireplace, where some large oak logs were burning. Gilberte did not show herself during the first fortnight, and the captain pretended to be ignorant of her very existence, although at the slightest sound he would at once glance towards the door of the adjoining room. He seemed desirous of making his host forget that he was one of the conquerors, showed himself unprejudiced and liberal-minded, and was always ready to laugh and jest whenever the conversation turned on any ridiculous requisitions. One day, for instance, when a demand had been made for a coffin and a bandage, this bandage and coffin vastly amused him. With regard to other things, coal, oil, milk, sugar, butter, bread, meat, to say nothing of clothing, stoves, and lamps--in a word all the necessaries of daily life, he simply shrugged his shoulders: What would you have? These demands were vexatious, no doubt, and he even admitted that they were excessive; but then this was wartime and the troops must needs live in the occupied territory. Delaherche, whom the incessant requisitions exasperated, spoke out frankly concerning them, passing them in review every evening, in much the same way as he might have gone through his household accounts. Still they only had one lively discussion together, which was in reference to a fine of a million francs which the Prussian prefect of Rethel had levied upon the department of the Ardennes under pretence of compensating Germany for the losses she was alleged to have sustained by the operations of the French fleet and the expulsion of the German subjects resident in France. Of this amount Sedan was required to contribute 42,000 francs, and Delaherche did his utmost to make his lodger understand that this was an iniquitous demand, the town being differently circumstanced to others, since it had already undergone such excessive suffering. The result of all these discussions was to increase the intimacy of the two men; the manufacturer, on his side, was delighted at having been able to shake off his thoughts by pouring forth a flood of words, whilst the Prussian was pleased with himself for having given proof of a truly Parisian urbanity.

One evening Gilberte came into the room with her gay giddy air, and at sight of the captain stopped short, affecting surprise. Herr von Gartlauben rose from his chair, and with commendable tact withdrew almost immediately. But on the following day he found Gilberte already installed in the room, and thereupon settled himself in his usual seat by the fireside. Some delightful evenings followed, invariably spent in this private room instead of in the drawing-room, wherein lay a nice distinction with regard to the character of the intercourse. Later on even, when the young woman had consented to play the piano to gratify the captain, who was extremely fond of music, she alone would step into the adjoining salon, leaving the door open. During those bitter winter evenings the old oaks of the Ardennes crackled and blazed in the lofty fireplace, and about ten o'clock they would drink a cup of tea, whilst chatting together in the warm atmosphere of that cosy room. And, plainly enough, Herr von Gartlauben had fallen head over heels in love with that sprightly young woman, who flirted with him just as in days gone by she had flirted with Captain Beaudoin's friends at Charleville. He now took additional care of his person, displayed exaggerated gallantry, and contented himself with the slightest favour, above all things anxious that he might not be taken for a barbarian--one of those gross-minded soldiers who cannot treat a woman with respect.

Thus life had, so to say, a double aspect in that vast, black house of the Rue Maqua. Whilst Edmond, the wounded Chérubin with the pretty face, returned monosyllabic answers to Delaherche's ceaseless chatter at meal-time, and blushed like a hobbledehoy if Gilberte merely asked him to pass the salt; whilst Herr von Gartlauben, with enraptured eyes, sat in the study of an evening listening to one of Mozart's sonatas, which the young woman was playing for his especial benefit in the drawing-room, the adjacent apartment, where Colonel de Vineuil and Madame Delaherche senior spent their time, remained quite silent, with the shutters always closed, the lamp always burning, as though it were a tomb lighted by a taper. December had buried Sedan under the snow, and the despair-fraught tidings from the scene of war were as though stifled by the bitter cold. After General Ducrot's defeat at Champigny, after the loss of Orleans, there remained but one sombre hope, that the soil of France might become an avenging soil, an exterminating soil to devour and swallow up the victors. Ah! that the snow might fall in thicker and thicker flakes, that the ground might rend and open under the biting frost, so that the whole of Germany might be entombed within it! And now a fresh sorrow was wringing old Madame Delaherche's heart. Whilst passing Gilberte's door one night when her son was from home, called away to Belgium by some business matter or other, she had heard a low murmur of voices, mingled with suppressed laughter. She staggered back into her own room, quite aghast, overcome by the horror of the abominable thing which she suspected. The voice she had heard could have been none other than the Prussian's; she had already fancied that she had detected glances of intelligence passing between him and Gilberte, and the thought of this supreme shame utterly overwhelmed her. Ah! that woman whom her son had brought into the house despite all her remonstrances, that abandoned woman whom she had already pardoned once by not speaking out after Captain Beaudoin's death! Yet it was all certainly beginning again, and this time the infamy was unparalleled! What should she do? Such monstrous behaviour could not be allowed to continue. The seclusion in which the old lady lived now became fraught with more poignant sorrow, and she spent long days in waging a frightful combat with herself. She would enter the colonel's room looking yet more gloomy than had been her wont, and sit there for hours in silence, with tears in her eyes; and he would gaze at her and interpret her increased sadness as signifying that France had sustained yet another defeat.

It was in the midst of this crisis that Henriette arrived one morning at the house in the Rue Maqua with the view of enlisting the Delaherches' sympathies in favour of uncle Fouchard. She had heard people speak smilingly of Gilberte's all-powerful influence over Captain von Gartlauben, and consequently felt somewhat embarrassed when on ascending the stairs she encountered Madame Delaherche senior, who was returning to the colonel's room. However, she deemed it advisable to acquaint the old lady with the object of her visit.

'Oh! madame,' said she, 'if you would only be kind enough to assist me! My uncle is in a terrible position; they talk of sending him to Germany.'

Much as the old lady liked Henriette, she could not restrain an angry gesture: 'But I am powerless to help you, my dear child. It is of no use applying to me.' And then, despite the young woman's evident distress, she added: 'Your visit is very ill-timed; my son is going to Brussels this evening. Besides, he has no more influence than I have. Apply to my daughter-in-law, she can do everything.'

Then off she went, leaving Henriette thunderstruck, fully convinced that she was falling into the midst of a family drama. On the previous evening, indeed, Madame Delaherche senior had resolved to communicate her suspicions to her son before his departure for Belgium, whither he was going to negotiate a large purchase of coal, in the hope of being able to start his power-looms again. She would never allow that abominable intrigue to be carried on during his absence, under the same roof as herself. And before speaking out she only wished to make quite certain that he would not again defer his departure as he had been doing, day after day, during an entire week. The course she proposed to take meant, she realised it, the downfall of the entire house, the Prussian driven away, the young woman also thrown into the street and her name ignominiously placarded on the walls, as had been threatened would be done with regard to every Frenchwoman who might yield to the advances of a German.

When Gilberte perceived Henriette she gave a cry of delight. 'Ah! how glad I am to see you! It seems so long since you went away, and all these dreadful things make one feel so old!'

She led her into her room, made her sit down on a couch there and ensconced herself close beside her: 'Come, you must breakfast with us,' she said. 'But first of all let us have a chat together. You must have so many things to tell me? I know that you have had no news of your brother. Poor Maurice! how I pity him, shut up in Paris like that, with no gas, no wood, and perhaps no bread! And that soldier, too, your brother's friend, whom you are nursing? You see that people have already been chattering to me. Is it on his account you've come?'

Greatly perturbed, Henriette did not at first answer her friend. After all, was it not really on Jean's account that she had come there, to make certain indeed that her dear patient would not be molested when her uncle had been set at liberty? To hear Gilberte speak of him, however, had filled her with confusion, and she no longer dared to reveal the true motive of her visit; her conscience pricked her--she recoiled from the thought of enlisting in Jean's behalf such an equivocal influence as that with which she credited Gilberte. 'And so,' repeated the latter, with a malicious air, 'it's for that soldier that you need our assistance?' Then as Henriette, brought to bay, at last began speaking of old Fouchard's arrest, she promptly interrupted her: 'Oh! yes--how foolish of me to have forgotten; why I was talking of the matter only this morning. You have done well to come, my dear; your uncle's case must be seen to at once, for the last information that I have had is not at all favourable. They wish to make an example.'

'Yes, I thought of you,' continued Henriette in a hesitating way. 'I thought that you might give me some good advice, perhaps be able to intercede----'

Gilberte burst out laughing: 'Why, you silly, I'll have your uncle set at liberty within three days! Haven't you heard that I have a Prussian captain quartered here who does whatever I ask? You hear, my dear, he can refuse me nothing!'

And thereupon, like a madcap enjoying the triumph of her coquetry, she laughed louder than ever, holding and patting the hands of her friend, who could not utter a word of thanks, so disturbed she was, so tormented by the fear that Gilberte's words might be intended as an avowal. And yet how serene and blithe the young woman appeared!

'Let me attend to it all,' added Gilberte. 'I'll send you home happy this evening.'

When they entered the dining-room Henriette was greatly struck by the delicate feminine beauty of Edmond, whom she had never previously seen. He enchanted her, as one is enchanted by the sight of a pretty object. Was it possible that this lad had really fought, and that the Germans had been so cruel as to break his arm? The legend of his great bravery rendered him all the more charming, and, whilst the servant was serving mutton chops and baked potatoes, Delaherche, who had given Henriette the cordial greeting of a man to whom the sight of a new face is a godsend, did not cease praising his secretary; Edmond, said he, had proved as industrious and well-behaved as he was handsome. And thus the repast in the warm spacious dining-room promptly took a turn of delightful intimacy.

'And so you came over with a view of enlisting our services in father Fouchard's case?' resumed the manufacturer. 'I'm sorry that I'm obliged to go away this evening. But my wife will settle the matter for you; she's irresistible; she has only to ask for a thing to get it.' He said this laughing, in all simplicity, as though flattered that Gilberte should possess such influence, which he was at times vain enough to ascribe to himself. Then, all at once, he asked: 'By the way, my dear, has Edmond told you of his discovery?'

'No; what discovery?' asked Gilberte gaily, turning her beautiful caressing eyes upon the young sergeant.

The latter blushed as was his wont whenever a pretty woman looked at him: 'Oh! madame, it's merely a question of some old lace. You were regretting the other day that you had none to trim your mauve wrapper with, and I was lucky enough yesterday to come upon five yards of old Bruges, something really handsome and cheap as well. The dealer is coming to show it to you by-and-by.'

She was delighted. 'How nice of you!' said she; 'you deserve a reward.'

Then, whilst a terrine of foie-gras, purchased in Belgium, was being served, the conversation took another turn; some allusion was made to the fish which were dying in the Meuse, poisoned by the corrupt state of the water; and Delaherche then spoke of the danger of pestilence to which Sedan would be exposed as soon as there should be a thaw. There, had been several cases of disease of an epidemical character already in November. Six thousand francs had been spent in cleansing the town after the battle; the knapsacks, cartridge pouches, in fact all the suspicious wreckage that could be found had been burnt in heaps, but as soon as the weather became at all damp the most abominable stenches were wafted from the surrounding country-side, where such a multitude of corpses had been half-buried, with merely a few inches of earth thrown over them. Many of the fields were quite bumpy with graves, and an internal pressure cracked and split the soil whence all the gases of putrefaction issued and spread around. And only a few days previously another source of infection had been discovered in the Meuse, although the carcases of more than twelve hundred horses had already been removed from it. It had been generally believed that not a corpse remained in the river, but, one day, on gazing into it attentively, at a point where it was only six or seven feet deep, a rural guard espied some whitish objects which he at first took for stones. They proved, however, to be corpses, corpses in layers, bodies which had been ripped open and which, as inflation was impossible, had not risen to the surface. They had therefore been lying among the herbage in that water during nearly four months. Arms, legs, and heads were brought up with boat-hooks; and at times the mere strength of the current would suffice to detach a hand. The water became turbid, and big bubbles of gas rose to the surface and burst, poisoning the air around with a disgusting stench.

'It will be all right so long as it freezes,' observed Delaherche. 'But as soon as the snow disappears there will have to be a thorough search and cleansing, or else we shall all be carried off.' Then, upon his wife begging him with a laugh to talk of some less unpleasant subject at table, he concluded with the remark: 'Well, we shall have to do without fish from the Meuse for a long time.'

They had finished their meal, and the coffee was being served, when the maid announced that Herr von Gartlauben requested permission to see them for a moment. This caused quite a flutter, for the captain had never previously presented himself at that hour of the day. Delaherche, however, deemed the circumstance a fortunate one, since it would enable him to introduce Henriette to the Prussian officer, and accordingly gave orders to admit him. On perceiving a second young woman in the room, the captain exaggerated his already excessive politeness. He even accepted a cup of coffee, which he drank without sugar, not because he liked it unsweetened, but because he had sometimes seen people drink it in this fashion in Paris. It appeared, moreover, that if he had so pressingly solicited admission it was simply from his desire to lose no time in informing Madame that he had just secured a pardon for one of her protégés, an unlucky workman employed at the factory, who had been imprisoned in consequence of a scuffle with a Prussian soldier.

Gilberte at once profited by the opportunity to speak about father Fouchard's case: 'Captain,' said she, 'I present you one of my dearest friends. She desires to place herself under your protection; she is the niece of the farmer who was recently arrested at Remilly, as you know, in connection with that Franc-tireur affair.'

'Ah! yes, the affair of the spy, the unfortunate fellow who was found in a sack. Oh! it's a serious matter, very serious indeed! I am afraid I can do nothing.'

'Oh! you would please me so much!' said Gilberte, looking at him with her caressing eyes and thrilling him with a sensation of beatitude. Then he bowed to her with an air of gallant compliance. Whatever she might desire, he was at her orders.

'I shall be very grateful to you, sir,' said Henriette painfully, seized as she was with an insurmountable feeling of discomfort, at the sudden thought of her husband, her poor Weiss, shot over yonder at Bazeilles.

However, Edmond, who had discreetly taken himself off on the arrival of the captain, had just returned into the room to whisper a few words in Gilberte's ear. She rose in a vivacious way, mentioned the lace which the dealer had just brought, and after apologising for leaving them, followed the young fellow out of the room. Left alone with the two men, Henriette was now able to isolate herself, and took a seat in the embrasure of a window, whilst they remained at table, talking in loud voices.

'You will accept a nip of brandy, captain, eh? You see I don't stand on ceremony with you. I tell you all I think because I am aware that you have a liberal mind. Well! I assure you that it is very wrong of your prefect to bleed the town of those forty-two thousand francs. Just think of all our sacrifices since the outset! In the first place, on the eve of the battle, the entire French army, exhausted and famished, fell on our hands. Then came your men, and they had long teeth too. Merely the troops that have passed through the place, the requisitions, the damage which had to be repaired, the needful expenses of all kinds, have cost us a million and a half of francs. We may put down as much for the havoc wrought by the battle, the destruction caused by your artillery fire and the conflagrations, and that will bring us to three millions. Then I estimate that the losses sustained by local trade and industry amount to quite two millions. What do you say to that? There we have a total of five millions of francs for a town of thirteen thousand inhabitants! And now under some pretext or other you ask us for a further contribution of forty-two thousand francs. Come, is it reasonable, is it just?'

Herr von Gartlauben nodded his head and contented himself with answering: 'What can you expect? Such is war, such is war!'

The spell of waiting continued, Gilberte did not return, and Henriette's ears were ringing; all kinds of vague, sad thoughts were rendering her drowsy, as she sat there in the embrasure of the window, whilst Delaherche declared upon his word of honour that Sedan could never have weathered the crisis, caused by the absolute dearth of specie, had it not been for the timely creation of a local fiduciary currency--the paper-money issued by the Caisse du Crédit Industriel, which had saved the town from a financial disaster.

'You will take another drop of brandy, captain, eh?' he added: and then passing to another subject: 'Ah! it wasn't France that declared the war, it was the Empire. The Emperor greatly deceived me. He is altogether done for; we would rather let ourselves be dismembered than take him back. There was only one man who saw clearly into things last July, and that was Monsieur Thiers, whose journey just now through the capitals of Europe is another great act of wisdom and patriotism. The hopes of all reasonable people accompany him--may he succeed!'

With a wave of the hand he sought to convey his meaning, for he would have deemed it altogether unseemly to speak of his desire for peace before a Prussian, however friendly the latter might be. Such a desire was, however, strong within him, as it was in all the old conservative and plébiscite-voting bourgeoisie. They would soon be at an end of their blood and treasure; it was necessary to give in; and such being the opinion, there arose from all the occupied provinces a covert rancour against Paris for resisting so stubbornly. And in this wise Delaherche, alluding to Gambetta's fiery proclamations, added in a lower voice: 'No, no; we cannot be on the side of the furious madmen![46] It's becoming a massacre--I for my part side with Monsieur Thiers, who wishes the elections to take place. As for their Republic, well, that doesn't inconvenience me; we'll keep it if necessary, till we get something better.'

With extreme politeness, Herr von Gartlauben continued wagging his head in an approving way, and repeating: 'No doubt, no doubt.'

Henriette, whose discomfort had increased, felt unable to remain there any longer. She experienced a kind of irritation, for which she could assign no definite reason, a pressing desire to find herself elsewhere; and so she at last quietly rose from her seat, and left the room in search of Gilberte, whose return had been so long delayed. And she was stupefied when she found her friend lying on a sofa in tears, a prey to poignant and unaccountable emotion. 'What is the matter? What has happened to you?' asked Henriette.

But the young woman's tears only fell the faster, and she would not speak; such was her confusion, moreover, that it seemed as though all the blood in her heart had rushed to her cheeks. At last, however, throwing herself into Henriette's outstretched arms, hiding her face against her friend's bosom, she stammered: 'Oh! my darling, if you only knew--I shall never dare to tell you--and yet I have no one but you; you alone can perhaps tell me what is best to do.' She shuddered and stammered yet more violently: 'I was here with Edmond. And then, just this minute, the old lady came in and caught me.'

'Caught you? What do you mean?'

'Yes, he had his arm round my waist and was kissing me.' And then, embracing Henriette, clasping her convulsively in her trembling arms, she told her all. 'Oh, my darling! don't judge me too severely, it would be more than I could bear. I know I promised you it should never happen again, but you have seen Edmond--you know how brave he is and how good-looking--as pretty as a girl. Besides, think of it, the poor young fellow; wounded, ill, so far away from his mother, too! And then he has never had any money to spend on enjoyment: as it was, his parents had to stint themselves to give him an education. I assure you, I could not find it in my heart to be harsh with him.'

Henriette listened dumbfounded, unable to recover from her amazement. 'But, my dear,' she said at last, 'everybody thinks it is the Prussian captain who has succeeded in pleasing you.'

At this Gilberte sprang to her feet, and, wiping her eyes, broke out into protestations: 'The Prussian! Oh, dear no, indeed! He's frightful; he's hateful to me! What can people take me for? How can anyone think me capable of such infamy? No, no, never; I would rather die!'

Her feeling of revolt had rendered her quite grave, imparting a pained, irritated expression to her beauty which quite transfigured her. But all at once her coquettish gaiety, her thoughtless giddiness, came back with a laugh which she was unable to repress: 'Well, it's true I amuse myself with him. He adores me, you know, and I merely have to look at him to make him obey me. If you only knew how amusing it is to make game of that big fat fellow, who always seems to fancy that he is about to be rewarded for his attentions.'

'But it's a very dangerous game to play,' said Henriette, seriously.

'Do you think so? Why, what risk do I run? When it dawns upon him that I have merely been trifling with him, he will be unable to do anything beyond flying into a passion and taking himself off. And, besides, he will never realise it! You don't know the man, my dear; he's one of those creatures whom women can flirt with as far as they like without any fear of danger. I know it intuitively. He is far too vain; he will never admit that I have trifled with him. And all that he will get from me will be permission to carry off my souvenir, with the consolation of thinking that he has done the proper thing and behaved himself like a well-bred man who long resided in Paris.' She was getting quite gay again, and added: 'Meantime he will have father Fouchard set at liberty, and his only reward for doing so will be a cup of tea from my hands.'

All at once, however, her fears returned to her, and fresh tears gathered in her eyes. 'And the old lady; good heavens! What will happen? She is not at all fond of me, and she is capable of telling the whole story to my husband.'

Henriette had at last recovered her self-possession. Wiping Gilberte's eyes, she said; 'Listen, my dear, I haven't the strength to scold you, and yet you know how I blame such conduct. But people had frightened me so terribly about your Prussian, I feared such horrid things, that this flirtation with the young sergeant comes as a relief. Quiet yourself, everything may be set right.'

This was sensible advice, the more so as Delaherche almost immediately came in with his mother, and explained that, having made up his mind to take the train to Brussels that same evening, he had just sent for the vehicle which was to convey him across the Belgian frontier. He had therefore come to bid his wife good-bye. Then, turning towards Henriette, he added: 'You may be at rest. On leaving me just now, the captain promised me that he would attend to that matter of your uncle's, and whilst I am away my wife will do whatever may be necessary.'

Since Madame Delaherche senior had entered the room Gilberte, with her heart oppressed, had not taken her eyes off her. Did she mean to speak out and tell what she had seen and thus prevent her son from starting? On her side the old lady had fixed her eyes upon her daughter-in-law from the moment she had crossed the threshold. However, she remained silent, experiencing perhaps a relief akin to that which Henriette had felt. Since it was that young Frenchman who had fought so bravely, ought she not to forgive as she had already forgiven, in the case of Captain Beaudoin? Her eyes softened, and she averted her head. Her son might go; if need were, Edmond would protect Gilberte against the Prussian. And at this thought she even indulged in a faint smile, she whose stern features had not once relaxed since the good news of Coulmiers.[47]

'Good-bye,' she said, embracing Delaherche; 'settle your business and make haste back.'

Then she retired, slowly betaking herself to the prison-like room across the landing, where the colonel, ever with the same expression of stupor on his face, was gazing into the dimness which surrounded the circle of pale light falling from the lamp.

Henriette went back to Remilly that same evening, and three days later, in the morning, she was delighted to see old Fouchard walk into the farm, as calmly as though he had merely come back from driving some bargain in the neighbourhood. He sat down and ate some bread and cheese. And to all the questions that he was plied with, he responded in a calm, deliberate way like a man who had never felt in the least degree uneasy respecting the issue of his affair. Why should they have kept him prisoner? He had done nothing wrong. It wasn't he who had killed the Prussian spy, was it? So he had contented himself with saying to the authorities; 'Find out all about it if you can, but for my part I know nothing.' And they had been obliged to release him, and the mayor as well, since they had no proofs against either of them. But at the same time, cunning, scoffing peasant that he was, his eyes twinkled with inward merriment, in his mute delight at having got the better of those dirty scamps, of whom he was growing quite sick and tired now that they had begun cavilling about the quality of his meat.

December was drawing to an end, and Jean insisted on leaving. His leg was now firm and strong again, and the doctor declared that he might go and fight. For Henriette this was a source of great affliction, which she strove to hide. They had had no news of Paris since the disastrous battle of Champigny. They simply knew that Maurice's regiment, exposed to a murderous fire, had on that occasion lost many men. There was ever the same unbroken silence on his part; no letter, not a line reached them, although they knew that some families of Raucourt and Sedan had received messages by circuitous routes. Perhaps the pigeon bearing the tidings which they so ardently longed for had encountered some voracious hawk, or had fallen on the verge of a wood, killed by a Prussian bullet. Above everything else, however, they were haunted by the fear that Maurice might be dead. In their case the silence of the great city over yonder, mute in the grip of the investment, had become like the silence of the tomb. They had now lost all hope of tidings, and so, when Jean expressed his formal desire to be gone, Henriette gave utterance to a stifled plaint: 'My God, so it is all over, I shall be entirely alone!'

Jean's desire was to join the Army of the North, which General Faidherbe had lately reformed. This army was defending three departments, the Nord, the Pas-de-Calais, and the Somme, which had become separated from the rest of France since General von Manteuffel's corps had pushed forward to Dieppe; and Jean's plan, susceptible of easy accomplishment, was to make his way to Bouillon, and pass round by way of Belgium. He knew that the formation of the Twenty-third Army Corps was being completed by gathering together all the old soldiers of Sedan and Metz that could be found. He had heard it reported also that General Faidherbe was resuming the offensive, and when he read of the engagement of Pont-Noyelle[48]--that drawn battle which the French almost won--he definitely fixed his departure for the ensuing Sunday.

It was again in this instance Dr. Dalichamp who offered his gig and his services as driver, so that Jean might get more easily to Bouillon. The doctor's courage and goodness of heart were inexhaustible. At Raucourt, whose inhabitants were being decimated by typhus, brought there by the Bavarians, he had patients in almost every house, in addition to those in the two ambulances which he attended, that of Raucourt itself and that of Remilly. His ardent patriotism, the impulse which always prompted him to protest against all needless violence, had twice led to his arrest by the Prussians, who had, however, promptly set him at liberty again. And he was laughing with genuine satisfaction on the morning when he arrived in his trap to drive Jean away, delighted, indeed, at being able to facilitate the escape of another of those vanquished soldiers of Sedan, those poor brave fellows whom he tended with all his professional skill and assisted with his purse. Jean, whom the pecuniary question greatly worried, for he knew very well that Henriette was by no means rich, had readily accepted the fifty francs offered him by the doctor to defray the expenses of his journey.

Old Fouchard behaved handsomely at the leave-taking. He sent Silvine to the cellar for two bottles of wine, desiring that everyone should drain a glass to the extermination of the Germans. He was henceforth a well-to-do man, with his 'pile' securely hidden away somewhere; and, easy in mind since the Francs-tireurs of the Dieulet Woods, tracked like wild beasts, had disappeared from the neighbourhood, he now had but one desire, that of enjoying the approaching peace as soon as it should be concluded. In a fit of generosity, moreover, he had even given wages to Prosper, by way of attaching him to the farm, which the young man, however, had no desire to leave. And Fouchard not merely chinked glasses with Prosper, but also with Silvine, whom he had at one moment thought of marrying, so well behaved and so intent on her work did he now find her. But what use would it be? He divined that she would never go astray again, that she would still be there when Charlot had grown up and in his turn went for a soldier. And when he had chinked glasses with the doctor, with Henriette and with Jean, the old fellow exclaimed:

'There! To everybody's health, and may everybody prosper and feel no worse than I do!'

Henriette had insisted upon accompanying Jean as far as Sedan. He was dressed for the occasion in civilian attire, wearing an overcoat and low hat which the doctor had lent him. The sun shone brightly over the snow that morning, although it was terribly cold. Their intention had been to drive through the town without stopping, but when Jean learnt that his colonel was still staying with the Delaherches, he felt a strong desire to go and pay his respects to him, and at the same time thank the manufacturer for his kindness. A final grief awaited him, however, in that town of disaster and affliction. When they reached the factory in the Rue Maqua, they found the house turned topsy-turvy by a tragic occurrence. Gilberte was in a state of wild grief; old Madame Delaherche was weeping big silent tears, and her son, who had come up from his loom-shops, where work had in some measure been resumed, was giving vent to exclamations of surprise. The colonel had just been found dead, lying all of a heap upon the floor of his room, where that eternal lamp was still burning. A doctor, summoned in all haste, had been unable to understand the case, finding no probable cause, neither heart-trouble nor congestion, to which he could ascribe this sudden death. M. de Vineuil had expired thunderstruck as it were, though none could tell whence the bolt had fallen. And it was only on the morrow that a fragment of an old newspaper was picked up in the room, a scrap which had served to cover a book, and which contained an account of the surrender of Metz!

'My dear,' said Gilberte to Henriette, 'just now when Captain Gartlauben came down stairs, he uncovered as he passed the door of the room where my uncle's body is lying--Edmond saw him do so--he is certainly a well-bred man, isn't he?'

Jean had never yet embraced Henriette. Before getting into the gig again with the doctor, he wished to thank her for all her care and kindness, for having nursed and loved him like a brother. But he could not find the words he sought, and suddenly opening his arms he kissed her, sobbing. Quite distracted, she returned his kiss. And when the horse started off the corporal turned round and they waved their hands to one another whilst repeating in faltering accents, 'Good-bye, good-bye!'

That night, Henriette, who had returned to Remilly, was on duty at the ambulance. During her long vigil she was again seized with a bitter access of tears, and she wept--wept exceedingly, stifling her sorrow between her clasped hands.

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VII. INSIDE PARIS: SIEGE AND COMMUNE--THE BARRICADES

Having overthrown the Empire at Sedan, the two German armies again began rolling their waves of men towards Paris, the army of the Meuse approaching the capital on its northern side by the valley of the Marne, whilst the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia, after crossing the Seine at Villeneuve-St. Georges, directed its course towards Versailles, skirting the city upon the south. And on that warm September morning, when General Ducrot, to whom the barely formed Fourteenth Army Corps had been confided, resolved to attack the second of the hostile armies on its flank march, Maurice, who was camping with his new regiment, the 115th of the Line, in the woods on the left of Meudon, only received orders to march when the disaster was already a certainty. A few shells had sufficed; a frightful panic had broken out among a battalion of newly recruited Zouaves, and the rest of the troops had been carried off in such helter-skelter fashion that the gallop of retreat did not cease till the men were behind the ramparts of Paris, where the alarm was intense. All the positions in advance of the southern forts were lost; and that evening the last link connecting the city with France, the telegraph wire of the Western Railway line, was severed. Paris was cut off from the world.

It was a frightfully sad evening for Maurice. Had the Prussians been more enterprising they might have camped that night on the Place du Carrousel. But they were extremely prudent folks, and had resolved to conduct the siege in the classical manner. The exact lines of the investment had already been settled--the cordon of the army of the Meuse on the north, from Croissy to the Marne, by way of Epinay; and the cordon of the Crown Prince of Prussia's army on the south, from Chennevières to Châtillon and Bougival; whilst general headquarters with King William, Count von Bismarck, and General von Moltke, exercised authority from Versailles. The gigantic blockade, which folks had refused to believe in, was already an accomplished fact. The city, with its bastioned enceinte upwards of twenty miles in circumference, its fifteen forts and six detached redoubts, found itself, as it were, imprisoned. And the army of the defence was only composed of the Thirteenth Corps, which General Vinoy had saved and brought back to the capital, and the Fourteenth, still in progress of formation, and confided to General Ducrot--the pair of them comprising some eighty thousand soldiers, besides whom there were fourteen thousand sailors, naval gunners, and marines, fifteen thousand men belonging to various volunteer corps, and one hundred and fifteen thousand Mobile Guards, in addition to three hundred thousand National Guards apportioned among the nine sections of the ramparts. But although there was thus almost a nation of defenders, the disciplined, tried soldiers were few in number. Men were being equipped and drilled; Paris had become one immense entrenched camp. The defensive preparations were being feverishly pushed forward, roads were intercepted, the houses in the military zone were razed to the ground, the two hundred guns of heavy calibre, and the two thousand five hundred others were utilised; other cannon were cast, quite an arsenal springing into existence, thanks to the great patriotic efforts of Dorian, the Minister of Public Works. After the rupture of the negotiations of Ferrières, when Jules Favre had acquainted the inhabitants with Count von Bismarck's demands--the cession of Alsace, the surrender of the garrison of Strasburg, and the payment of a war indemnity of five milliards of francs,[49]--a cry of rage resounded, and everyone acclaimed the continuation of the war, the prolongation of resistance as a condition indispensable to the very existence of France. Even should there be no hope of victory, it was the duty of Paris to defend herself so that the country might live.

One Sunday, at the close of September, Maurice was sent with a fatigue party to the other end of the city, and a fresh hope buoyed him up as he threaded the streets and crossed the squares. It seemed to him that since the rout of Châtillon all hearts had been rising for the mighty task that had to be accomplished. Ah! that Paris, which he had known so intent upon enjoyment, so near to the most grievous faults, how simple he found it now--cheerfully brave, and ready for every sacrifice! Everybody was in uniform; those who, as a rule, took the least interest in national affairs, now wore the képi of the National Guard. Like some gigantic clock whose works have broken, social life, industry, trade, business, had suddenly come to a standstill, and there remained but one passion--the resolution to conquer. It was the only subject that men talked of, that inflamed both their hearts and their heads, at the public meetings, during the guard-room vigils, and amid the crowds that incessantly gathered in the streets, barring both foot and roadways. Men's minds were carried away by the illusions thus diffused; excessive tension was exposing them to the dangers of generous folly. Quite a crisis of sickly neurosis was already declaring itself, an epidemic fever of exaggerated fears as well as of exaggerated confidence, amid which a mere nothing sufficed to set the human animal loose. In the Rue des Martyrs, Maurice witnessed a scene which passionately excited him--a furious mob rushing to the assault of a lofty house, one of whose upmost windows had remained throughout the night brightly illumined by a lamp, which had evidently been intended as a signal to the Prussians stationed at Bellevue. Haunted by this belief in signals, some citizens virtually lived upon the housetops, watching all that went on around them. On the previous day, too, an unfortunate man had narrowly escaped being drowned in the ornamental water in the Tuileries Garden, because he had spread a map of the city on a seat and consulted it.

All Maurice's confidence in the things in which he had formerly believed was shattered, and he, once so open-minded, was also succumbing to the mania of suspicion. Certainly he no longer despaired as he had done on the night of the panic of Châtillon, when he had anxiously wondered whether the French army would ever regain sufficient virility to fight; no, the sortie of September 30 in the direction of L'Hay and Chevilly, that of October 13 when the Mobiles had carried Bagneux, and that of October 21 when his regiment momentarily secured possession of the park of La Malmaison, had restored all his confidence, that flame of hope which a spark sufficed to rekindle and which consumed him. Although the Prussians had hitherto checked it upon every point, the army had none the less fought valiantly, and it might yet conquer. Maurice's sufferings, however, were caused by Paris itself, which darted from extreme illusion to the deepest discouragement, ever haunted as it was, amid its thirst for victory, by an all-absorbing fear of treachery. After the Emperor and Marshal MacMahon, would not General Trochu and General Ducrot prove commanders of scant ability, unconscious artisans of defeat? The same movement which had swept the Empire away--all the impatience of violent-minded men eager to assume power and save France--was now threatening the Government of National Defence. Jules Favre and its other members were indeed already more unpopular than the fallen ministers of Napoleon III. Since they would not conquer the Prussians, it was their duty to make way for others, for the revolutionaries, who were certain of conquering by decreeing the levée en masse, and by employing the inventors who offered to undermine the suburbs of the city or to annihilate the enemy with a torrent of Greek fire.

On the eve of the rising of October 31 Maurice was thus consumed by that malady of the siege days compounded of distrust and illusion. He now lent a willing ear to fancies at which he would formerly have smiled. Why should they not be realisable? Were not imbecility and crime limitless? Was there not a possibility of a miracle amid all the catastrophes overturning the world? There was a flood of rancour within him which had been gathering since that night when, in front of Mulhausen, he had heard of the disaster of Frœschweiler; and his heart bled at the thought of Sedan--Sedan, that raw wound, still sore, which opened and bled afresh at the tidings of the slightest reverse. Cast into a scaring, nightmare-like existence, no longer knowing if he were yet alive, he still suffered from the shock of each defeat; his physical strength had been impoverished, his head weakened by that long period of hungry days and sleepless nights; and the idea that so much suffering would but lead to another and an irremediable disaster fairly maddened him, transformed him, a man of culture, into a being governed merely by instinct, fallen into childhood once more, and ever swayed and carried away by the impulse of the moment. Anything, everything, destruction, extermination rather than surrender a copper of the fortune or an inch of the territory of France! The evolution at work within him, which, under the blow of the first reverses, had swept away his faith in the Napoleonic legend--that sentimental Bonapartism which he had imbibed from his grandfather's epic narratives--was now reaching completion. He no longer even believed in the theoretical, orderly Republic, he was already inclining to revolutionary violence and to the necessity of terror as the only means of sweeping away the imbeciles and traitors who were butchering their own country. And so he was heart and soul with the insurrectionists on October 31, when such disastrous tidings came pouring upon Paris in fast succession--the loss of Le Bourget, so gallantly carried by the Volunteers of the Press on the night of the 27th; the arrival of M. Thiers at Versailles on his return from his journey to the European capitals, whence he had come, so it was reported, to treat for peace in the name of Napoleon III.; and finally the surrender of Metz, which, after the vague rumours which had been current, now became a frightful certainty, a supreme sledge-hammer blow, another but infinitely more shameful Sedan. And, on the morrow, when Maurice learnt of the occurrences at the Hôtel-de-Ville--the insurrectionists momentarily victorious, the members of the Government detained captive until the small hours of the morning and then only saved by a veering of the population, which, at first exasperated with them, had ultimately become anxious at thought of the triumph of the rising--he regretted the failure of the attempt, the failure to establish that Commune which might possibly have brought them salvation, with its call to arms, and its proclamation of the country in danger arousing all the classical memories of a free people determined not to perish. Thiers, for his part, did not even dare to enter the city, and on the rupture of the negotiations the Parisians all but illuminated.

Then the month of November went by amid feverish impatience. Some trifling engagements were fought, in which Maurice took no part. He was now camping in the direction of St. Ouen, and at each opportunity he applied for leave, to satisfy his incessant craving for news. Like him, Paris was waiting anxiously. Political passions seemed to have been somewhat appeased by the election of the district mayors, though it was noticeable that most of the successful candidates belonged to the extreme parties, an ominous symptom for the future. And that for which Paris was so anxiously waiting during this long lull, was the great sortie so incessantly called for, the sortie which was to bring victory and deliverance. Of this, again, there was not the slightest doubt; they would hurl back the Prussians and pass over them. Preparations were being made on the peninsula of Gennevilliers, the point which was considered most favourable for the projected effort. But one morning there came a fit of mad delight at the good news of Coulmiers--Orleans retaken, the Army of the Loire marching upon Paris, and already camping, it was said, at Etampes. Then everything was changed; the Gennevilliers scheme, Trochu's long meditated plan, was abruptly set aside since it would merely be necessary to join hands with the army of succour across the Marne. The military forces had by this time been reorganised, and three armies had been created--one composed of the battalions of the National Guard under the orders of General Clément Thomas; the second, which General Ducrot was to conduct to the great attack, formed of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Army Corps, reinforced by the best men that could be picked out of the other forces; and finally the third, the reserve army, composed almost entirely of Mobile Guards, and confided to General Vinoy. And when on November 28 Maurice came to bivouac with his regiment--the 115th of the Line--in the wood of Vincennes, he entertained no doubt of the success of the effort. The three corps of the second army were all encamped there, and the men told one another that their appointment with the Army of the Loire was for the morrow at Fontainebleau. Then, immediately afterwards, came the customary ill-luck, the usual blunders, a sudden rising of the Marne which prevented the pontoon-bridges from being thrown across it, and regrettable orders which delayed the movements of the troops. On the following night the 115th of the Line was one of the first regiments to cross the river, and as early as ten o'clock, under a terrible fusillade, Maurice entered the village of Champigny. He was wild with excitement, and his chassepot burnt his fingers despite the bitter cold. Ever since he had been on the march he had had but one desire, to continue going onward like that, onward, ever onward until he met his comrades of the provinces over yonder. But, beyond Champigny and Bry, the army had come upon the park-walls of Cœuilly and Villiers, walls more than five hundred yards in length, which the enemy had transformed into impregnable fortresses. They proved the limit, the obstacle that bravery was powerless to surmount. From that moment all was hesitation and retreat; the third corps' movements having been delayed, the first and second, whose advance was already arrested, continued defending Champigny during a couple of days, but eventually had to abandon it during the night of December 2, having merely achieved a barren victory. That night the whole army returned to encamp under the trees of the wood of Vincennes, which were white with rime; and Maurice, who could no longer even feel his feet, so numbed they were by the cold, lay with his face upon the frozen ground, and wept.

Ah! the sad dreary days which followed after the collapse of that great effort! The great sortie, so long in preparation, the irresistible onslaught which was to have delivered Paris, had failed; and three days later a letter from General von Moltke announced that the Army of the Loire had again been defeated and compelled to abandon Orleans. The fetters encompassing the city were being drawn tighter and tighter, as it were, and henceforth there was no possibility of breaking through them. Yet Paris, in the delirium of despair, seemed to acquire a fresh resistive strength. Famine was beginning to threaten the inhabitants. Since the middle of October meat had been rationed. In December not a beast remained of the great droves of oxen and flocks of sheep which had been turned into the Bois de Boulogne amid the clouds of dust raised by their continuous tramping; and now the horses were being slaughtered. The Government supplies, and the private stores of flour and grain which had been requisitioned, had been calculated to yield sufficient bread for four months. When the flour was all consumed it became necessary to erect mills in the railway stations. There was also a dearth of fuel, and such little as remained was reserved for grinding the grain, baking the bread, and manufacturing weapons. And yet Paris, without gas, with her streets lighted merely by petroleum lamps, few and far between, Paris shivering under her icy mantle, Paris, whose black bread and horseflesh were doled out to her in infinitesimal quantities, continued hoping--hoping despite everything, talking of Faidherbe in the north, of Chanzy on the Loire, and of Bourbaki in the east, as though some prodigy were about to bring these commanders victorious under the ramparts. The crowds which waited in the snow outside the bakers' and butchers' shops still chatted gaily at times over the news of some great imaginary victory. Indeed, after the short fit of despondency which followed upon each defeat, the same tenacious illusions would spring to life again, and flare yet higher and higher among that mass of people whom suffering and hunger filled with hallucinations. One day, a soldier who had spoken of surrender, was almost massacred by the bystanders on the Place du Château d'Eau. The troops, whose courage was exhausted and who felt the end approaching, asked for peace, but the inhabitants still clamoured for the sortie en masse, the torrential sortie, when the entire population, men, women, and even children, were to rush upon the Prussians, like a vast overflowing stream which throws everything down and sweeps it away.

And Maurice now kept apart from his comrades, avoiding them, and experiencing a growing hatred of his soldier's calling which penned him up idle and useless under the shelter of Mont Valérien. And thus he availed himself of every opportunity that presented itself, invented all possible pretexts to obtain leave, and hurried with more haste than ever into that Paris where his heart had fixed its abode. He only found peace of mind when he was in the midst of the thronging masses; he tried to force himself to hope as the mob hoped. He often went to witness the ascent of the balloons which every few days were sent up from the Northern and Orleans railway stations, with a freight of carrier pigeons, despatches, and letters. The balloons ascended and were lost to sight in the cheerless wintry sky; and the hearts of the onlookers became heavy with anguish whenever the wind wafted them in the direction of Germany. Many of them must have been lost. Maurice had written twice to his sister Henriette, but he did not know if she had received his letters. His recollections of her and of Jean were now so far away from him, in the depths of that vast world whence nothing came, that he now thought of those dear ones but seldom, and then as of affections which he had left behind him in some other life. There was no room for them in his being now, it was filled to overflowing with the ceaseless tempest of despondency and excitement amid which he lived. Then, in the early days of January, he found fresh food for his exasperation in the bombardment of the districts on the left bank of the Seine. He had ended by ascribing the dilatoriness of the Germans in this respect to humanitarian reasons, though it was simply due to the difficulties they encountered in conveying their siege-guns through France and getting them into position. And now that a shell had killed two little girls at the Val-de-Grâce hospital, Maurice felt unbounded scorn and hatred for those barbarians who murdered children and threatened to burn down the public museums and libraries. However, after the first few days of fright, Paris had resumed, under the bombs, its life of unfaltering heroism.

Since the reverse of Champigny, there had only been one more abortive attempt at a sortie, made in the direction of Le Bourget, and on the evening when the plateau of Avron had to be evacuated, under the fire of the heavy guns pounding away at the forts, Maurice shared the violent fit of exasperation which spread throughout the city. At this juncture the growing discontent which threatened to sweep away General Trochu and the Government of National Defence acquired such intensity that the rulers of the city were compelled to attempt a supreme and hopeless effort. Why indeed did they refuse to lead the three hundred thousand National Guards into the field, the National Guards who did not cease offering themselves and claiming their share of peril? It was the torrential sortie clamoured for since the very outset, Paris opening her flood-gates and drowning the Prussians beneath the colossal torrent of her people. Despite the certainty of a fresh defeat, it became necessary to accede to this gallant prayer; but in order to limit the slaughter, the commanders contented themselves with adjoining to the regular troops the fifty-nine marching battalions of the National Guard. And the eve of January 19 was like a fête: an enormous crowd thronged the Boulevards and the Champs-Elysées, watching the regiments as they marched along headed by their bands, and singing patriotic refrains. Children and women accompanied them, and men sprang upon the benches to shout their ardent prayers for victory. Then, on the morrow, the entire population betook itself to the neighbourhood of the Arc-de-Triomphe, and a wild hope inflamed it when in the course of the morning the tidings arrived of the occupation of Montretout. Epic-like narratives circulated concerning the irresistible dash of the National Guards; the Prussians were overcome, Versailles itself would be captured before the evening. And then, what a collapse there was when the inevitable repulse became known at nightfall! Whilst the left wing of the army was occupying Montretout, the central column, after making its way beyond the outer wall of Buzenval Park, was shattered in its efforts to carry a second inner wall which it encountered. There had been a thaw, moreover, a persistent fine rain had drenched the roads, and the guns, those guns cast by public subscription, the pride and the hope of Paris, were unable to come up. On the right, too, General Ducrot's column, brought into action much too late, was still lagging into the rear. The effort could be carried no further, and General Trochu had to give orders for a general retreat. Montretout was abandoned, St. Cloud was abandoned and set on fire by the Prussians. And when black night had fallen the whole horizon was illumined by the glow of that immense conflagration.

This time Maurice himself felt that it was all over. During four hours, under the galling fire from the Prussian entrenchments, he had remained in the park of Buzenval with some of the National Guards, whose courage he greatly praised when he returned into the city a few days afterwards. They had indeed conducted themselves bravely. That being so, was not the defeat necessarily due to the imbecility and treachery of the commanders? In the Rue de Rivoli he met bands of men shouting 'Down with Trochu!' and 'Vive la Commune!' Another awakening of the revolutionary passions had come, a fresh propulsion of public opinion of such a disquieting character that, to avoid being swept away, the Government of National Defence thought it necessary to compel General Trochu to resign his command and set General Vinoy in his place. That same day, at a public meeting at Belleville, Maurice again heard a demand for an attack en masse. It was a mad idea, and he knew it, yet his heart again began beating more rapidly, in presence of this obstinate resolve to fight and conquer. When all is ended, should not the impossible be attempted? Throughout the night he dreamt of prodigies.

Then another long week went by. Paris was suffering uncomplainingly. The shops were no longer opened, the few foot passengers no longer met a single vehicle in the deserted streets. Forty thousand horses had been eaten; dogs, cats, and rats were fetching high prices. Since the dearth of wheat had set in, the bread, partially compounded of rice and oats, was black, viscous, and difficult of digestion; and the interminable 'waits' outside the bakers' shops to obtain the three hundred grammes of bread[50] to which each person's daily ration was limited, were becoming mortal. Ah! those grievous 'waits' of the siege days, those poor women shivering under the downpour, with their feet in the icy slush--all the heroic wretchedness of the great city still bent upon not surrendering. The death-rate had increased threefold,[51] the theatres had been turned into ambulances. At nightfall the once luxurious fashionable quarters fell into a dreary quietness, into dense obscurity, like districts of some accursed city smitten by pestilence. And amid the silence and obscurity, you heard but the far-off, continuous crash of the bombardment, and saw but the flashes of the guns setting the wintry sky aglow.

All at once, on January 26, Paris became aware that for a couple of days past Jules Favre had been negotiating with Count von Bismarck for an armistice; and at the same time it learnt that there only remained sufficient bread for another ten days, barely the period requisite for the revictualling of the city. Capitulation had become a brutal necessity. In its stupor at thus at last learning the truth, Paris mournfully allowed the Government to act as it listed. That same day, at midnight, the last cannon shot was fired. And, on the 29th, when the Germans had occupied the forts, Maurice came inside the ramparts with the 115th and encamped in the neighbourhood of Montrouge. Then began an aimless kind of life, made up of idleness and feverish unrest. Discipline was greatly relaxed, the soldiers disbanded and roamed about, waiting to be sent home again. He, however, remained in a wild excited state, prompt to taking offence at the slightest provocation, his disquietude ever ready to turn into exasperation. He devoured the revolutionary newspapers, and that three weeks' armistice, concluded for the sole purpose of allowing France to elect an Assembly which was to pronounce upon the conclusion of peace or the continuance of war, seemed to him a delusion and a snare, a final, supreme act of treachery. Even if Paris were forced to capitulate, he, like Gambetta, was in favour of continuing the war on the Loire and in the North. The disasters which overtook the Army of the East, forgotten, compelled to take refuge in Switzerland, enraged him. And then the result of the elections brought his fury to a climax; it was just as he had foreseen, the cowardly provinces, irritated by the resistance of Paris, hankered for peace at any price, so that they might bring back the monarchy, even under the Prussian guns. After the first sittings of the Assembly at Bordeaux, Thiers, elected in six-and-twenty departments, chosen chief of the executive by acclamation, became in his eyes a monster, the man of every lie and every crime. And nothing could now calm him--the peace which was concluded by the monarchical Assembly seemed to him a climax of shame; he became delirious at the mere thought of those harsh conditions, the indemnity of five milliards of francs, Metz given up, Alsace abandoned, the gold and the blood of France pouring forth from that wound opened in her flank, and never to be healed!

Then, during the last days of February, Maurice made up his mind to desert. One clause of the treaty specified that the soldiers encamped in Paris should be disarmed and sent home. He did not wait for this, however; it seemed to him that it would rend his heart asunder if he were compelled to quit that glorious Paris, which hunger alone had been able to subdue. So he took himself off, and rented, in a six-storeyed house in the Rue des Orties, atop of the Butte des Moulins,[52] a little furnished room, akin to a belvedere, whence he could gaze over the sea of roofs and chimneys, from the Tuileries to the Bastille. An old fellow-student of the Law School had lent him a hundred francs. Moreover, as soon as he had secured a lodging, he entered himself in one of the battalions of the National Guard, resolved to content himself with the pay of a franc and a half per day allowed to the citizen soldiery. The idea of leading a quiet, egotistical life in the provinces horrified him. Even the letters which he received from his sister Henriette, to whom he had written directly the armistice was concluded, angered him with their pressing entreaties, the ardent desire they expressed that he would come and rest at Remilly. He refused to do so--he would only go there later on, when no Prussians were left there.

And Maurice now led a vagabond, lazy life, in a state of increasing feverishness. He no longer suffered from hunger; he had devoured the first white bread he could procure with delight. Paris, where there had never been any dearth either of wine or brandy, was now living in plenty, sinking, too, into incorrigible dipsomania. Still, it was always a prison, with its gates guarded by the Germans, and so many complicated formalities in force that people were unable to leave. There had as yet been no resumption of social life; there was still no work, no business transactions were engaged in, and cooped within the ramparts there was a whole people waiting in suspense and doing nothing, losing its last habits of regular, orderly life, whilst it vegetated in the bright sunshine of that budding springtime. During the siege there had at least been the military service to tire men's limbs and occupy their minds, whereas now the population, in the isolation in which it still found itself, had all at once slipped into a life of absolute idleness. Maurice, like most others, lounged about from morn to eve, breathing the vitiated atmosphere, now thoroughly impregnated with all the germs of madness which for months past had been ascending from the mob. The unlimited liberty which prevailed completed the universal destruction. Maurice read the papers, attended the public meetings, shrugged his shoulders at the more preposterous speeches, but, nevertheless, returned home with his brain full of violent ideas, ready to engage in any desperate deed for the defence of what he believed to be truth and justice. And in his little room, whence he overlooked the city, he still indulged in dreams of victory, telling himself that France, the Republic, might yet be saved, so long as the treaty of peace was not finally signed.

The Prussians were to enter Paris on March 1, and when this became known a long howl of execration and wrath went up from every heart. Maurice never attended a public meeting now without hearing the Assembly, Thiers, and the Men of the Fourth of September charged with the responsibility of this crowning affront, from which, it was asserted, they had not tried to spare the heroic city.[53] He himself became so frenzied one evening that he made a speech and shouted that all Paris ought to go and die upon the ramparts, rather than allow a single Prussian to enter the capital. Amid this population, maddened by long months of misery and hunger, reduced to absolute idleness, unable to shake off its painful thoughts, consumed by suspicion, and fearful of phantoms of its own creation, the insurrectionary movement grew and spread, made all its preparations in the full light of day. It was one of those moral crises which have followed upon all great sieges, when excessive patriotism, deceived in its hopes and expectations, after vainly inflaming men's minds, becomes changed into a blind longing for violence and destruction. The Central Committee, elected by the delegates of the National Guard, had just protested against any attempt at disarming the citizen soldiery. A great demonstration had followed on the Place de la Bastille, with red flags, incendiary speeches, an immense concourse of people, and, as a climax, the murder of a wretched detective, who was flung into the canal and stoned until he drowned. And forty-eight hours later, on the night of February 26, Maurice, aroused by the beating of the 'assembly' and the ringing of the tocsin, met bands of men and women dragging cannon along the Boulevard des Batignolles. And he too, with a score of other men, harnessed himself to one of the guns, on hearing that the people had been to fetch this artillery from the Place Wagram, so that the Assembly might not hand it over to the Prussians. There were altogether a hundred and seventy pieces, and for lack of horses the people dragged them along with ropes, pushed them with their fists till they brought them to the summit of Montmartre, with the fierce impetuosity of some barbarian horde saving its idols from destruction. When on March 1 the Prussians had to content themselves with occupying the district of the Champs-Elysées, penned up there within barriers like a herd of anxious conquerors, Paris put on a lugubrious aspect and did not stir; its streets were deserted, its houses closed--the whole city remained lifeless, shrouded, as it were, in a huge veil of mourning.

Two more weeks went by, and Maurice no longer knew how he was living during this long wait for the indeterminate, monstrous something whose approach he could divine. Peace was now definitely concluded, the Assembly was to take up its quarters at Versailles on March 20; but to Maurice it seemed that nothing was yet ended, that some frightful revanche was at hand. Whilst he was dressing on the morning of March 18, he received a letter from Henriette, in which she again begged him to join her at Remilly, affectionately threatening to go to fetch him if he should delay his coming much longer. And then she referred to Jean, and related how, after leaving her at the end of December to join the Army of the North, he had fallen ill of a low fever and had been nursed in a Belgian hospital; and he had written to her, only the previous week, to say that in spite of his weakness he was about to start for Paris with the intention of seeking active service again. Henriette concluded by asking her brother to give her full particulars concerning Jean as soon as he had seen him. Then Maurice, with this letter lying open before his eyes, fell into a tender reverie. Henriette, Jean, his fondly loved sister, his brother bound to him by ties of mutual misery and succour; ah! how far those dear ones were from his daily thoughts, now that the tempest was ever raging within him!

However, as his sister informed him that she had been unable to give Jean his address in the Rue des Orties, he determined to try and find his friend that same day, by applying at the War Office. But he was barely out of the house, just crossing the Rue St. Honoré in fact, when two comrades of his battalion acquainted him with what had happened during the night and early morning at Montmartre. And all three then started off thither at the double-quick, half out of their senses.

Ah! that 18th of March, with what fatal excitement did it inflame Maurice! Later on he could not clearly remember what he had done or said that day. Looking backward, he first beheld himself galloping along in a state of fury--fury at thought of the surprise which the troops had attempted that morning before daybreak, with the view of recapturing the guns of Montmartre, and thus disarming Paris. Evidently enough, Thiers, who had recently arrived from Bordeaux, had for two days past been planning this stroke, the object of which was to enable the Assembly to proclaim the monarchy at Versailles. Next Maurice beheld himself at Montmartre at about nine o'clock, fired by the narratives of victory which were recounted to him--how the troops had come stealing up in the darkness; how the arrival of the teams which were to have removed the guns had been delayed; how the National Guards had thereupon rushed to arms; and how the soldiers, loth to fire on women and children, had eventually hoisted the butt-ends of their chassepots and fraternised with the people. Then he beheld himself roaming through Paris at random, already realising by midday that the city belonged to the Commune, although there had been no battle. Thiers and the ministers, however, had fled from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where they had been assembled in council, the Government rushed helter-skelter to Versailles, and the thirty thousand troops of the garrison were led away in all haste, though not without leaving over five thousand deserters on the road. Then Maurice beheld himself at about half-past five at a corner on the outer Boulevards, loitering among a group of ruffians and listening without any feeling of indignation to the abominable story of the murder of Generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas. Generals, indeed! He remembered those of Sedan, incapable humbugs who only thought of taking all the blanket to themselves! One the more or one the less, verily, that was a matter of little consequence! And he had spent the remainder of the day in the same wildly excited state, no longer capable of seeing things as they really were, transported by this insurrection which the very paving stones seemed to have favoured, which, in the unforeseen fatality of its triumph, had spread and at one stroke secured power, placing the Hôtel-de-Ville, at ten o'clock that same night, in the hands of the members of the Central Committee, who were amazed to find themselves assembled there.

Confused as were these memories in Maurice's mind, he retained a precise recollection of one incident--his unexpected meeting with Jean. The latter had reached Paris three days previously, penniless, still wan and enfeebled by the fever which during two long months had kept him in a hospital at Brussels; and meeting a former captain of his old regiment, Captain Ravaud, he had at once joined the company which this officer now commanded in the 124th of the Line. He had secured his old rank of corporal, and on the evening of the insurrection he had just left the Prince-Eugène barracks with his squad, the last of the regiment, in view of reaching the left bank of the Seine, where the entire army had received orders to concentrate, when he and his men were suddenly stopped by the crowd assembled on the Boulevard St. Martin. Shouts were raised, and there was a talk of disarming the soldiers. With perfect coolness, however, Jean requested the mob to let him alone; all this business did not concern him, said he; he simply wished to carry out his orders without hurting anyone. But all at once a glad cry of surprise rang out, and Maurice, who was among the crowd and had drawn near, threw himself on his friend's neck, embracing him fraternally.

'What! is it you?' said the young fellow, 'My sister wrote to me about you, and I wished to go to the Ministry this morning to inquire after you.'

Big tears of joy had gathered in Jean's eyes. 'Ah! my poor youngster; how pleased I am to see you!' he replied. 'I myself have been wanting to find you, but where could I go and look for you in this confounded big place?'

The crowd, meantime, was still growling angrily, and Maurice turned round to appease it. 'Let me talk to them, citizens!' said he. 'They are good fellows and I'll answer for them.' Then, grasping his friend's hands, he added in a lower voice: 'You will stay with us, won't you?'

Jean's face assumed an expression of deep surprise. 'Stay with you--what do you mean?'

Then for a moment he listened to Maurice while the latter railed against the Government and the army, recalled all that they had suffered together in past times, and explained that the people was at last about to become the master and would punish both traitors and cowards and save the Republic. And by degrees, as Jean strove to understand it all, his calm peasant's face darkened with increasing sorrow: 'Ah! no, no, youngster, I can't stay, if it's for such fine work as that--besides, my captain ordered me to take my men to Vaugirard, and I am going there. If thunderbolts were falling, there I should go all the same. It's only natural, you know it is, yourself.' He had begun to laugh in his simple way, and added: 'It's you that must come with us.'

But with a gesture of furious dissent Maurice released his hold on Jean's hands. And for a few seconds they stood there face to face--one a prey to all the exasperation born of that fit of insanity which had taken possession of Paris, that malady of distant origin, sprung from the bad leaven of the late reign; the other, strong in his practical common-sense and ignorance, still healthy because he had grown apart in the soil of labour and thrift. Yet they were brothers, a strong tie bound them together, and they felt as though they were being wrenched asunder when a swaying of the crowd suddenly parted them.

'Till we meet again, Maurice!'

'Till we meet again, Jean!'

It was a regiment of infantry, the 79th of the Line, which, debouching in a compact mass from a side street, had just thrown the mob back upon the footways. There was again some shouting and hooting, but none were bold enough to bar the road to the soldiers, whose officers were urging them along. And the little squad of the 124th, thus extricated from the mob, was able to follow in the wake of the regiment without further hindrance.

'Till we meet again, Jean!'

'Till we meet again, Maurice!'

Again did they wave their hands, yielding to the fatality of that violent parting, but with their hearts still full of one another.

During the ensuing days Maurice at first forgot this incident, so absorbing were the extraordinary events which now followed one upon another in fast succession. On the 19th Paris awoke without a Government; still, it was more surprised than frightened on learning how panic had carried off the army, the public services, and the ministers to Versailles during the night; and, as the weather was magnificent that fine March Sunday, the city simply streamed into the streets to gaze at the barricades. A large white placard emanating from the Central Committee, and convoking the population for the Communal elections, appeared a very sensible production. People merely expressed surprise at finding it signed by names so utterly unknown. At the dawn of the Commune, indeed, Paris, in the bitter memory of all that it had suffered, in the suspicions also which ever haunted it, was hostile to Versailles. Absolute anarchy, moreover, prevailed; the district mayors and the Central Committee contending for authority, and the former making ineffectual efforts at conciliation, whilst the latter, as yet uncertain whether it could rely upon the entire federated National Guard, modestly limited its demands to municipal liberty. The shots fired at the pacific demonstration of the Place Vendôme, the few victims who then fell, staining the pavement with their blood, sent the first thrill of terror circulating through the city. And whilst the triumphant insurrection was at last taking possession of all the ministries and public departments, equal rage and alarm prevailed at Versailles, where the Government was hastily gathering together sufficient military forces to repel the attack which it felt to be imminent. The most reliable troops of the armies of the North and of the Loire were speedily summoned; and, ten days having sufficed to collect a force of nearly eighty thousand men, confidence returned so rapidly that already on April 2 a couple of divisions opened hostilities by taking the suburbs of Puteaux and Courbevoie from the Federals.[54]

It was only on the morrow that Maurice, who had set out with his battalion to effect the capture of Versailles, again beheld Jean's sorrowful countenance rise up amid his feverish souvenirs. The attack of the Versaillese had stupefied and exasperated the National Guard, and three columns of the latter, some fifty thousand men, had poured forth from Paris early that morning, rushing towards Versailles by way of Bougival and Meudon with the design of seizing the monarchical Assembly and the murderer Thiers! 'Twas the torrential sortie, the sortie so ardently demanded during the siege, and Maurice wondered where he should again see Jean, whether it would not be over yonder among the corpses on the battlefield? But the rout came too promptly for his surmises; his battalion had barely reached the Plateau des Bergères, on the road to Reuil, when some shells, fired from the fort of Mont Valérien, fell among the ranks. For a moment perfect stupor prevailed; some of the men had imagined that the fort was held by their comrades, whilst others averred that the commander had promised that he would not fire. Then a mad terror took possession of the Federals, the battalions disbanded and scurried back into Paris, whilst the head of the column, cut off by a turning movement which General Vinoy promptly effected, only reached Reuil to be cut to pieces there.

Maurice, who had escaped from the slaughter unharmed, and was thrilled with the emotion of fighting, now nourished intense hatred for that so-called government of law and order, which, beaten by the Prussians in every encounter, could only muster up courage to conquer Paris. And the German armies were still there, encamped on the north-eastern side of the city from St. Denis to Charenton, and gazing on that fine spectacle of a nation's Downfall! In the gloomy passion for destruction which was gaining upon him, Maurice approved of the first violent measures to which the Commune resorted, the erection of barricades in the streets and squares, the arrest of the hostages, the Archbishop, the priests, and the ex-functionaries. Atrocities were already being perpetrated on either side; Versailles shot its prisoners, whilst Paris decreed that for the head of each of its soldiers the heads of three hostages should fall; and the little reason which Maurice still retained, after so many shocks and so much havoc, was speedily swept away by the blast of fury now blowing from every side. In his eyes the Commune appeared as the Avenger of all the shame and degradation that had been endured, as the Liberator armed with the knife to amputate and the flame to purify. All this was not quite clear in his mind; the cultured being yet lingering within him merely evoked the old classical memories of triumphant free cities, and federations of rich provinces imposing their will upon the world. Should Paris prove victorious, he pictured her crowned with an aureole of glory, building up a new France where justice and liberty would reign supreme, and organising a new society after first sweeping away the rotten remnants of the old. To tell the truth, when the elections were over, he felt some surprise on reading the names of the members of the Commune; so extraordinary was the mingling of Moderates, Revolutionaries, and Socialists of all sects, to whom the mighty task was confided. He knew several of these men, and esteemed them to be of very limited attainments. And would not even the best of them come into collision and neutralise one another's efforts, representing as they did such conflicting principles? However, on the day when the Commune was solemnly installed in office at the Hôtel-de-Ville, whilst the guns were booming and the trophies of red flags were flapping in the breeze, he strove to forget everything, buoyed up once more by boundless hope. And, fanned by the lies of some and the unquestioning faith of others, his illusions were all revived in this acute stage of his malady, which was now fast reaching a climax.

Maurice spent the entire month of April in the neighbourhood of Neuilly, firing away at the Versaillese. The spring was an early one, and the lilacs were already blooming; they fought amid the tender greenery of the villa gardens, and some National Guards would return home at nightfall with nosegays in their gun-barrels. The troops assembled at Versailles were now so numerous that they had been divided into two armies, the first actively engaged under Marshal MacMahon, and the second forming a reserve force, commanded by General Vinoy. The Commune, on its side, had about one hundred thousand mobilised National Guards, and nearly as many men in the sedentary battalions, but of all these not more than fifty thousand really fought. And day by day the plan of the Versaillese became more and more evident; after taking Neuilly they had occupied the château of Bécon and then Asnières, but simply with a view of bringing the line of investment closer to the city, which they purposed entering by the Point-du-Jour, as soon as they could force the rampart there by means of the converging fire of Mont-Valérien and the fort of Issy. Mont-Valérien belonged to them, and all their efforts were directed towards capturing the fort of Issy, in attacking which they availed themselves of some of the works which had been thrown up by the Prussians during the late siege.

After the middle of April the cannonade and fusillade went on without a pause. At Levallois and Neuilly an endless combat was kept up, a skirmishing fire which rattled uninterruptedly by day and night alike. Heavy guns, mounted upon armour-plated carriages, travelled along the circular railway line, and fired over the roofs of Levallois at Asnières. But it was at Vanves and at Issy that the cannonade proved fiercest, all the window-panes on that side of Paris rattled as they had done during the most terrible days of the German siege. And on May 9, when, after a first alert, the fort of Issy finally fell into the possession of the Versaillese, the defeat of the Commune became a certainty, and a fit of panic impelled its members to the most evil resolutions.

Maurice approved of the creation of a Committee of Public Safety. Pages of history returned to his mind; had not the hour struck for energetic measures to be adopted if the country were to be saved? Of all the many acts of violence, there was but one which wrung his heart with a secret anguish--the destruction of the Vendôme Column. In vain did he reproach himself for this feeling, this childish weakness as he deemed it; his grandfather's voice still rang in his ears telling him tales of battle--Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Wagram, the Moskowa--all those epic narratives which thrilled him yet. But it was different when the question was one of demolishing the house of that murderer, Thiers, of detaining the hostages as a guarantee and a menace, for were not acts like these fitting reprisals now that the rage of Versailles against Paris had increased to such a pitch that the city was being bombarded, and that shells were plunging through the house-roofs and killing women? That sombre longing for destruction mounted to his brain as the end of his dream drew nigh. If the principle of justice and retribution were destined to be annihilated in bloodshed might the ground open and everything be transformed by one of those cosmical convulsions that have renewed the life of the world! Might Paris fall, burn like a huge sacrificial pyre rather than be again delivered over to its vice and its misery, to that old rotten social system that had ever upheld abominable injustice! And he dreamed another great gloomy dream--the giant city reduced to cinders, naught left but smoking embers on both banks of the river, a nameless, unparalleled catastrophe whence a new people would arise. And thus he took a more and more feverish interest in the wild reports which circulated: whole districts undermined, the catacombs chokefull of gunpowder, everything ready to blow up the public monuments; electric wires connecting the mines so that a single spark would at the same moment ignite them all; vast stores of inflammable products gathered together, especially petroleum, enough to turn the streets and squares into rivers and seas of flame. The Commune had sworn it--if the Versaillese should enter the city, not one of them would pass beyond the barricades blocking the crossways, the pavements would open, the edifices would crumble, Paris would flare from end to end and swallow up a world!

And if Maurice began clinging to this wild dream, it was because of his secret discontent with the Commune itself. He despaired of the men composing it, felt them to be incompetent, pulled this way and that by conflicting views and interests, growing more and more exasperated, losing their heads, and lapsing into imbecility as their peril gradually increased. Of all the social reforms to which the Commune was pledged, it had been unable to realise a single one; and it was already certain that it would leave no durable work behind it. But the great evil from which it suffered was the rivalry tearing it asunder, the mutual suspicion which consumed each of its members. Many of them, the Moderates, the timid ones, had already ceased taking any part in the deliberations. The others acted on the spur of the moment, as events might suggest, trembled at the prospect of a possible dictatorship, had reached indeed that phase when the factions of revolutionary assemblies exterminate one another in the hope of saving the Commonwealth. After Cluseret, after Dombrowski, it became Rossel's turn to be suspected. Delescluze, appointed civil delegate at War, could himself do nothing, despite his great authority. And on the other hand the social effort, of which there had been just a faint glimpse, subsided to insignificance, proved utterly abortive amid the hourly increasing isolation of these men, rendered powerless by dissension and reduced to acts of despair.

Terror was rising in Paris. Irritated, at first, against Versailles, shuddering at memory of the sufferings of the siege, the city was now detaching itself from the Commune. The compulsory enrolment, the decree incorporating every man under forty years of age in the insurrectionary forces, had angered people of calm minds and caused a flight en masse; some folks went off by way of St. Denis, disguised and provided with spurious Alsatian passports,[55] others with the help of ropes and ladders let themselves down into the ditch of the fortifications on dark nights. The wealthy people of the middle class had long since taken themselves off. Not a factory, not a workshop had reopened its doors. There was no trade, no work, the old life of idleness continued during that anxious wait for the inevitable ending. And the people--the poorer classes--still lived upon the paltry pay allowed to each National Guard--that franc and a half per diem paid from the millions which were now being requisitioned from the Bank of France, that franc and a half for the sake of which alone many men still continued fighting, and which was really one of the primary causes, the why and wherefore of the insurrection. Entire districts had become depopulated, the shops were shut, the house-fronts lifeless. And in the deserted streets under the warm sun of that lovely month of May, there was nothing to look at but the funerals of Federals who had been killed in action--processions unaccompanied by any priest, but fraught with a barbaric pomp, the hearses draped with red flags and followed by crowds wearing 'button-holes' of immortelles. The churches, closed for purposes of worship, became transformed every evening into political club-rooms. Only revolutionary newspapers were published, all the others had been suppressed. And all this was tantamount to the destruction of Paris, that great, ill-fated Paris which, like the Republican capital it was, still retained a feeling of repulsion for the Assembly, even while its terror of the Commune, and its impatience to be delivered from it, grew and spread amid all the alarming rumours that circulated--rumours of the daily arrest of hostages, and of barrels of gunpowder lowered into the sewers, where men were said to watch with lighted torches waiting for a signal.

And at this stage Maurice, who hitherto had never been inclined to drink, found himself caught and submerged as it were in the universal intoxication. At present, when he was on duty at some advanced post or spent the night in a guard-room, it frequently happened that he accepted a nip of brandy. And if he took a second nip excitement followed, fanned by the breath of his comrades as it blew past his face, reeking with alcoholic fumes. The drunkenness had become chronic, an all-invading epidemic, bequeathed by the first siege, aggravated by the second; for if the population had lacked bread it had always possessed brandy and wine in profusion, and had so saturated itself with drink, that the merest drop now sufficed to make it delirious. For the first time in his life, on the evening of Sunday, May 21, Maurice came back drunk to his lodging in the Rue des Orties, where he still slept from time to time. He had again spent the day at Neuilly, firing at the Versaillese and drinking with his comrades in the hope of surmounting the intense weariness which was overpowering him. Then with his head in a fog and his limbs exhausted, he had come and thrown himself on the bed in his little room, led thither by instinct, for he never remembered how he had managed to make the journey. And on the following morning the sun was already high in the heavens when the tumult of alarm bells, drums, and bugles at last aroused him. On the previous evening, finding a gate of the ramparts at the Point-du-Jour abandoned, the Versaillese had entered Paris unopposed.

Hastily dressing, and taking his gun, which he slung over his shoulder, Maurice went down into the street, and, scarcely had he reached the district municipal offices, when a cluster of scared comrades whom he met there acquainted him with the events of the evening and the night, in so confused a way, however, that it was at first difficult for him to understand the position. The fort of Issy and the great battery at Montretout had been pounding away at the ramparts for ten days past, and with such effect that the St. Cloud gate of the fortifications had at last become untenable. An assault had therefore been resolved upon, and was to have taken place on the morning of May 22. But on the afternoon of the 21st, at about five o'clock, a passer-by, seeing that nobody remained guarding the St. Cloud gate, simply beckoned to the Versaillese posted in the trenches, which were scarcely fifty yards away. Two companies of the 37th of the Line thereupon at once entered the city, and behind them followed the whole of the Fourth Corps, commanded by General Douay. The troops poured into Paris in a ceaseless stream throughout the night. At seven in the evening General Vergé's division set out towards the Grenelle bridge, and even pushed forward as far as the Trocadéro. At nine o'clock General Clinchant captured Passy and La Muette. At three in the morning the First Corps was camping in the Bois de Boulogne; and at about the same hour General Bruat's division crossed the Seine to carry the Sèvres gate and facilitate the entrance of the Second Corps, which, under the orders of General de Cissey, occupied the Grenelle district an hour later. Thus on the morning of the 22nd the army of Versailles held the Trocadéro and La Muette on the right bank of the river, and Grenelle on the left bank; and this to the stupor, wrath, and consternation of the Commune, whose members were already accusing one another of treachery in their agony at the idea that annihilation was now inevitable.

This, too, was Maurice's first feeling when he at last understood the situation. The end had come, and no course remained but to meet death boldly. Meantime, however, the alarm bells were pealing, the drums were beating more loudly, women and even children were helping to build barricades, and the streets were filling with all the feverish stir and bustle of the battalions hastily assembled and hurrying to their posts of combat. And at midday hope again sprang from the breasts of the excited, determined soldiers of the Commune when they found that the Versaillese had scarcely stirred from their positions. This army, which they had feared to find at the Tuileries in a couple of hours' time, manœuvred with extraordinary caution, profiting by the stern lessons of defeat, and exaggerating the tactics which it had learnt at such dire cost from the Germans.[56] Meantime the Committee of Public Safety, and Delescluze, the delegate at War, organised and directed the defence from their quarters at the Hôtel-de-Ville. It was noised abroad that they had disdainfully repulsed a supreme attempt at conciliation. These tidings inflamed the courage of their partisans; the triumph of Paris once more seemed assured, and on all sides the resistance was to be as fierce as the attack had been implacable--such was the hatred, fed by lies and atrocities, which burnt in the hearts of either army.

Maurice spent that day in the neighbourhood of the Champ de Mars and the Invalides, falling back slowly from street to street whilst firing upon the troops. He had not been able to find his own battalion, and was fighting in company with some comrades who were strangers to him, and who had led him to the left bank of the river without his even noticing it. Towards four o'clock they defended a barricade blocking the Rue de l'Université, at the point where it reaches the Esplanade des Invalides; and they did not abandon this position until the twilight fell and they learned that Bruat's division, stealing along by way of the quay, had secured possession of the Corps Législatif. As it was, they narrowly escaped being caught, and only reached the Rue de Lille with great difficulty, after making a long round through the Rue St. Dominique and the Rue Bellechasse. When night fell the army of Versailles occupied a line starting from the Vanves gate, on the left bank of the Seine, and passing by way of the Corps Législatif across the river to the Elysée palace, the church of St. Augustin, and the St. Lazare railway station, until it finally reached the Asnières gate on the north-west.

It was the morrow, May 23, a beautiful spring Tuesday, bright with warm sunshine, which proved the terrible day for Maurice. The few hundred Federals of various battalions, among whom he found himself, still held the whole district from the quay to the Rue St. Dominique. Most of them, however, had bivouacked in the gardens of the large mansions lining the Rue de Lille, and he himself had fallen fast asleep on a lawn adjoining the palace of the Legion of Honour. He fancied that the troops would emerge from the Corps Législatif at dawn to drive him and his comrades behind the strong barricades which had been thrown up in the Rue du Bac, but several hours went by and there were no signs of an attack. The combatants merely continued exchanging random shots from one to the other end of the streets. All this, however, formed part of the plan of the Versaillese, which was now being slowly, cautiously carried out. Firmly resolved not to attempt a front attack upon the formidable fortress into which the insurgents had converted the Tuileries terrace, they had decided upon a double advance along the ramparts on either side of the river in view of capturing Montmartre on the north and the Observatory on the south to begin with, and thence swooping down upon the city, surrounding the central quarters and seizing upon them at one great stroke. Towards two o'clock Maurice heard a comrade say that the tricolour flag was waving over Montmartre. Simultaneously attacked by three army corps, whose battalions had climbed the height on its northern and western sides, the great battery of the Galette windmill had been captured; and the victors were now streaming down into Paris, carrying in turn the Place St. Georges, the church of Notre Dame de Lorette, the municipal offices in the Rue Drouot, and the Grand Opera House; whilst on the left bank the turning movement, starting from the Montparnasse Cemetery, was now reaching the Place d'Enfer and the Horse Market. At these tidings of the rapid progress made by the army the Communists gave way to stupor, wrath, and fright. What! Montmartre had been carried in a couple of hours--Montmartre, the glorious, impregnable citadel of the insurrection! Maurice noticed that the ranks were thinning around him, that trembling comrades were slinking away to wash their hands and slip on a blouse, in their fear of the troops' reprisals. It was rumoured, too, that they would soon be turned by way of the Croix-Rouge crossway, the attack on which was now being prepared. The barricades in the Rue Martignac and the Rue Bellechasse had already been carried, and the insurgents were beginning to espy the red trousers of the soldiers at the end of the Rue de Lille. And now the Communist force upon this point became limited to the men of conviction, the desperate ones; Maurice and some fifty others who were resolved to die after killing as many as possible of those bloodthirsty Versaillese who treated the Federals as bandits, dragging those whom they made prisoners to the rear of their line of battle and shooting them down there. Since the previous day the execrable feelings of hatred animating either side had yet increased; it was now a war of extermination between those rebels dying for their dream, and that army hot with reactionary passions and exasperated at still having to fight.

At about five o'clock, whilst Maurice and his comrades were finally retreating to seek the shelter of the barricades in the Rue du Bac, making their way from door to door down the Rue de Lille and still firing as they went, the young fellow suddenly perceived a mass of dense black smoke pouring out of an open window of the palace of the Legion of Honour. It was the first of the conflagrations kindled in Paris; and in the furious insanity that now possessed him he experienced a fierce delight. The hour had come: might the whole city flare like a huge sacrificial pyre, might fire purify the world! But all at once he was overcome with astonishment. Five or six men had just rushed out of the palace, led by a big fellow in whom he recognised Chouteau, his former comrade in the 106th of the Line. Maurice had caught sight of the scamp once before, just after the 18th of March, when he was already wearing the gold-laced cap of an officer. Since then he must have risen in rank, for his uniform was now covered with galloons. Maybe he was attached to the staff of some Communist general who shirked fighting; and indeed Maurice suddenly remembered that a comrade had told him various anecdotes of this fellow Chouteau, who had been quartered at this very palace of the Legion of Honour, where in the company of his mistress he had led a life of continual jollity, lying booted and spurred in the sumptuous beds, and smashing the plate-glass mirrors with shots from his revolver just by way of a lark. It was asserted, too, that his mistress, under pretence of going to market, drove out every morning in a gala carriage, in which she carried away bales of linen, clocks, and even articles of furniture. Thus, when Maurice caught sight of the rogue running away with his men, and still carrying a can of petroleum, he experienced a sensation of uneasiness, a frightful doubt, a wavering of all the blind faith which had been buoying him up. Was it possible that the great work could be evil, since it had such a man as Chouteau for its artisan?

Several hours elapsed and still he fought, but in a distressful fashion, conscious of no feeling save a sombre determination to die. If he had erred, might he atone for his error with his blood! The barricade at which he found himself barred the Rue de Lille at the point where this street was intersected by the Rue du Bac. It was a formidable one, strongly built of sandbags and barrels of earth and faced by a deep ditch. Maurice was holding it with barely a dozen Federals, all of them reclining among the sandbags, and with unerring aim picking off every soldier who showed himself. Without moving, without even speaking a word, such was the dogged sullenness of his despair, the young fellow continued exhausting his cartridges until night closed in, watching meantime the growth of the clouds of smoke which were pouring out of the palace of the Legion of Honour, and were swept down into the street by the wind. The flames were not yet visible in the waning daylight. Another conflagration had broken out in a neighbouring mansion. And all at once a comrade ran up to Maurice and warned him that the soldiers, not daring to advance down the street, were approaching through the gardens and houses skirting it, cutting their way through the walls with picks. The end was at hand; the troops might emerge on that very spot at any moment. And, indeed, on a shot being fired from a window above him, he looked up and again saw Chouteau and his men, who were now frantically climbing the stairs of the corner houses on either hand, carrying lighted torches as well as cans of petroleum. Half an hour later, the whole crossway was flaring under the black sky, and Maurice, still reclining behind the barrels and the bags, profited by the vivid light to shoot down any of the soldiers who were imprudent enough to leave the shelter of the doorways and show themselves in the street.

How long did he keep on firing? He no longer had any consciousness of time or place. It might be nine o'clock, ten o'clock perhaps. The abominable work in which he was engaged now gave him a sensation of nausea, as though he were drunk with some loathsome wine which kept on rising from his stomach. Now that the houses were flaming all around, an intense heat, a burning, asphyxiating atmosphere was beginning to envelop him. The crossway, barred on every side by piles of paving stones, had become an intrenched camp which the conflagrations defended with shower after shower of brands. And were not these the orders? To set each district on fire as, one by one, its barricades were abandoned, to check the advance of the troops by a devouring line of furnaces, to burn down progressively each portion of Paris which they, the insurgents, might be forced to surrender? And Maurice already realised that the houses of the Rue du Bac were not the only ones that were burning. Behind him an immense ruddy glow suffused the sky, and he could hear a distant roar as though the whole city were catching fire. Along the Seine, on the right bank, some other gigantic conflagrations must be bursting forth. He had long since seen Chouteau hurry away, fleeing the bullets. One by one, moreover, the most desperate of his comrades took themselves off, terrified by the idea that they might now at any moment be outflanked; and at last he remained there all alone, and was still lying between two sandbags with the one thought of defending the front of the barricade, when all at once some soldiers, having made their way through the courtyards and gardens of the Rue de Lille, came out by a house in the Rue du Bac and swooped down from the rear.

For two long days, amid the excitement of that supreme struggle, Maurice had not given a thought to Jean; nor had Jean since entering Paris with his regiment, which had been adjoined to General Bruat's division, for a single moment remembered his friend Maurice. On the previous day, the corporal had spent his time firing upon the insurgents on the Champ de Mars and the Esplanade des Invalides; and on this, the second, the terrible day of the fighting, he had not left the Place du Palais Bourbon till about noon, when he and his comrades were sent forward to capture the barricades of the neighbourhood as far as the Rue des Saints-Pères. He, usually so calm, had gradually become quite exasperated by that fratricidal war, somewhat influenced in this respect by his comrades, all of whom ardently longed for a rest after so much fatigue and privation. The men who had spent long months as prisoners of war in Germany, and who had only been brought back to France to be re-incorporated in the army, felt thoroughly enraged with Paris; and Jean, for his part, was further incensed by all that he had heard of the abominations of the Commune--deeds which struck at his belief in the rights of ownership, and at his desire for orderly government. He was still the sensible, sober-minded peasant, personifying the very foundation of the nation, desirous of peace in order that one might again begin working, earning money, and recruiting health and strength. And in the growing wrath which now carried away all thought even of his most tender affections, he was especially maddened by the deeds of the incendiaries. What! burn down houses, burn down palaces, simply because one was not the stronger; no, no, anything but that! Only bandits could do such things. And he, who only the day before had been grieved by the summary executions of the Communists captured by the troops, had now lost all control over himself and was like a madman, striking and shouting fiercely, with his eyes starting from their sockets.

It was with a rush that he debouched into the Rue du Bac, followed by the few men of his squad. At first he could distinguish no one, and fancied that the barricade had been altogether abandoned. Then, over yonder, between two sandbags, he caught sight of a Communist who was moving, levelling his gun again, about to fire down the Rue de Lille. And, thereupon, under the furious propulsion of Destiny, he ran up and nailed the man to the barricade with a thrust of his bayonet.

Maurice had not had time to turn. He gave a shriek and raised his head. The conflagrations lighted up both men with a blinding blaze.

'Oh! Jean, my old friend, Jean, is it you?'

Die? Yes, willingly; he was desperately impatient for death. But to die by his brother's hand was too hard; it marred his death--poisoned it with an abominable bitterness.

'Is it you then, Jean--my old Jean?'

Jean looked at him, thunderstruck, abruptly sobered. They were alone; the other soldiers had already started in pursuit of some runaways. All around them the conflagrations were flaring yet higher, the windows were vomiting great red flames, and one could hear the crash of the burning ceilings as they sank inside the houses. Then Jean fell down near Maurice, sobbing, feeling him, trying to raise him up so as to ascertain whether he might not still be able to save him.

'Oh! my poor youngster, my poor youngster!'

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