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By Root 2134 0

of fate, so that cries of ‘Out! Out!’ were echoing by evening on the boulevards while in the short, doom-laden night sitting Jules Favre had read out the motion for the revolution demanded by the populace. Then the next day was 4 September, the collapse of a world, the Second Empire swept away in the wreckage of its vices and follies, all the people out in the streets, a torrent of half a million men pouring into the Place de la Concorde on that brilliant Sunday, billowing over to the railings of the Legislative Assembly defended by a mere handful of troops with rifle-butts in the air. Then the mob, smashing down doors, invaded the Chamber itself, from which Jules Favre, Gambetta and other deputies of the left were about to leave to proclaim the Republic at the Hôtel de Ville, while a little door of the Louvre, giving on to the Place Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, was opened just enough to let out the Empress-Regent, dressed in black and accompanied by one woman friend, both trembling, fugitives keeping out of sight in a cab they had picked up and which jolted them away from the Tuileries through which the mob was now running. On that same day Napoleon III had left the inn at Bouillon where he had spent his first night in exile en route for Wilhelmshöhe.

In a serious voice Jean broke in:

‘So now we have a republic?… Oh well, all to the good if it helps us beat the Prussians.’

But he shook his head, for he had always been led to fear a republic when he worked on the land. And besides, in the face of the enemy he didn’t think it was a good thing not to be all of one mind. Anyway there would have to be something else because the Empire was thoroughly corrupt, and nobody wanted any more truck with it.

Henriette finished reading the letter, which ended by mentioning the approach of the Germans. On the 13th, the very day when a delegation from the Government of National Defence established itself in Tours, they had been sighted east of Paris, as far forward as Lagny. On the 14th and 15th they were on the outskirts, at Créteil and Joinville-le-Pont. Yet on the morning of the 18th, when he had written, Maurice still did not seem to believe it would be possible to invest Paris completely, and had recovered a superb confidence, considering a siege as an insolent and hazardous gamble which would collapse in less than three weeks, and counting on the relieving armies the provinces would certainly send, to say nothing of the army of Metz, already on the move via Verdun and Rheims. Thus the links in the iron belt had closed up and shut Paris in a gigantic prison for two million living souls, whence nothing came out but the silence of death.

‘Oh God!’ murmured Henriette, weighed down by grief. ‘How long is it all going to last, and shall we ever see him again?’

A squall bowed the trees outside and the old timbers of the farmhouse groaned. If they were in for a hard winter what sufferings there would be for the poor soldiers with no fire, no food and fighting in the snow.

‘Ah well,’ Jean concluded, ‘it’s a very nice letter and it’s a pleasure to get news… We mustn’t ever despair.’

And so day after day the month of October went by, with dreary grey skies and the wind only giving over so as to bring up even darker banks of clouds again soon. Jean’s wound took an endless time to heal. The quality of the fluid coming from the drainage tube would not have justified the doctor’s removing it, and the patient had become very weak but refused to countenance an operation for fear of being a cripple for life. So now the little isolated room seemed to be slumbering in a period of waiting and resignation, sometimes broken by sudden anxieties with no clear cause, and the news that reached there was, remote and vague, like a nightmare from which one is just emerging. The unspeakable war, with its slaughters and disasters, was still going on somewhere out there, but they never knew the real truth or heard anything except the widespread muted clamour of their slaughtered country. The wind carried away the leaves under the dreary sky and there were long,