on pleasure and so near to giving itself up to the foulest vices, was now, he found, simple again, brave and cheerful, accepting any sacrifice. You saw nothing but uniforms, and even the least involved wore the képi of the National Guard. As a huge clock stops when the spring breaks, so social life had suddenly come to an end, and with it industry, commerce, business, leaving only one passion, to win through, and it was the only subject of conversation that inflamed all hearts and heads in public gatherings, during the watches in the guardroom and among the crowds continually blocking the pavements. Shared in common, illusions carried people’s souls away and excitement flung them into the dangers of impetuous heroics. Already a crisis of unhealthy excitability was approaching a sort of epidemic fever, magnifying fear just as much as confidence and letting loose the human herd to rush off unbridled at the slightest stimulus. In the rue des Martyrs Maurice witnessed a scene which worked him up into a frenzy – a mass assault, a furious mob hurling itself upon a house where, at one of the upper windows, a brilliant lamp had been seen burning all night, obviously a signal flashed above Paris to the Prussians at Bellevue. Citizens felt compelled to live on their roofs so as to keep an eye on the surrounding country. On the previous day they had tried to drown in the round pond in the Tuileries some wretched person who was looking at a town plan he had unfolded on a seat. Maurice, who had formerly been so fair-minded, also caught this disease of suspicion, with the uprooting of everything he had so far believed in. No longer did he despair, as he had on that evening of the Châtillon panic, wondering whether the French army would ever regain its manhood and fight; the sortie of 30 September to Hay and Chevilly, that of 13 October when the militia had taken Bagneux, and finally that of 21 October, during which his regiment had momentarily occupied the park of La Malmaison, had restored all his faith, this flame of hope which a mere spark sufficed to kindle and which consumed him. The Prussians may have stopped it at all points, but all the same the army had fought bravely and still might win. What however depressed Maurice so much was the great city of Paris, leaping from the heights of self-deception to the depths of discouragement, hag-ridden by the fear of treason in its need for victory. After the Emperor and Marshal MacMahon, were General Trochu and General Ducrot also going to be second-rate commanders and unconscious workers for defeat? The same impulse which had overthrown the Empire was now bidding fair to overthrow the Government of National Defence – the impatience of the violent militants to seize power and save France. Already Jules Favre and other members of the government were more unpopular than the ousted former ministers of Napoleon III. If they didn’t want to beat the Prussians, well, they could make way for somebody else, for the revolutionaries who were sure of winning by decreeing a mass rising or by encouraging inventors who wanted to mine all the suburbs or annihilate the enemy under some novel hail of fireworks.
On the day before 31 October Maurice was attacked by this malady of mistrust and daydreaming and was now accepting sheer figments of the imagination that would formerly have made him smile. Why not? Was there any limit to stupidity and crime? Were not miracles becoming possible amid all the catastrophes upsetting the world? Inside him rancour had been slowly building up ever since the day, outside Mulhouse, when he heard about Froeschwiller. Sedan was making him bleed like a still tender wound that the smallest reverse was enough to reopen, and the shock of each of these defeats had unhinged him, for his bodily resistance had been lowered and his mind weakened by such a long succession of days
without food and nights without sleep, dropped as he was into this terrifying nightmare existence, hardly even knowing if he were still alive. And the thought that so much suffering might end in a new and