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By Root 2113 0

The idea was crazy and he knew it, yet his heart beat faster in the face of this determination to win. When all is over can’t one still attempt a miracle? All through that night he dreamed of wonders. Eight more long days dragged on. Paris was in its death-throes, but never complained. Shops no longer opened, and the few people walking about never saw a vehicle in the deserted streets. Forty thousand horses had been eaten, and now dogs, cats and rats were becoming expensive. Since corn had vanished, the bread, made of rice and oats, was black, clammy and most indigestible, and to get the ration of three hundred grammes the interminable queues in front of bakers’ shops were becoming killing. What a painful business these waits were in the siege, when poor women shivered in pouring rain, with their feet in freezing mud! It was the heroic misery of a great city that refused to give in. The death rate had tripled, and theatres had been turned into hospitals. By nightfall the formerly fashionable neighbourhoods fell into a gloomy silence and pitch darkness, like quarters of an accursed city ravaged by plague. In the silence and darkness the only thing to be heard was the ceaseless din of the bombardment, and the only thing to be seen the flashes of guns lighting up the winter sky.

On the 28th Paris suddenly heard that Jules Favre had been negotiating

with Bismarck for two days with a view to an armistice, and at the same time that there was only enough bread left for ten days, scarcely time to restock the city with food. A surrender was being brutally forced on them. Paris, grief-stricken and stunned by the truth she had been told at last, just let things run their course. On that same day, at midnight, the last gun was fired. Then on the 29th, when the Germans had occupied the forts, Maurice went back into camp with the 115th near Montrouge, within the fortifications. Then there set in for him an unsettled existence, full of both idleness and feverish activity. Discipline had become very lax, soldiers ran wild and wandered about, waiting to be sent home. But he remained disturbed, nervy and touchy, full of anxiety which turned into exasperation at the slightest mishap. He greedily read the revolutionary papers, and this three-week armistice, concluded for the sole purpose of allowing France to elect an Assembly to settle peace terms, looked to him like a trap, a final act of treachery.

Even if Paris was forced to capitulate, he was with Gambetta for the continuation of the war on the Loire and in the north. The disaster of the army of the east, which had been forgotten and forced to cross into Switzerland, made him indignant. The elections put the finishing touch to his fury – it was exactly what he had foreseen, the cowardly provinces, annoyed at the resistance of Paris and wanting peace on any terms with the monarchy restored while Prussian guns were still trained on them. After the first sittings of the Assembly at Bordeaux, Thiers, returned by twenty-six departments and acclaimed as head of the executive, became in his eyes the arch-monster, the man of every lie and every crime. Nothing could calm his anger, for this peace concluded by a monarchist Assembly struck him as the very depth of shame, and the very idea of the harsh conditions and the five milliard indemnity made him rave, with Metz handed over, Alsace abandoned, the gold and blood of France running away through this ever-open wound in her side.

It was then, in late February, that Maurice made up his mind to desert. A clause in the treaty stipulated that soldiers in camp in Paris should be disarmed and sent home. He did not wait, for he felt that his heart would be torn out of him if he left the streets of this glorious Paris, which hunger alone had succeeded in subjugating. So he disappeared, rented a tiny furnished room in a six-storey house in the rue des Orties, right at the top of the Butte des Moulins. It was a sort of turret from which you could see the endless sea of roofs from the Tuileries to the Bastille. An old friend from his law-school days had