lent him a hundred francs. And in any case, as soon as he was settled in he signed on in a battalion of the National Guard, and the one-franc-fifty pay would be enough for his needs. The thought of a comfortable, selfish existence in the country filled him with horror. Even the letters from his sister Henriette, to whom he had written immediately after the armistice, irritated him with their supplications and desperate longing to see him come home and rest at Remilly. He refused; he would go later when there weren’t any Prussians left there. So Maurice’s life became rootless and idle, but also increasingly feverish. Hunger was no longer a problem, and he had devoured the first white bread with delight. Paris, in which wines and spirits had never been short, was in an alcoholic daze, and now living riotously in a continuous state of drunkenness. But it was still a prison, the gates were guarded by Germans and complicated formalities prevented anyone from getting out. No social life had been resumed and so far there was no work or business functioning, a whole population was waiting, doing nothing, growing more and more hysterical in the warm sunny weather of early spring. During the siege military service had at least tired out people’s limbs and occupied their minds, but now the populace had slumped straight into total idleness in its continual isolation from the rest of the world. Maurice, like everybody else, just strolled about from morning till night, breathing the air that was infected with all the germs of madness that the mob had been exhaling for months. The unlimited freedom enjoyed by all finally destroyed everything. He read the papers and went to public meetings, sometimes shrugging his shoulders when the idiocies were too ridiculous, but nevertheless went home haunted by thoughts of violence and ready for desperate acts in defence of what he took to be truth and justice. And up in his little room overlooking the whole city, he still entertained dreams of victory and told himself that France and the Republic could still be saved so long as peace was not actually signed.
The Prussians were to make their entry into Paris on 1 March, and a cry of execration and rage rose from every heart. At every public meeting he went to Maurice heard the accusations against the Assembly, Thiers and the men of 4 September for this crowning
shame that they had not tried to spare the great, heroic city. One evening he was so worked up that he even spoke himself, shouting that the whole of Paris should go and die on the ramparts rather than let a single Prussian get in. In this manner the insurrection sprang up quite naturally and organized itself in broad daylight among people thrown off balance by months of anguish and famine, fallen into a hag-ridden idleness and haunted by suspicions of their own making. It was one of those crises of morale observed after all great sieges, when unsurpassable patriotism has been cheated and, after inspiring people’s souls to no purpose, changes into a blind lust for vengeance and destruction. The Central Committee, elected by delegates from the National Guard, had protested against any attempt at disarmament. There was a great demonstration on the Place de la Bastille, with red flags, fiery speeches, a huge crowd and the murder of one unfortunate policeman, tied to a plank, thrown into the canal and finished off with stones. Two days later, during the night of 26 February, Maurice was awakened by the call to arms and alarm bells, and watched bands of men and women going along the Boulevard des Batignolles dragging guns; and he
went too, and with twenty others harnessed himself to a cannon, when he heard that the people had gone and seized these guns in the Place Wagram to prevent the Assembly from handing them over to the Prussians. There were one hundred and seventy of them, and as some of the proper gear was missing people hauled them with ropes, pushed them with their hands and got them up to the top of Montmartre with the fierce drive of a horde of barbarians rescuing their gods. On 1 March,