"That's how it is, you see; we were not so strong as they! No one can ever get at the rights of such matters while the fighting is going on. Never mind, though; you have read the figures as the newspapers give them: Bazaine has a hundred and fifty thousand men with him, he has three hundred thousand small arms and more than five hundred pieces of artillery; take my word for it, he is not going to let himself be caught in such a scrape as we were. The fellows all say he is a tough man to deal with; depend on it he's fixing up a nasty dose for the enemy, and he'll make 'em swallow it."
Henriette nodded her head and appeared to agree with him, in order to keep him in a cheerful frame of mind. She could not follow those complicated operations of the armies, but had a presentiment of coming, inevitable evil. Her voice was fresh and clear; she could have gone on reading thus for hours; only too glad to have it in her power to relieve the tedium of his long day, though at times, when she came to some narrative of slaughter, her eyes would fill with tears that made the words upon the printed page a blur. She was doubtless thinking of her husband's fate, how he had been shot down at the foot of the wall and his body desecrated by the touch of the Bavarian officer's boot.
"If it gives you such pain," Jean said in surprise, "you need not read the battles; skip them."
But, gentle and self-sacrificing as ever, she recovered herself immediately.
"No, no; don't mind my weakness; I assure you it is a pleasure to me."
One evening early in October, when the wind was blowing a small hurricane outside, she came in from the ambulance and entered the room with an excited air, saying:
"A letter from Maurice! the doctor just gave it me."
With each succeeding morning the twain had been becoming more and more alarmed that the young man sent them no word, and now that for a whole week it had been rumored everywhere that the investment of Paris was complete, they were more disturbed in mind than ever, despairing of receiving tidings, asking themselves what could have happened him after he left Rouen. And now the reason of the long silence was made clear to them: the letter that he had addressed from Paris to Doctor Dalichamp on the 18th, the very day that ended railway communication with Havre, had gone astray and had only reached them at last by a miracle, after a long and circuitous journey.
"Ah, the dear boy!" said Jean, radiant with delight. "Read it to me, quick!"
The wind was howling and shrieking more dismally than ever, the window of the apartment strained and rattled as if someone were trying to force an entrance. Henriette went and got the little lamp, and placing it on the table beside the bed applied herself to the reading of the missive, so close to Jean that their faces almost touched. There was a sensation of warmth and comfort in the peaceful room amid the roaring of the storm that raged without.
It was a long letter of eight closely filled pages, in which Maurice first told how, soon after his arrival on the 16th, he had had the good fortune to get into a line regiment that was being recruited up to its full strength. Then, reverting to facts of history, he described in brief but vigorous terms the principal events of that month of terror: how Paris, recovering her sanity in a measure after the madness into which the disasters of Wissembourg and Froeschwiller had driven her, had comforted herself with hopes of future victories, had cheered herself with fresh illusions, such as lying stories of the army's successes, the appointment of Bazaine to the chief command, the levee en masse, bogus dispatches, which the ministers themselves read from the tribune, telling of hecatombs of slaughtered Prussians. And then he went on to tell how, on the 3d of September, the thunderbolt had a second time burst over the unhappy capitaclass="underline" all hope gone, the misinformed, abused, confiding city dazed by that crushing blow of destiny, the cries: "Down with the Empire!" that resounded at night upon the boulevards, the brief and gloomy session of the Chamber at which Jules Favre read the draft of the bill that conceded the popular demand. Then on the next day, the ever-memorable 4th of September, was the upheaval of all things, the second Empire swept from existence in atonement for its mistakes and crimes, the entire population of the capital in the streets, a torrent of humanity a half a million strong filling the Place de la Concorde and streaming onward in the bright sunshine of that beautiful Sabbath day to the great gates of the Corps Legislatif, feebly guarded by a handful of troops, who up-ended their muskets in the air in token of sympathy with the populace-smashing in the doors, swarming into the assembly chambers, whence Jules Favre, Gambetta and other deputies of the Left were even then on the point of departing to proclaim the Republic at the Hotel de Ville; while on the Place Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois a little wicket of the Louvre opened timidly and gave exit to the Empress-regent, attired in black garments and accompanied by a single female friend, both the women trembling with affright and striving to conceal themselves in the depths of the public cab, which went jolting with its scared inmates from the Tuileries, through whose apartments the mob was at that moment streaming. On the same day Napoleon III. left the inn at Bouillon, where he had passed his first night of exile, bending his way toward Wilhelmshohe.
Here Jean, a thoughtful expression on his face, interrupted Henriette.
"Then we have a republic now? So much the better, if it is going to help us whip the Prussians!"
But he shook his head; he had always been taught to look distrustfully on republics when he was a peasant. And then, too, it did not seem to him a good thing that they should be of differing minds when the enemy was fronting them. After all, though, it was manifest there had to be a change of some kind, since everyone knew the Empire was rotten to the core and the people would have no more of it.
Henriette finished the letter, which concluded with a mention of the approach of the German armies. On the 13th, the day when a committee of the Government of National Defense had established its quarters at Tours, their advanced guards had been seen at Lagny, to the east of Paris. On the 14th and 15th they were at the very gates of the city, at Creteil and Joinville-le-Pont. On the 18th, however, the day when Maurice wrote, he seemed to have ceased to believe in the possibility of maintaining a strict blockade of Paris; he appeared to be under the influence of one of his hot fits of blind confidence, characterising the siege as a senseless and impudent enterprise that would come to an ignominious end before they were three weeks older, relying on the armies that the provinces would surely send to their relief, to say nothing of the army of Metz, that was already advancing by way of Verdun and Rheims. And the links of the iron chain that their enemies had forged for them had been riveted together; it encompassed Paris, and now Paris was a city shut off from all the world, whence no letter, no word of tidings longer came, the huge prison-house of two millions of living beings, who were to their neighbors as if they were not.
Henriette was oppressed by a sense of melancholy. "Ah, merciful heaven!" she murmured, "how long will all this last, and shall we ever see him more!"
A more furious blast bent the sturdy trees out-doors and made the timbers of the old farmhouse creak and groan. Think of the sufferings the poor fellows would have to endure should the winter be severe, fighting in the snow, without bread, without fire!
"Bah!" rejoined Jean, "that's a very nice letter of his, and it's a comfort to have heard from him. We must not despair."
Thus, day by day, the month of October ran its course, with gray melancholy skies, and if ever the wind went down for a short space it was only to bring the clouds back in darker, heavier masses. Jean's wound was healing very slowly; the outflow from the drain was not the "laudable pus" which would have permitted the doctor to remove the appliance, and the patient was in a very enfeebled state, refusing, however, to be operated on in his dread of being left a cripple. An atmosphere of expectant resignation, disturbed at times by transient misgivings for which there was no apparent cause, pervaded the slumberous little chamber, to which the tidings from abroad came in vague, indeterminate shape, like the distorted visions of an evil dream. The hateful war, with its butcheries and disasters, was still raging out there in the world, in some quarter unknown to them, without their ever being able to learn the real course of events, without their being conscious of aught save the wails and groans that seemed to fill the air from their mangled, bleeding country. And the dead leaves rustled in the paths as the wind swept them before it beneath the gloomy sky, and over the naked fields brooded a funereal silence, broken only by the cawing of the crows, presage of a bitter winter.