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“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 capital: 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.