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One morning the doctor came to them in a condition of deepest discouragement. With a trembling hand he drew from his pocket a Belgian newspaper and threw it on the bed, exclaiming:

“Alas, my friends, poor France is murdered; Bazaine has played the traitor!”

Jean, who had been dozing, his back supported by a couple of pillows, suddenly became wide-awake.

“What, a traitor?”

“Yes, he has surrendered Metz and the army. It is the experience of Sedan over again, only this time they drain us of our last drop of life-blood.” Then taking up the paper and reading from it: “One hundred and fifty thousand prisoners, one hundred and fifty-three eagles and standards, one hundred and forty-one field guns, seventy-six machine guns, eight hundred casemate and barbette guns, three hundred thousand muskets, two thousand military train wagons, material for eighty-five batteries–”

And he went on giving further particulars: how Marshal Bazaine had been blockaded in Metz with the army, bound hand and foot, making no effort to break the wall of adamant that surrounded him; the doubtful relations that existed between him and Prince Frederick Charles, his indecision and fluctuating political combinations, his ambition to play a great role in history, but a role that he seemed not to have fixed upon himself; then all the dirty business of parleys and conferences, and the communications by means of lying, unsavory emissaries with Bismarck, King William and the Empress-regent, who in the end put her foot down and refused to negotiate with the enemy on the basis of a cession of territory; and, finally, the inevitable catastrophe, the completion of the web that destiny had been weaving, famine in Metz, a compulsory capitulation, officers and men, hope and courage gone, reduced to accept the bitter terms of the victor. France no longer had an army.

“In God’s name!” Jean ejaculated in a deep, low voice. He had not fully understood it all, but until then Bazaine had always been for him the great captain, the one man to whom they were to look for salvation. “What is left us to do now? What will become of them at Paris?”

The doctor was just coming to the news from Paris, which was of a disastrous character. He called their attention to the fact that the paper from which he was reading was dated November 5. The surrender of Metz had been consummated on the 27th of October, and the tidings were not known in Paris until the 30th. Coming, as it did, upon the heels of the reverses recently sustained at Chevilly, Bagneux and la Malmaison, after the conflict at Bourget and the loss of that position, the intelligence had burst like a thunderbolt over the desperate populace, angered and disgusted by the feebleness and impotency of the government of National Defense. And thus it was that on the following day, the 31st, the city was threatened with a general insurrection, an immense throng of angry men, a mob ripe for mischief, collecting on the Place de l’Hotel de Ville, whence they swarmed into the halls and public offices, making prisoners the members of the Government, whom the National Guard rescued later in the day only because they feared the triumph of those incendiaries who were clamoring for the commune. And the Belgian journal wound up with a few stinging comments on the great City of Paris, thus torn by civil war when the enemy was at its gates. Was it not the presage of approaching decomposition, the puddle of blood and mire that was to engulf a world?

“That’s true enough!” said Jean, whose face was very white. “They’ve no business to be squabbling when the Prussians are at hand!”

But Henriette, who had said nothing as yet, always making it her rule to hold her tongue when politics were under discussion, could not restrain a cry that rose from her heart. Her thoughts were ever with her brother.

“Mon Dieu, I hope that Maurice, with all the foolish ideas he has in his head, won’t let himself get mixed up in this business!”

They were all silent in their distress; and it was the doctor, who was ardently patriotic, who resumed the conversation.