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The condition of their affairs caused Maurice a terrible dejection. Had the Germans been more enterprising they might have pitched their tents that night in the Place du Carrousel, but with the prudence of their race they had determined that the siege should be conducted according to rule and precept, and had already fixed upon the exact lines of investment, the position of the army of the Meuse being at the north, stretching from Croissy to the Marne, through Epinay, the cordon of the third army at the south, from Chennevieres to Chatillon and Bougival, while general headquarters, with King William, Bismarck, and General von Moltke, were established at Versailles. The gigantic blockade, that no one believed could be successfully completed, was an accomplished fact; the city, with its girdle of fortifications eight leagues and a half in length, embracing fifteen forts and six detached redoubts, was henceforth to be transformed into a huge prison-pen. And the army of the defenders comprised only the 13th corps, commanded by General Vinoy, and the 14th, then in process of reconstruction under General Ducrot, the two aggregating an effective strength of eighty thousand men; to which were to be added fourteen thousand sailors, fifteen thousand of the francs corps, and a hundred and fifteen thousand mobiles, not to mention the three hundred thousand National Guards distributed among the sectional divisions of the ramparts. If this seems like a large force it must be remembered that there were few seasoned and trained soldiers among its numbers. Men were constantly being drilled and equipped; Paris was a great intrenched camp. The preparations for the defense went on from hour to hour with feverish haste; roads were built, houses demolished within the military zone; the two hundred siege guns and the twenty-five hundred pieces of lesser caliber were mounted in position, other guns were cast; an arsenal, complete in every detail, seemed to spring from the earth under the tireless efforts of Dorian, the patriotic war minister. When, after the rupture of the negotiations at Ferrieres, Jules Favre acquainted the country with M. von Bismarck’s demands–the cession of Alsace, the garrison of Strasbourg to be surrendered, three milliards of indemnity–a cry of rage went up and the continuation of the war was demanded by acclaim as a condition indispensable to the country’s existence. Even with no hope of victory Paris must defend herself in order that France might live.

On a Sunday toward the end of September Maurice was detailed to carry a message to the further end of the city, and what he witnessed along the streets he passed through filled him with new hope. Ever since the defeat of Chatillon it had seemed to him that the courage of the people was rising to a level with the great task that lay before them. Ah! that Paris that he had known so thoughtless, so wayward, so keen in the pursuit of pleasure; he found it now quite changed, simple, earnest, cheerfully brave, ready for every sacrifice. Everyone was in uniform; there was scarce a head that was not decorated with the kepi of the National Guard. Business of every sort had come to a sudden standstill, as the hands of a watch cease to move when the mainspring snaps, and at the public meetings, among the soldiers in the guard-room, or where the crowds collected in the streets, there was but one subject of conversation, inflaming the hearts and minds of all–the determination to conquer. The contagious influence of illusion, scattered broadcast, unbalanced weaker minds; the people were tempted to acts of generous folly by the tension to which they were subjected. Already there was a taint of morbid, nervous excitability in the air, a feverish condition in which men’s hopes and fears alike became distorted and exaggerated, arousing the worst passions of humanity at the slightest breath of suspicion. And Maurice was witness to a scene in the Rue des Martyrs that produced a profound impression on him, the assault made by a band of infuriated men on a house from which, at one of the upper windows, a bright light had been displayed all through the night, a signal, evidently, intended to reach the Prussians at Bellevue over the roofs of Paris. There were jealous citizens who spent all their nights on their house-tops, watching what was going on around them. The day before a poor wretch had had a narrow escape from drowning at the hands of the mob, merely because he had opened a map of the city on a bench in the Tuileries gardens and consulted it.