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And Maurice kept himself apart from his comrades, with an ever-increasing disgust for the life and duties of a soldier, that condemned him to inactivity and uselessness behind the ramparts of Mont-Valerien. He grasped every occasion to get away and hasten to Paris, where his heart was. It was in the midst of the great city’s thronging masses alone that he found rest and peace of mind; he tried to force himself to hope as they hoped. He often went to witness the departure of the balloons, which were sent up every other day from the station of the Northern Railway with a freight of despatches and carrier pigeons. They rose when the ropes were cast loose and soon were lost to sight in the cheerless wintry sky, and all hearts were filled with anguish when the wind wafted them in the direction of the German frontier. Many of them were never heard of more. He had himself twice written to his sister Henriette, without ever learning if she had received his letters. The memory of his sister and of Jean, living as they did in that outer, shadowy world from which no tidings ever reached him now, was become so blurred and faint that he thought of them but seldom, as of affections that he had left behind him in some previous existence. The incessant conflict of despair and hope in which he lived occupied all the faculties of his being too fully to leave room for mere human feelings. Then, too, in the early days of January he was goaded to the verge of frenzy by the action of the enemy in shelling the district on the left bank of the river. He had come to credit the Prussians with reasons of humanity for their abstention, which was in fact due simply to the difficulties they experienced in bringing up their guns and getting them in position. Now that a shell had killed two little girls at the Val-de-Grace, his scorn and hatred knew no bounds for those barbarous ruffians who murdered little children and threatened to burn the libraries and museums. After the first days of terror, however, Paris had resumed its life of dogged, unfaltering heroism.

Since the reverse of Champigny there had been but one other attempt, ending in disaster like the rest, in the direction of Bourget; and the evening when the plateau of Avron was evacuated, under the fire of the heavy siege artillery battering away at the forts, Maurice was a sharer in the rage and exasperation that possessed the entire city. The growing unpopularity that threatened to hurl from power General Trochu and the Government of National Defense was so augmented by this additional repulse that they were compelled to attempt a supreme and hopeless effort. What, did they refuse the services of the three hundred thousand National Guards, who from the beginning had been demanding their share in the peril and in the victory! This time it was to be the torrential sortie that had all along been the object of the popular clamor; Paris was to throw open its dikes and drown the Prussians beneath the on-pouring waves of its children. Notwithstanding the certainty of a fresh defeat, there was no way of avoiding a demand that had its origin in such patriotic motives; but in order to limit the slaughter as far as possible, the chiefs determined to employ, in connection with the regular army, only the fifty-nine mobilized battalions of the National Guard. The day preceding the 19th of January resembled some great public holiday; an immense crowd gathered on the boulevards and in the Champs-Elysees to witness the departing regiments, which marched proudly by, preceded by their bands, the men thundering out patriotic airs. Women and children followed them along the sidewalk, men climbed on the benches to wish them Godspeed. The next morning the entire population of the city hurried out to the Arc de Triomphe, and it was almost frantic with delight when at an early hour news came of the capture of Montretout; the tales that were told of the gallant behavior of the National Guard sounded like epics; the Prussians had been beaten all along the line, the French would occupy Versailles before night. As a natural result the consternation was proportionately great when, at nightfall, the inevitable defeat became known. While the left wing was seizing Montretout the center, which had succeeded in carrying the outer wall of Buzanval Park, had encountered a second inner wall, before which it broke. A thaw had set in, the roads were heavy from the effects of a fine, drizzling rain, and the guns, those guns that had been cast by popular subscription and were to the Parisians as the apple of their eye, could not get up. On the right General Ducrot’s column was tardy in getting into action and saw nothing of the fight. Further effort was useless, and General Trochu was compelled to order a retreat. Montretout was abandoned, and Saint-Cloud as well, which the Prussians burned, and when it became fully dark the horizon of Paris was illuminated by the conflagration.