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Two weeks more went by, during which Maurice could hardly have told how he spent his time while awaiting the approach of the momentous events of which he had a distinct presentiment. Peace was concluded definitely at last, the Assembly was to commence its regular sessions at Versailles on the 20th of the month; and yet for him nothing was concluded: he felt that they were ere long to witness the beginning of a dreadful drama of atonement. On the 18th of March, as he was about to leave his room, he received a letter from Henriette urging him to come and join her at Remilly, coupled with a playful threat that she would come and carry him off with her if he delayed too long to afford her that great pleasure. Then she went on to speak of Jean, concerning whose affairs she was extremely anxious; she told how, after leaving her late in December to join the Army of the North, he had been seized with a low fever that had kept him long a prisoner in a Belgian hospital, and only the preceding week he had written her that he was about to start for Paris, notwithstanding his enfeebled condition, where he was determined to seek active service once again. Henriette closed her letter by begging her brother to give her a faithful account of how matters were with Jean as soon as he should have seen him. Maurice laid the open letter before him on the table and sank into a confused revery. Henriette, Jean; his sister whom he loved so fondly, his brother in suffering and privation; how absent from his daily thoughts had those dear ones been since the tempest had been raging in his bosom! He aroused himself, however, and as his sister advised him that she had been unable to give Jean the number of the house in the Rue des Orties, promised himself to go that very day to the office where the regimental records were kept and hunt up his friend. But he had barely got beyond his door and was crossing the Rue Saint-Honore when he encountered two fellow-soldiers of his battalion, who gave him an account of what had happened that morning and during the night before at Montmartre, and the three men started off on a run toward the scene of the disturbance.

Ah, that day of the 18th of March, the elation and enthusiasm that it aroused in Maurice! In after days he could never remember clearly what he said and did. First he beheld himself dimly, as through a veil of mist, convulsed with rage at the recital of how the troops had attempted, in the darkness and quiet that precedes the dawn, to disarm Paris by seizing the guns on Montmartre heights. It was evident that Thiers, who had arrived from Bordeaux, had been meditating the blow for the last two days, in order that the Assembly at Versailles might proceed without fear to proclaim the monarchy. Then the scene shifted, and he was on the ground at Montmartre itself–about nine o’clock it was–fired by the narrative of the people’s victory: how the soldiery had come sneaking up in the darkness, how the delay in bringing up the teams had given the National Guards an opportunity to fly to arms, the troops, having no heart to fire on women and children, reversing their muskets and fraternizing with the people. Then he had wandered desultorily about the city, wherever chance directed his footsteps, and by midday had satisfied himself that the Commune was master of Paris, without even the necessity of striking a blow, for Thiers and the ministers had decamped from their quarters in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the entire government was flying in disorder to Versailles, the thirty thousand troops had been hastily conducted from the city, leaving more than five thousand deserters from their numbers along the line of their retreat. And later, about half-past five in the afternoon, he could recall being at a corner of the exterior boulevard in the midst of a mob of howling lunatics, listening without the slightest evidence of disapproval to the abominable story of the murder of Generals Lecomte and Clement Thomas. Generals, they called themselves; fine generals, they! The leaders they had had at Sedan rose before his memory, voluptuaries and imbeciles; one more, one less, what odds did it make! And the remainder of the day passed in the same state of half-crazed excitement, which served to distort everything to his vision; it was an insurrection that the very stones of the streets seemed to have favored, spreading, swelling, finally becoming master of all at a stroke in the unforeseen fatality of its triumph, and at ten o’clock in the evening delivering the Hotel de Ville over to the members of the Central Committee, who were greatly surprised to find themselves there.