in the great world
outside their peaceful solitude and the terrible calamities that were
desolating their country. He was their only source of intelligence; his
heart, which beat with patriotic ardor, overflowed with rage and
grief at every fresh defeat, and thus it was that his sole topic of
conversation was the victorious progress of the Prussians, who, since
Sedan, had spread themselves over France like the waves of some black
ocean. Each day brought its own tidings of disaster, and resting
disconsolately on one of the two chairs that stood by the bedside,
he would tell in mournful tones and with trembling gestures of the
increasing gravity of the situation. Oftentimes he came with his pockets
stuffed with Belgian newspapers, which he would leave behind him when he
went away. And thus the echoes of defeat, days, weeks, after the event,
reverberated in that quiet room, serving to unite yet more closely in
community of sorrow the two poor sufferers who were shut within its
walls.

It was from some of those old newspapers that Henriette read to Jean the
occurrences at Metz, the Titanic struggle that was three times renewed,
separated on each occasion by a day's interval. The story was already
five weeks old, but it was new to him, and he listened with a bleeding
heart to the repetition of the miserable narrative of defeat to which he
was not a stranger. In the deathly stillness of the room the incidents
of the woeful tale unfolded themselves as Henriette, with the sing-song
enunciation of a schoolgirl, picked out her words and sentences. When,
after Froeschwiller and Spickeren, the 1st corps, routed and broken into
fragments, had swept away with it the 5th, the other corps stationed
along the frontier _en echelon_ from Metz to Bitche, first wavering,
then retreating in their consternation at those reverses, had ultimately
concentrated before the intrenched camp on the right bank of the
Moselle. But what waste of precious time was there, when they should not
have lost a moment in retreating on Paris, a movement that was presently
to be attended with such difficulty! The Emperor had been compelled
to turn over the supreme command to Marshal Bazaine, to whom everyone
looked with confidence for a victory. Then, on the 14th[*] came the
affair of Borny, when the army was attacked at the moment when it was
at last about to cross the stream, having to sustain the onset of two
German armies: Steinmetz's, which was encamped in ob