and rattled as if someone were trying to force
an entrance. Henriette went and got the little lamp, and placing it on
the table beside the bed applied herself to the reading of the missive,
so close to Jean that their faces almost touched. There was a sensation
of warmth and comfort in the peaceful room amid the roaring of the storm
that raged without.

It was a long letter of eight closely filled pages, in which Maurice
first told how, soon after his arrival on the 16th, he had had the good
fortune to get into a line regiment that was being recruited up to its
full strength. Then, reverting to facts of history, he described in
brief but vigorous terms the principal events of that month of terror:
how Paris, recovering her sanity in a measure after the madness into
which the disasters of Wissembourg and Froeschwiller had driven her, had
comforted herself with hopes of future victories, had cheered herself
with fresh illusions, such as lying stories of the army's successes, the
appointment of Bazaine to the chief command, the _levee en masse_,
bogus dispatches, which the ministers themselves read from the tribune,
telling of hecatombs of slaughtered Prussians. And then he went on to
tell how, on the 3d of September, the thunderbolt had a second time
burst over the unhappy capital: all hope gone, the misinformed, abused,
confiding city dazed by that crushing blow of destiny, the cries: "Down
with the Empire!" that resounded at night upon the boulevards, the brief
and gloomy session of the Chamber at which Jules Favre read the draft
of the bill that conceded the popular demand. Then on the next day, the
ever-memorable 4th of September, was the upheaval of all things, the
second Empire swept from existence in atonement for its mistakes and
crimes, the entire population of the capital in the streets, a torrent
of humanity a half a million strong filling the Place de la Concorde and
streaming onward in the bright sunshine of that beautiful Sabbath day to
the great gates of the Corps Legislatif, feebly guarded by a handful of
troops, who up-ended their muskets in the air in token of sympathy
with the populace--smashing in the doors, swarming into the assembly
chambers, whence Jules Favre, Gambetta and other deputies of the Left
were even then on the point of departing to proclaim the Republic at the
Hotel de Ville; while on the Place Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois a little
wicket of the Louvre opened timidly and gave exit to the Emp