ress-regent,
attired in black garments and accompanied by a single female friend,
both the women trembling with affright and striving to conceal
themselves in the depths of the public cab, which went jolting with its
scared inmates from the Tuileries, through whose apartments the mob was
at that moment streaming. On the same day Napoleon III. left the inn at
Bouillon, where he had passed his first night of exile, bending his way
toward Wilhelmshohe.

Here Jean, a thoughtful expression on his face, interrupted Henriette.

"Then we have a republic now? So much the better, if it is going to help
us whip the Prussians!"

But he shook his head; he had always been taught to look distrustfully
on republics when he was a peasant. And then, too, it did not seem to
him a good thing that they should be of differing minds when the enemy
was fronting them. After all, though, it was manifest there had to be
a change of some kind, since everyone knew the Empire was rotten to the
core and the people would have no more of it.

Henriette finished the letter, which concluded with a mention of the
approach of the German armies. On the 13th, the day when a committee
of the Government of National Defense had established its quarters at
Tours, their advanced guards had been seen at Lagny, to the east of
Paris. On the 14th and 15th they were at the very gates of the city,
at Creteil and Joinville-le-Pont. On the 18th, however, the day when
Maurice wrote, he seemed to have ceased to believe in the possibility
of maintaining a strict blockade of Paris; he appeared to be under the
influence of one of his hot fits of blind confidence, characterising
the siege as a senseless and impudent enterprise that would come to
an ignominious end before they were three weeks older, relying on the
armies that the provinces would surely send to their relief, to say
nothing of the army of Metz, that was already advancing by way of Verdun
and Rheims. And the links of the iron chain that their enemies had
forged for them had been riveted together; it encompassed Paris, and now
Paris was a city shut off from all the world, whence no letter, no word
of tidings longer came, the huge prison-house of two millions of living
beings, who were to their neighbors as if they were not.

Henriette was oppressed by a sense of melancholy. "Ah, merciful heaven!"
she murmured, "how long will all this last, and shall we ever see him
more!"

A more furious blast bent the stur