cheerfully brave, ready for every sacrifice. Everyone was in uniform;
there was scarce a head that was not decorated with the _kepi_ of the
National Guard. Business of every sort had come to a sudden standstill,
as the hands of a watch cease to move when the mainspring snaps, and at
the public meetings, among the soldiers in the guard-room, or where
the crowds collected in the streets, there was but one subject of
conversation, inflaming the hearts and minds of all--the determination
to conquer. The contagious influence of illusion, scattered broadcast,
unbalanced weaker minds; the people were tempted to acts of generous
folly by the tension to which they were subjected. Already there was a
taint of morbid, nervous excitability in the air, a feverish condition
in which men's hopes and fears alike became distorted and exaggerated,
arousing the worst passions of humanity at the slightest breath of
suspicion. And Maurice was witness to a scene in the Rue des Martyrs
that produced a profound impression on him, the assault made by a band
of infuriated men on a house from which, at one of the upper windows,
a bright light had been displayed all through the night, a signal,
evidently, intended to reach the Prussians at Bellevue over the roofs of
Paris. There were jealous citizens who spent all their nights on their
house-tops, watching what was going on around them. The day before a
poor wretch had had a narrow escape from drowning at the hands of the
mob, merely because he had opened a map of the city on a bench in the
Tuileries gardens and consulted it.

And that epidemic of suspicion Maurice, who had always hitherto been
so liberal and fair-minded, now began to feel the influence of in the
altered views he was commencing to entertain concerning men and things.
He had ceased to give way to despair, as he had done after the rout at
Chatillon, when he doubted whether the French army would ever muster up
sufficient manhood to fight again: the sortie of the 30th of September
on l'Hay and Chevilly, that of the 13th of October, in which the mobiles
gained possession of Bagneux, and finally that of October 21, when his
regiment captured and held for some time the park of la Malmaison, had
restored to him all his confidence, that flame of hope that a spark
sufficed to light and was extinguished as quickly. It was true the
Prussians had repulsed them in every direction, but for all that the
troops had fought bravely; they might yet