be victorious in the end.
It was Paris now that was responsible for the young man's gloomy
forebodings, that great fickle city that at one moment was cheered by
bright illusions and the next was sunk in deepest despair, ever haunted
by the fear of treason in its thirst for victory. Did it not seem as
if Trochu and Ducrot were treading in the footsteps of the Emperor and
Marshal MacMahon and about to prove themselves incompetent leaders, the
unconscious instruments of their country's ruin? The same movement that
had swept away the Empire was now threatening the Government of National
Defense, a fierce longing of the extremists to place themselves in
control in order that they might save France by the methods of '92;
even now Jules Favre and his co-members were more unpopular than the old
ministers of Napoleon III. had ever been. Since they would not fight
the Prussians, they would do well to make way for others, for those
revolutionists who saw an assurance of victory in decreeing the _levee
en masse_, in lending an ear to those visionaries who proposed to mine
the earth beneath the Prussians' feet, or annihilate them all by means
of a new fashioned Greek fire.

Just previous to the 31st of October Maurice was more than usually a
victim to this malady of distrust and barren speculation. He listened
now approvingly to crude fancies that would formerly have brought a
smile of contempt to his lips. Why should he not? Were not imbecility
and crime abroad in the land? Was it unreasonable to look for the
miraculous when his world was falling in ruins about him? Ever since the
time he first heard the tidings of Froeschwiller, down there in front
of Mulhausen, he had harbored a deep-seated feeling of rancor in his
breast; he suffered from Sedan as from a raw sore, that bled afresh with
every new reverse; the memory of their defeats, with all the anguish
they entailed, was ever present to his mind; body and mind enfeebled
by long marches, sleepless nights, and lack of food, inducing a mental
torpor that left them doubtful even if they were alive; and the thought
that so much suffering was to end in another and an irremediable
disaster maddened him, made of that cultured man an unreflecting being,
scarce higher in the scale than a very little child, swayed by each
passing impulse of the moment. Anything, everything, destruction,
extermination, rather than pay a penny of French money or yield an inch
of French soil! The revolution