-in spite of all, talking
of Faidherbe in the north, of Chanzy on the Loire, of Bourbaki in the
east, as if their victorious armies were already beneath the walls.
The men and women who stood waiting, their feet in snow and slush, in
interminable lines before the bakers' and butchers' shops, brightened up
a bit at times at the news of some imaginary success of the army.
After the discouragement of each defeat the unquenchable flame of their
illusion would burst out and blaze more brightly than ever among
those wretched people, whom starvation and every kind of suffering
had rendered almost delirious. A soldier on the Place du Chateau d'Eau
having spoken of surrender, the by-standers mobbed and were near killing
him. While the army, its endurance exhausted, feeling the end was near,
called for peace, the populace clamored still for the sortie _en masse_,
the torrential sortie, in which the entire population of the capital,
men, women, and children, even, should take part, rushing upon the
Prussians like water from a broken dyke and overwhelming them by sheer
force of numbers.

And Maurice kept himself apart from his comrades, with an
ever-increasing disgust for the life and duties of a soldier, that
condemned him to inactivity and uselessness behind the ramparts of
Mont-Valerien. He grasped every occasion to get away and hasten to
Paris, where his heart was. It was in the midst of the great city's
thronging masses alone that he found rest and peace of mind; he tried
to force himself to hope as they hoped. He often went to witness the
departure of the balloons, which were sent up every other day from the
station of the Northern Railway with a freight of despatches and carrier
pigeons. They rose when the ropes were cast loose and soon were lost
to sight in the cheerless wintry sky, and all hearts were filled
with anguish when the wind wafted them in the direction of the German
frontier. Many of them were never heard of more. He had himself twice
written to his sister Henriette, without ever learning if she had
received his letters. The memory of his sister and of Jean, living as
they did in that outer, shadowy world from which no tidings ever reached
him now, was become so blurred and faint that he thought of them but
seldom, as of affections that he had left behind him in some previous
existence. The incessant conflict of despair and hope in which he lived
occupied all the faculties of his being too fully to leave room fo