r mere
human feelings. Then, too, in the early days of January he was goaded to
the verge of frenzy by the action of the enemy in shelling the district
on the left bank of the river. He had come to credit the Prussians with
reasons of humanity for their abstention, which was in fact due simply
to the difficulties they experienced in bringing up their guns and
getting them in position. Now that a shell had killed two little girls
at the Val-de-Grace, his scorn and hatred knew no bounds for those
barbarous ruffians who murdered little children and threatened to burn
the libraries and museums. After the first days of terror, however,
Paris had resumed its life of dogged, unfaltering heroism.

Since the reverse of Champigny there had been but one other attempt,
ending in disaster like the rest, in the direction of Bourget; and the
evening when the plateau of Avron was evacuated, under the fire of the
heavy siege artillery battering away at the forts, Maurice was a sharer
in the rage and exasperation that possessed the entire city. The growing
unpopularity that threatened to hurl from power General Trochu and
the Government of National Defense was so augmented by this additional
repulse that they were compelled to attempt a supreme and hopeless
effort. What, did they refuse the services of the three hundred thousand
National Guards, who from the beginning had been demanding their share
in the peril and in the victory! This time it was to be the torrential
sortie that had all along been the object of the popular clamor;
Paris was to throw open its dikes and drown the Prussians beneath the
on-pouring waves of its children. Notwithstanding the certainty of a
fresh defeat, there was no way of avoiding a demand that had its origin
in such patriotic motives; but in order to limit the slaughter as far
as possible, the chiefs determined to employ, in connection with the
regular army, only the fifty-nine mobilized battalions of the National
Guard. The day preceding the 19th of January resembled some great
public holiday; an immense crowd gathered on the boulevards and in the
Champs-Elysees to witness the departing regiments, which marched proudly
by, preceded by their bands, the men thundering out patriotic airs.
Women and children followed them along the sidewalk, men climbed on the
benches to wish them Godspeed. The next morning the entire population of
the city hurried out to the Arc de Triomphe, and it was almost
frantic with del