erted into seething
lakes of flame. The Commune had sworn that should the Versaillese enter
the city not one of them would ever get beyond the barricades that
closed the ends of the streets; the pavements would yawn, the houses
would sink in ruins, Paris would go up in flames, and bury assailants
and assailed under its ashes.

And if Maurice solaced himself with these crazy dreams, it was because
of his secret discontent with the Commune itself. He had lost all
confidence in its members, he felt it was inefficient, drawn this way
and that by so many conflicting elements, losing its head and becoming
purposeless and driveling as it saw the near approach of the peril with
which it was menaced. Of the social reforms it had pledged itself to
it had not been able to accomplish a single one, and it was now quite
certain that it would leave behind it no great work to perpetuate its
name. But what more than all beside was gnawing at its vitals was
the rivalries by which it was distracted, the corroding suspicion and
distrust in which each of its members lived. For some time past many
of them, the more moderate and the timid, had ceased to attend its
sessions. The others shaped their course day by day in accordance with
events, trembling at the idea of a possible dictatorship; they had
reached that point where the factions of revolutionary assemblages
exterminate one another by way of saving the country. Cluzeret had
become suspected, then Dombrowski, and Rossel was about to share their
fate. Delescluze, appointed Civil Delegate at War, could do nothing
of his own volition, notwithstanding his great authority. And thus
the grand social effort that they had had in view wasted itself in
the ever-widening isolation about those men, whose power had become a
nullity, whose actions were the result of their despair.

In Paris there was an increasing feeling of terror. Paris, irritated at
first against Versailles, shivering at the recollection of what it had
suffered during the siege, was now breaking away from the Commune. The
compulsory enrollment, the decree incorporating every man under forty
in the National Guard, had angered the more sedate citizens and been the
means of bringing about a general exodus: men in disguise and provided
with forged papers of Alsatian citizenship made their escape by way of
Saint-Denis; others let themselves down into the moat in the darkness of
the night with ropes and ladders. The wealthy had long si