em must
inevitably have exploded them all, entailing the immediate destruction
of the city by conflagration. Then, too, what could be accomplished with
such an assemblage of miserable wretches, deprived of all their powers,
mental and physical, by reason of their long-endured privations, and
destitute of either ammunition or subsistence? Merely to clear the
streets and reduce them to a condition of something like order would
require a whole day. The place was entirely incapable of defense, having
neither guns nor provisions.

These were the considerations that had prevailed at the council among
those more reasonable officers who, in the midst of their grief
and sorrow for their country and the army, had retained a clear and
undistorted view of the situation as it was; and the more hot-headed
among them, those who cried with emotion that it was impossible for an
army to surrender thus, had been compelled to bow their head upon their
breast in silence and admit that they had no practicable scheme to offer
whereby the conflict might be recommenced on the morrow.

In the Place Turenne and Place du Rivage, Delaherche succeeded with the
greatest difficulty in working his way through the press. As he passed
the Hotel of the Golden Cross a sorrowful vision greeted his eyes, that
of the generals seated in the dining room, gloomily silent, around the
empty board; there was nothing left to eat in the house, not even
bread. General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, however, who had been storming and
vociferating in the kitchen, appeared to have found something, for he
suddenly held his peace and ran away swiftly up the stairs, holding in
his hands a large paper parcel of a greasy aspect. Such was the crowd
assembled there, to stare through the lighted windows upon the
guests assembled around that famine-stricken _table d'hote_, that the
manufacturer was obliged to make vigorous play with his elbows, and was
frequently driven back by some wild rush of the mob and lost all the
distance, and more, that he had just gained. In the Grande Rue, however,
the obstacles became actually impassable, and there was a moment when
he was inclined to give up in despair; a complete battery seemed to have
been driven in there and the guns and _materiel_ piled, pell-mell, on
top of one another. Deciding finally to take the bull by the horns, he
leaped to the axle of a piece and so pursued his way, jumping from wheel
to wheel, straddling the guns, at the imminent