htened breathing. It was not alone the unquiet slumbers of
the soldiers who had fallen in the streets, the blending of inarticulate
sounds produced by that gathering of guns, men, and horses; what he
fancied he could distinguish was the insomnia, the alarmed watchfulness
of his bourgeois neighbors, who, no more than he, could sleep, quivering
with feverish terrors, awaiting anxiously the coming of the day. They
all must be aware that the capitulation had not been signed, and were
all counting the hours, quaking at the thought that should it not
be signed the sole resource left them would be to go down into their
cellars and wait for their own walls to tumble in on them and crush the
life from their bodies. The voice of one in sore straits came up, it
seemed to him, from the Rue des Voyards, shouting: "Help! murder!" amid
the clash of arms. He bent over the terrace to look, then remained aloft
there in the murky thickness of the night where there was not a star to
cheer him, wrapped in such an ecstasy of terror that the hairs of his
body stood erect.

Below-stairs, at early daybreak, Maurice awoke upon his sofa. He was
sore and stiff as if he had been racked; he did not stir, but lay
looking listlessly at the windows, which gradually grew white under the
light of a cloudy dawn. The hateful memories of the day before all came
back to him with that distinctness that characterizes the impressions
of our first waking, how they had fought, fled, surrendered. It all rose
before his vision, down to the very least detail, and he brooded with
horrible anguish on the defeat, whose reproachful echoes seemed to
penetrate to the inmost fibers of his being, as if he felt that all the
responsibility of it was his. And he went on to reason on the cause of
the evil, analyzing himself, reverting to his old habit of bitter and
unavailing self-reproach. He would have felt so brave, so glorious had
victory remained with them! And now, in defeat, weak and nervous as
a woman, he once again gave way to one of those overwhelming fits of
despair in which the entire world, seemed to him to be foundering.
Nothing was left them; the end of France was come. His frame was shaken
by a storm of sobs, he wept hot tears, and joining his hands, the
prayers of his childhood rose to his lips in stammering accents.

"O God! take me unto Thee! O God! take unto Thyself all those who are
weary and heavy-laden!"

Jean, lying on the floor wrapped in his bed-quil