if it possesses artillery, is short of artillerymen. It delights me to
learn that they can only dispose of seven thousand combatants. I had
feared that it would be enabled to kill a great many more; and as to
what Citizen Rossel says of the committees and officers who deliberate
but do not act, it is most pleasant news, for it convinces me, that the
Commune has not the power to continue much longer a war, which can but
result in the death of Paris; and yet I highly disapprove of the letter
of Citizen Rossel, because it is on his part an act of treachery, and it
is not for the friends and servants of the Commune to reveal its faults
and to show up its weaknesses. Who obliged Rossel, commander of the
staff, to take the place of his general, disgraced and imprisoned? Did
he not accept willingly a position, the difficulties of which he had
already recognised? He says himself that his predecessor was wrong to
have stayed in so absurd a position, and why did he voluntarily put
himself there, where he blamed another for remaining? If the new
delegate hoped by his own cleverness to modify the position, he ought
not, the position remaining the same, accuse anything but his own
incapacity. In a word, the conclusion at which we arrive is, that he
only accepted power to be able to throw it off with effect, like Cato,
who only went to the public theatres for the purpose of fussily leaving
the place, at the moment when the audience called the actors before the
curtain. Not being able or perhaps willing to save the Commune, M.
Rossel desired to save himself at its expense. There is something
ungentlemanly in this. Do not, however, imagine for a moment that I
believe in M. Rossel having been bought by M. Thiers. All those
ridiculous stories of sums of money having been offered to the members
of the Commune, are merely absurd inventions.[84] What do you think they
say of Cluseret? That he was in the habit of taking his breakfast at the
Cafe d'Orsay, and afterwards playing a game of dominoes. One day his
adversary is reported to have said to him, "If you will deliver the fort
of Montrouge to the Versaillais, I will give you two millions." What
fools people must be to believe such absurdities! Rossel has not sold
himself, for the very good reason that nobody ever thought of buying
him. It was his own idea to do what he did. For the pleasure of being
insolent and showing his boldness, he has pulled down from its pedestal
what he adored, co