to mutter, "My mother---I
would see her once more."

As at daybreak the loungers on Montmartre and the ramparts descended
into the streets--most windows in which were open, as they had been
all night, with anxious female faces peering palely down-they saw the
conveyances of the ambulances coming dismally along, and many an
eye turned wistfully towards the litter on which lay the idol of the
pleasure-loving Paris, with the dark, bareheaded figure walking beside
it,--onwards, onwards, till it reached the Hotel de Vandemar, and a
woman's cry was heard at the entrance--the mother's cry, "My son! my
son!"

BOOK XII.

CHAPTER I.

The last book closed with the success of the Parisian sortie on the
30th of November, to be followed by the terrible engagements no less
honourable to French valour, on the 2nd of December. There was the
sanguine belief that deliverance was at hand; that Trochu would break
through the circle of iron, and effect that junction with the army
of Aurelles de Paladine which would compel the Germans to raise the
investment;--belief rudely shaken by Ducrot's proclamation of the 4th,
to explain the recrossing of the Marne, and the abandonment of the
positions conquered, but not altogether dispelled till von Moltke's
letter to Trochu on the 5th announcing the defeat of the army of the
Loire and the recapture of Orleans. Even then the Parisians did not
lose hope of succour; and even after the desperate and fruitless sortie
against Le Bourget on the 21st, it was not without witticisms on defeat
and predictions of triumph, that Winter and Famine settled sullenly on
the city.

Our narrative reopens with the last period of the siege.

It was during these dreadful days, that if the vilest and the most
hideous aspects of the Parisian population showed themselves at
the worst, so all its loveliest, its noblest, its holiest
characteristics--unnoticed by ordinary observers in the prosperous days
of the capital--became conspicuously prominent. The higher classes,
including the remnant of the old noblesse, had, during the whole siege,
exhibited qualities in notable contrast to those assigned them by
the enemies of aristocracy. Their sons had been foremost among those
soldiers who never calumniated a leader, never fled before a foe; their
women had been among the most zealous and the most tender nurses of the
ambulances they had founded and served; their houses had been freely
opened, whether to the