as dreamily
walking up and down before the stacks of guns. His warlike ardor of the
first few days had dampened. He had seen and heard too many foolish
things said and done since the beginning of this horrible siege; had
taken part too many times in one of the most wretched spectacles in which
a people can show vanity in adversity. He was heart broken to see his
dear compatriots, his dear Parisians, redouble their boasting after each
defeat and take their levity for heroism. If he admired the resignation
of the poor women standing in line before the door of a butcher's shop,
he was every day more sadly tormented by the bragging of his comrades,
who thought themselves heroes when playing a game of corks. The official
placards, the trash in the journals, inspired him with immense disgust,
for they had never lied so boldly or flattered the people with so much
low meanness. It was with a despairing heart and the certitude of final
disaster that Amedee, needing a little sleep after the fatigue, wandered
through Paris's obscure streets, barely lighted here and there by
petroleum lamps, under the dark, opaque winter sky, where the echoes of
the distant cannonading unceasingly growled like the barking of monstrous
dogs.

What solitude! The poet had not one friend, not one comrade to whom he
could confide his patriotic sorrows. Paul Sillery was serving in the army
of the Loire. Arthur Papillon, who had shown such boisterous enthusiasm
on the fourth of September, had been nominated prefet in a Pyrenean
department, and having looked over his previous studies, the former
laureate of the university examinations spent much of his time therein,
far from the firing, in making great speeches and haranguing from the top
of the balconies, in which speeches the three hundred heroes of antiquity
in a certain mountain-pass were a great deal too often mentioned. Amedee
sometimes went to see Jocquelet in the theatres, where they gave benefit
performances for the field hospitals or to contribute to the molding of a
new cannon. The actor, wearing a short uniform and booted to the thighs,
would recite with enormous success poems of the times in which enthusiasm
and fine sentiments took the place of art and common sense. What can one
say to a triumphant actor who takes himself for a second Tyrtee, and who
after a second recall is convinced that he is going to save the country,
and that Bismarck and old William had better look after their laurels.