considerable in the government, but did not do very much, the offices in
which they worked for France's salvation usually closed at four o'clock,
and they went as usual to take their appetizers at the Cafe de Seville.
It was there that Amedee met them again, and mixed anew in their
conversations, which now dwelt exclusively upon patriotic and military
subjects. These "beards" who would none of them have been able to command
"by the right flank" a platoon of artillery, had all at once been endowed
by some magical power with the genius of strategy. Every evening, from
five to seven, they fought a decisive battle upon each marble table,
sustained by the artillery of the iced decanter which represented Mount
Valerien, a glass of bitters, that is to say, Vinoy's brigade, feigned to
attack a saucer representing the Montretout batteries; while the regular
army and National Guard, symbolized by a glass of vermouth and absinthe,
were coming in solid masses from the south, and marching straight into
the heart of the enemy, the match-box.

There were scheming men among these "beards," and particularly terrible
inventors, who all had an infallible way of destroying at a blow the
Prussian army, and who accused General Trochu of treason, and of refusing
their offers, giving as a reason the old prejudices of military laws
among nations. One of these visionary people had formerly been physician
to a somnambulist, and took from his pocket--with his tobacco and
cigarette papers--a series of bottles labelled: cholera, yellow fever,
typhus fever, smallpox, etc., and proposed as a very simple thing to go
and spread these epidemics in all the German camps, by the aid of a
navigable balloon, which he had just invented the night before upon going
to bed. Amedee soon became tired of these braggarts and lunatics, and no
longer went to the Cafe de Seville. He lived alone and shut himself up in
his discouragement, and he had never perhaps had it weigh more heavily
upon his shoulders than this morning of the second of December, the last
day of the battle of Champigny, while he was sadly promenading before the
stacked guns of his battalion.

The dark clouds, heavy with snow, were hurrying by, the tormenting rumble
of the cannons, the muddy country, the crumbling buildings, and these
vanquished soldiers shivering under their rags, all threw the poet into
the most gloomy of reveries. Then humanity so many ages, centuries,
perhaps, old, had only reac