f golden hair and a
very tumbled neckerchief, and a young mother, pale and thin, giving the
breast to a sickly infant.

The child, which could get no milk, was screaming, but its voice was
weak and stifled by its sobs. Pitifully small, with a pallid, unhealthy
skin and inflamed eyes, the mother gazed at it with mingled anxiety and
grief.

"He is very young," observed Gamelin, turning to look at the unhappy
infant groaning just at his back, half stifled amid the crowd of new
arrivals.

"He is six months, poor love!... His father is with the army; he is one
of the men who drove back the Austrians at Conde. His name is Dumonteil
(Michel), a draper's assistant by trade. He enlisted at a booth they had
established in front of the Hotel de Ville. Poor lad, he was all for
defending his country and seeing the world.... He writes telling me to
be patient. But pray, how am I to feed Paul (he's called Paul, you know)
when I can't feed myself?"

"Oh, dear!" exclaimed the pretty girl with the flaxen hair, "we've got
another hour before us yet, and to-night we shall have to repeat the
same ceremony over again at the grocer's. You risk your life to get
three eggs and a quarter of a pound of butter."

"Butter!" sighed the _citoyenne_ Dumonteil, "why, it's three months
since I've seen a scrap!"

And a chorus of female voices rose, bewailing the scarcity and dearness
of provisions, cursing the _emigres_ and devoting to the guillotine the
Commissaries of Sections who were ready to give good-for-nothing minxes,
in return for unmentionable services, fat hens and four-pound loaves.
Alarming stories passed round of cattle drowned in the Seine, sacks of
flour emptied in the sewers, loaves of bread thrown into the
latrines.... It was all those Royalists, and Rolandists, and Brissotins,
who were starving the people, bent on exterminating every living thing
in Paris!

All of a sudden the pretty, fair-haired girl with the rumpled
neckerchief broke into shrieks as if her petticoats were afire. She was
shaking these violently and turning out her pockets, vociferating that
somebody had stolen her purse.

At news of the petty theft, a flood of indignation swept over this crowd
of poor folks, the same who had sacked the mansions of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain and invaded the Tuileries without appropriating the
smallest thing, artisans and housewives, who would have burned down the
Palace of Versailles with a light heart, but would have though