rrows like costers, but instead of
trundling cabbages were pushing forward sleeping babies and little
children, who seemed on the first stage to find new amusement and
excitement in the journey from home; but for the most part they trudged
along bravely, carrying their babies and holding the hands of their
little ones.

They were of all classes, rank and fortune being annihilated by the
common tragedy. Elegant women whose beauty is known in Paris salons,
whose frivolity, perhaps, in the past was the main purpose of their
life, were now on a level with the peasant mothers of the French suburbs
and with the midinettes of Montmartre, and their courage did not fail
them so quickly.

I looked into many proud, brave faces of these delicate women, walking
in high-heeled shoes, all too frail for the hard-dusty roadways. They
belonged to the same race and breed as those ladies who defied death
with fine disdain upon the scaffold of the guillotine in the great
Revolution.

They were leaving Paris now, not because of any fears for themselves--I
believe they were fearless--but because they had decided to save the
little sons and daughters of soldier fathers.

This great army in retreat was made up of every type familiar in Paris.

Here were women of the gay world, poor creatures whose painted faces had
been washed with tears, and whose tight skirts and white stockings were
never made for a long march down the highways of France.

Here also were thousands of those poor old ladies who live on a few
francs a week in the top attics of the Paris streets, which Balzac knew;
they had fled from their poor sanctuaries and some of them were still
carrying cats and canaries, as dear to them as their own lives.

There was one young woman who walked with a pet monkey on her shoulder
while she carried a bird in a golden cage. Old men, who remembered 1870,
gave their arms to old ladies to whom they had made love when the
Prussians were at the gates of Paris then.

It was pitiful to see these old people now hobbling along together.
Pitiful, but beautiful also, because of their lasting love.

Young boy students, with ties as black as their hats and rat-tail hair,
marched in small companies of comrades, singing brave songs, as though
they had no fear in their hearts, and very little food, I think, in
their stomachs.

Shopgirls and concierges, city clerks, old aristocrats, young boys and
girls, who supported grandfathers and grandmothers