e for
it, if necessary, without interesting themselves in the varied
mystifications one calls government. Four or five of the men, more or
less astonished at the cry which greeted them, turned their placid,
countrified faces toward the National Guard, and the battalion passed
by.

The dressmaker's husband--he did nothing at his trade, for his wife
adored him, and he spent at cafes all the money which she gave him--was
extremely scandalized. During this time Amedee Violette was 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 hos