le of the night, and, as I wended my way across the Seine,
about noon, the mist, which had been hanging over the river, was slowly
rising in banked and jagged masses, with only a rift here and there for
the pitilessly glacial sun to peer through and mock at our shivering
condition. When I got to the Boulevard Montparnasse, I met several
stretchers, bearing sentries who had been absolutely frozen to within an
ace of death.

I know nothing of the military import of a bombardment, but have been
told that even the greatest strategists only count upon the moral effect
it produces upon the besieged inhabitants. I can only say this: if
Marshal von Moltke took the "moral effect" of his projectiles into his
calculations to accelerate the surrender of Paris, he might have gone on
shelling Paris for a twelvemonth without being one whit nearer his aim;
that is, if I am to judge by the scene I witnessed on that January
morning, before familiarity with the destruction-dealing shells could
have produced the proverbial contempt. At the risk of offending all the
sensation-mongers, foreign and native, with pen or with pencil, I can
honestly say that a broken-down omnibus and a couple of prostrate horses
would have excited as much curiosity as did the sight of the battered
tenements at Vaugirard, Montrouge, and Vanves. On the Chaussee du Maine,
the roadway had been ploughed up for a distance of about half a dozen
yards by a shell; in another spot, a shell had gone clean through the
roof and killed a woman by the side of her husband; in a third, a shell
had carried away part of the wall of a one-storied cottage, and the
whole of the opposite wall: in short, there was more than sufficient
evidence that life was no longer safe within the fortifications, and yet
there was no wailing, no wringing of hands, no heart-rending frenzied
look of despair, either pent up or endeavouring to find vent in shrieks
and yells, nay, not even on the part of the women. There was merely a
kind of undemonstrative contempt--very unlike the usual French way of
manifesting it--blended with a considerable dash of _badauderie_,--for
which word I cannot find an English equivalent, because the Parisian
loafer or idler is unlike any of his European congeners. To grasp the
difference between the former and the latter, one must have had the good
fortune to see the same incident in the streets of Paris, London,
Madrid, Florence, and Rome, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg,