The little town is rich, with its numerous factories, its handsome thoroughfare lined with two rows of well-built houses, and its pretty church and mairie; but the night before Marshal MacMahon and the Emperor had passed that way with their respective staffs and all the imperial household, and during the whole of the present morning the entire 1st corps had been streaming like a torrent through the main street.  The resources of the place had not been adequate to meet the requirements of these hosts; the shelves of the bakers and grocers were empty, and even the houses of the bourgeois had been swept clean of provisions; there was no bread, no wine, no sugar, nothing capable of allaying hunger or thirst.  Ladies had been seen to station themselves before their doors and deal out glasses of wine and cups of bouillon until cask and kettle alike were drained of their last drop.  And so there was an end, and when, about three o’clock, the first regiments of the 7th corps began to appear the scene was a pitiful one; the broad street was filled from curb to curb with weary, dust-stained men, dying with hunger, and there was not a mouthful of food to give them.  Many of them stopped, knocking at doors and extending their hands beseechingly toward windows, begging for a morsel of bread, and women were seen to cry and sob as they motioned that they could not help them, that they had nothing left.

At the corner of the Rue Dix-Potiers Maurice had an attack of dizziness and reeled as if about to fall.  To Jean, who came hastening up, he said: 

“No, leave me; it is all up with me.  I may as well die here!”

He had sunk down upon a door-step.  The corporal spoke in a rough tone of displeasure assumed for the occasion: 

“Nom de Dieu! why don’t you try to behave like a soldier!  Do you want the Prussians to catch you?  Come, get up!”

Then, as the young man, lividly pale, his eyes tight-closed, almost unconscious, made no reply, he let slip another oath, but in another key this time, in a tone of infinite gentleness and pity: 

“Nom de Dieu! Nom de Dieu!”

And running to a drinking-fountain near by, he filled his basin with water and hurried back to bathe his friend’s face.  Then, without further attempt at concealment, he took from his sack the last remaining biscuit that he had guarded with such jealous caution, and commenced crumbling it into small bits that he introduced between the other’s teeth.  The famishing man opened his eyes and ate greedily.

“But you,” he asked, suddenly recollecting himself, “how comes it that you did not eat it?”

“Oh, I!” said Jean.  “I’m tough, I can wait.  A good drink of Adam’s ale, and I shall be all right.”

He went and filled his basin again at the fountain, emptied it at a single draught, and came back smacking his lips in token of satisfaction with his feast.  He, too, was cadaverously pale, and so faint with hunger that his hands were trembling like a leaf.