of the day.  They all must be aware that the capitulation had not been signed, and were all counting the hours, quaking at the thought that should it not be signed the sole resource left them would be to go down into their cellars and wait for their own walls to tumble in on them and crush the life from their bodies.  The voice of one in sore straits came up, it seemed to him, from the Rue des Voyards, shouting:  “Help! murder!” amid the clash of arms.  He bent over the terrace to look, then remained aloft there in the murky thickness of the night where there was not a star to cheer him, wrapped in such an ecstasy of terror that the hairs of his body stood erect.

Below-stairs, at early daybreak, Maurice awoke upon his sofa.  He was sore and stiff as if he had been racked; he did not stir, but lay looking listlessly at the windows, which gradually grew white under the light of a cloudy dawn.  The hateful memories of the day before all came back to him with that distinctness that characterizes the impressions of our first waking, how they had fought, fled, surrendered.  It all rose before his vision, down to the very least detail, and he brooded with horrible anguish on the defeat, whose reproachful echoes seemed to penetrate to the inmost fibers of his being, as if he felt that all the responsibility of it was his.  And he went on to reason on the cause of the evil, analyzing himself, reverting to his old habit of bitter and unavailing self-reproach.  He would have felt so brave, so glorious had victory remained with them!  And now, in defeat, weak and nervous as a woman, he once again gave way to one of those overwhelming fits of despair in which the entire world, seemed to him to be foundering.  Nothing was left them; the end of France was come.  His frame was shaken by a storm of sobs, he wept hot tears, and joining his hands, the prayers of his childhood rose to his lips in stammering accents.

“O God! take me unto Thee!  O God! take unto Thyself all those who are weary and heavy-laden!”

Jean, lying on the floor wrapped in his bed-quilt, began to show some signs of life.  Finally, astonished at what he heard, he arose to a sitting posture.

“What is the matter, youngster?  Are you ill?” Then, with a glimmering perception of how matters stood, he adopted a more paternal tone.  “Come, tell me what the matter is.  You must not let yourself be worried by such a little thing as this, you know.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Maurice, “it is all up with us, va! we are Prussians now, and we may as well make up our mind to it.”

As the peasant, with the hard-headedness of the uneducated, expressed surprise to hear him talk thus, he endeavored to make it clear to him that, the race being degenerate and exhausted, it must disappear and make room for a newer and more vigorous strain.  But the other, with an obstinate shake of the head, would not listen to the explanation.

“What! would you try to make me believe that my bit of land is no longer mine? that I would permit the Prussians to take it from me while I am alive and my two arms are left to me?  Come, come!”