was Amiens and Rouen, and other corps on the march to reinforce the besiegers before Paris.  For several days the houses were full to overflowing with soldiers, the butchers’ and bakers’ shops were swept clean, to the last bone, to the last crumb; the streets were pervaded by a greasy, tallowy odor, as after the passage of the great migratory bands of olden times.  The buildings in the Rue Maqua, protected by a friendly influence, escaped the devastating irruption, and were only called on to give shelter to a few of the leaders, men of education and refinement.

Owing to these circumstances, Delaherche at last began to lay aside his frostiness of manner.  As a general thing the bourgeois families shut themselves in their apartments and avoided all communication with the officers who were billeted on them; but to him, who was of a sociable nature and liked to extract from life what enjoyment it had to offer, this enforced sulkiness in the end became unbearable.  His great, silent house, where the inmates lived apart from one another in a chill atmosphere of distrust and mutual dislike, damped his spirits terribly.  He began by stopping M. de Gartlauben on the stairs one day to thank him for his favors, and thus by degrees it became a regular habit with the two men to exchange a few words when they met.  The result was that one evening the Prussian captain found himself seated in his host’s study before the fireplace where some great oak logs were blazing, smoking a cigar and amicably discussing the news of the day.  For the first two weeks of their new intimacy Gilberte did not make her appearance in the room; he affected to ignore her existence, although, at every faintest sound, his glance would be directed expectantly upon the door of the connecting apartment.  It seemed to be his object to keep his position as an enemy as much as possible in the background, trying to show he was not narrow-minded or a bigoted patriot, laughing and joking pleasantly over certain rather ridiculous requisitions.  For example, a demand was made one day for a coffin and a shroud; that shroud and coffin afforded him no end of amusement.  As regarded other things, such as coal, oil, milk, sugar, butter, bread, meat, to say nothing of clothing, stoves and lamps—­all the necessaries of daily life, in a word—­he shrugged his shoulders:  mon Dieu! what would you have?  No doubt it was vexatious; he was even willing to admit that their demands were excessive, but that was how it was in war times; they had to keep themselves alive in the enemy’s country.  Delaherche, who was very sore over these incessant requisitions, expressed his opinion of them with frankness, pulling them to pieces mercilessly at their nightly confabs, in much the same way as he might have criticised the cook’s kitchen accounts.  On only one occasion did their discussion become at all acrimonious, and that was in relation to the impost of a million francs that the Prussian prefet at Rethel had levied on the department