ready for every sacrifice.  Everyone was in uniform; there was scarce a head that was not decorated with the kepi of the National Guard.  Business of every sort had come to a sudden standstill, as the hands of a watch cease to move when the mainspring snaps, and at the public meetings, among the soldiers in the guard-room, or where the crowds collected in the streets, there was but one subject of conversation, inflaming the hearts and minds of all—­the determination to conquer.  The contagious influence of illusion, scattered broadcast, unbalanced weaker minds; the people were tempted to acts of generous folly by the tension to which they were subjected.  Already there was a taint of morbid, nervous excitability in the air, a feverish condition in which men’s hopes and fears alike became distorted and exaggerated, arousing the worst passions of humanity at the slightest breath of suspicion.  And Maurice was witness to a scene in the Rue des Martyrs that produced a profound impression on him, the assault made by a band of infuriated men on a house from which, at one of the upper windows, a bright light had been displayed all through the night, a signal, evidently, intended to reach the Prussians at Bellevue over the roofs of Paris.  There were jealous citizens who spent all their nights on their house-tops, watching what was going on around them.  The day before a poor wretch had had a narrow escape from drowning at the hands of the mob, merely because he had opened a map of the city on a bench in the Tuileries gardens and consulted it.

And that epidemic of suspicion Maurice, who had always hitherto been so liberal and fair-minded, now began to feel the influence of in the altered views he was commencing to entertain concerning men and things.  He had ceased to give way to despair, as he had done after the rout at Chatillon, when he doubted whether the French army would ever muster up sufficient manhood to fight again:  the sortie of the 30th of September on l’Hay and Chevilly, that of the 13th of October, in which the mobiles gained possession of Bagneux, and finally that of October 21, when his regiment captured and held for some time the park of la Malmaison, had restored to him all his confidence, that flame of hope that a spark sufficed to light and was extinguished as quickly.  It was true the Prussians had repulsed them in every direction, but for all that the troops had fought bravely; they might yet be victorious in the end.  It was Paris now that was responsible for the young man’s gloomy forebodings, that great fickle city that at one moment was cheered by bright illusions and the next was sunk in deepest despair, ever haunted by the fear of treason in its thirst for victory.  Did it not seem as if Trochu and Ducrot were treading in the footsteps of the Emperor and Marshal MacMahon and about to prove themselves incompetent leaders, the unconscious instruments of their country’s ruin?  The same movement that had swept away the