talk that their junction with the army of the Loire had been fixed for the following day at Fontainebleau.  Then ensued a series of mischances, the usual blunders arising from want of foresight; a sudden rising of the river, which prevented the engineers from laying the pontoon bridge; conflicting orders, which delayed the movement of the troops.  The 115th was among the first regiments to pass the river on the following night, and in the neighborhood of ten o’clock, with Maurice in its ranks, it entered Champigny under a destructive fire.  The young man was wild with excitement; he fired so rapidly that his chassepot burned his fingers, notwithstanding the intense cold.  His sole thought was to push onward, ever onward, surmounting every obstacle until they should join their brothers from the provinces over there across the river.  But in front of Champigny and Bry the army fell up against the park walls of Coeuilly and Villiers, that the Prussians had converted into impregnable fortresses, more than a quarter of a mile in length.  The men’s courage faltered, and after that the action went on in a half-hearted way; the 3d corps was slow in getting up, the 1st and 2d, unable to advance, continued for two days longer to hold Champigny, which they finally abandoned on the night of December 2, after their barren victory.  The whole army retired to the wood of Vincennes, where the men’s only shelter was the snow-laden branches of the trees, and Maurice, whose feet were frost-bitten, laid his head upon the cold ground and cried.

The gloom and dejection that reigned in the city, after the failure of that supreme effort, beggars the powers of description.  The great sortie that had been so long in preparation, the irresistible eruption that was to be the deliverance of Paris, had ended in disappointment, and three days later came a communication from General von Moltke under a flag of truce, announcing that the army of the Loire had been defeated and that the German flag again waved over Orleans.  The girdle was being drawn tighter and tighter about the doomed city all whose struggles were henceforth powerless to burst its iron fetters.  But Paris seemed to accumulate fresh powers of resistance in the delirium of its despair.  It was certain that ere long they would have to count famine among the number of their foes.  As early as October the people had been restricted in their consumption of butcher’s meat, and in December, of all the immense herds of beeves and flocks of sheep that had been turned loose in the Bois de Boulogne, there was not a single creature left alive, and horses were being slaughtered for food.  The stock of flour and wheat, with what was subsequently taken for the public use by forced sale, it was estimated would keep the city supplied with bread for four months.  When the flour was all consumed mills were erected in the railway stations to grind the grain.  The supply of coal, too, was giving out; it was reserved to bake the bread and for use in the mills and arms