factories.  And Paris, her streets without gas and lighted by petroleum lamps at infrequent intervals; Paris, shivering under her icy mantle; Paris, to whom the authorities doled out her scanty daily ration of black bread and horse flesh, continued to hope—­in spite of all, talking of Faidherbe in the north, of Chanzy on the Loire, of Bourbaki in the east, as if their victorious armies were already beneath the walls.  The men and women who stood waiting, their feet in snow and slush, in interminable lines before the bakers’ and butchers’ shops, brightened up a bit at times at the news of some imaginary success of the army.  After the discouragement of each defeat the unquenchable flame of their illusion would burst out and blaze more brightly than ever among those wretched people, whom starvation and every kind of suffering had rendered almost delirious.  A soldier on the Place du Chateau d’Eau having spoken of surrender, the by-standers mobbed and were near killing him.  While the army, its endurance exhausted, feeling the end was near, called for peace, the populace clamored still for the sortie en masse, the torrential sortie, in which the entire population of the capital, men, women, and children, even, should take part, rushing upon the Prussians like water from a broken dyke and overwhelming them by sheer force of numbers.

And Maurice kept himself apart from his comrades, with an ever-increasing disgust for the life and duties of a soldier, that condemned him to inactivity and uselessness behind the ramparts of Mont-Valerien.  He grasped every occasion to get away and hasten to Paris, where his heart was.  It was in the midst of the great city’s thronging masses alone that he found rest and peace of mind; he tried to force himself to hope as they hoped.  He often went to witness the departure of the balloons, which were sent up every other day from the station of the Northern Railway with a freight of despatches and carrier pigeons.  They rose when the ropes were cast loose and soon were lost to sight in the cheerless wintry sky, and all hearts were filled with anguish when the wind wafted them in the direction of the German frontier.  Many of them were never heard of more.  He had himself twice written to his sister Henriette, without ever learning if she had received his letters.  The memory of his sister and of Jean, living as they did in that outer, shadowy world from which no tidings ever reached him now, was become so blurred and faint that he thought of them but seldom, as of affections that he had left behind him in some previous existence.  The incessant conflict of despair and hope in which he lived occupied all the faculties of his being too fully to leave room for mere human feelings.  Then, too, in the early days of January he was goaded to the verge of frenzy by the action of the enemy in shelling the district on the left bank of the river.  He had come to credit the Prussians with reasons of humanity for their abstention, which was in fact due simply to the difficulties they experienced in bringing up their guns and getting them in position.  Now that a shell had killed two little girls at the Val-de-Grace, his scorn and hatred knew no bounds for those barbarous ruffians who murdered little children and threatened to burn the libraries and museums.  After the first days of terror, however, Paris had resumed its life of dogged, unfaltering heroism.