Maurice himself this time felt that the end was come.  For four hours he had remained in the park of Buzanval with the National Guards under the galling fire from the Prussian intrenchments, and later, when he got back to the city, he spoke of their courage in the highest terms.  It was undisputed that the Guards fought bravely on that occasion; after that was it not self-evident that all the disasters of the army were to be attributed solely to the imbecility and treason of its leaders?  In the Rue de Rivoli he encountered bands of men shouting:  “Hurrah for the Commune! down with Trochu!” It was the leaven of revolution beginning to work again in the popular mind, a fresh outbreak of public opinion, and so formidable this time that the Government of National Defense, in order to preserve its own existence, thought it necessary to compel General Trochu’s resignation and put General Vinoy in his place.  On that same day Maurice, chancing to enter a hall in Belleville where a public meeting was going on, again heard the levee en masse demanded with clamorous shouts.  He knew the thing to be chimerical, and yet it set his heart a-beating more rapidly to see such a determined will to conquer.  When all is ended, is it not left us to attempt the impossible?  All that night he dreamed of miracles.

Then a long week went by, during which Paris lay agonizing without a murmur.  The shops had ceased to open their doors; in the lonely streets the infrequent wayfarer never met a carriage.  Forty thousand horses had been eaten; dogs, cats and rats were now luxuries, commanding a high price.  Ever since the supply of wheat had given out the bread was made from rice and oats, and was black, damp, and slimy, and hard to digest; to obtain the ten ounces that constituted a day’s ration involved a wait, often of many hours, in line before the bake-house.  Ah, the sorrowful spectacle it was, to see those poor women shivering in the pouring rain, their feet in the ice-cold mud and water! the misery and heroism of the great city that would not surrender!  The death rate had increased threefold; the theaters were converted into hospitals.  As soon as it became dark the quarters where luxury and vice had formerly held carnival were shrouded in funereal blackness, like the faubourgs of some accursed city, smitten by pestilence.  And in that silence, in that obscurity, naught was to be heard save the unceasing roar of the cannonade and the crash of bursting shells, naught to be seen save the red flash of the guns illuminating the wintry sky.

On the 28th of January the news burst on Paris like a thunderclap that for the past two days negotiations had been going on, between Jules Favre and M. von Bismarck, looking to an armistice, and at the same time it learned that there was bread for only ten days longer, a space of time that would hardly suffice to revictual the city.  Capitulation was become a matter of material necessity.  Paris, stupefied