by the hard truths that were imparted to it at that late day, remained sullenly silent and made no sign.  Midnight of that day heard the last shot from the German guns, and on the 29th, when the Prussians had taken possession of the forts, Maurice went with his regiment into the camp that was assigned them over by Montrouge, within the fortifications.  The life that he led there was an aimless one, made up of idleness and feverish unrest.  Discipline was relaxed; the soldiers did pretty much as they pleased, waiting in inactivity to be dismissed to their homes.  He, however, continued to hang around the camp in a semi-dazed condition, moody, nervous, irritable, prompt to take offense on the most trivial provocation.  He read with avidity all the revolutionary newspapers he could lay hands on; that three weeks’ armistice, concluded solely for the purpose of allowing France to elect an assembly that should ratify the conditions of peace, appeared to him a delusion and a snare, another and a final instance of treason.  Even if Paris were forced to capitulate, he was with Gambetta for the prosecution of the war in the north and on the line of the Loire.  He overflowed with indignation at the disaster of Bourbaki’s army in the east, which had been compelled to throw itself into Switzerland, and the result of the elections made him furious:  it would be just as he had always predicted; the base, cowardly provinces, irritated by Paris’ protracted resistance, would insist on peace at any price and restore the monarchy while the Prussian guns were still directed on the city.  After the first sessions, at Bordeaux, Thiers, elected in twenty-six departments and constituted by unanimous acclaim the chief executive, appeared to his eyes a monster of iniquity, the father of lies, a man capable of every crime.  The terms of the peace concluded by that assemblage of monarchists seemed to him to put the finishing touch to their infamy, his blood boiled merely at the thought of those hard conditions:  an indemnity of five milliards, Metz to be given up, Alsace to be ceded, France’s blood and treasure pouring from the gaping wound, thenceforth incurable, that was thus opened in her flank.

Late in February Maurice, unable to endure his situation longer, made up his mind he would desert.  A stipulation of the treaty provided that the troops encamped about Paris should be disarmed and returned to their abodes, but he did not wait to see it enforced; it seemed to him that it would break his heart to leave brave, glorious Paris, which only famine had been able to subdue, and so he bade farewell to army life and hired for himself a small furnished room next the roof of a tall apartment house in the Rue des Orties, at the top of the butte des Moulins, whence he had an outlook over the immense sea of roofs from the Tuileries to the Bastille.  An old friend, whom he had known while pursuing his law studies, had loaned him a hundred francs.  In addition to that he had caused his