Produced by David Widger
By Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The last book closed with the success of the Parisian sortie on the 30thof November, to be followed by the terrible engagements no lesshonourable to French valour, on the 2nd of December. There was thesanguine belief that deliverance was at hand; that Trochu would breakthrough the circle of iron, and effect that junction with the army ofAurelles de Paladine which would compel the Germans to raise theinvestment;—belief rudely shaken by Ducrot's proclamation of the 4th, toexplain the recrossing of the Marne, and the abandonment of the positionsconquered, but not altogether dispelled till von Moltke's letter toTrochu on the 5th announcing the defeat of the army of the Loire and therecapture of Orleans. Even then the Parisians did not lose hope ofsuccour; and even after the desperate and fruitless sortie against LeBourget on the 21st, it was not without witticisms on defeat andpredictions of triumph, that Winter and Famine settled sullenly on thecity.
Our narrative reopens with the last period of the siege.
It was during these dreadful days, that if the vilest and the mosthideous aspects of the Parisian population showed themselves at theworst, so all its loveliest, its noblest, its holiest characteristics—unnoticed by ordinary observers in the prosperous days of the capital—became conspicuously prominent. The higher classes, including theremnant of the old noblesse, had, during the whole siege, exhibitedqualities in notable contrast to those assigned them by the enemies ofaristocracy. Their sons had been foremost among those soldiers who nevercalumniated a leader, never fled before a foe; their women had been amongthe most zealous and the most tender nurses of the ambulances they hadfounded and served; their houses had been freely opened, whether to thefamilies exiled from the suburbs, or in supplement to the hospitals. Theamount of relief they afforded unostentatiously, out of means that sharedthe general failure of accustomed resource, when the famine commenced,would be scarcely credible if stated. Admirable, too, were the fortitudeand resignation of the genuine Parisian bourgeoisie,—the thriftytradesfolk and small rentiers,—that class in which, to judge of itstimidity when opposed to a mob, courage is not the most conspicuousvirtue. Courage became so now—courage to bear hourly increasingprivation, and to suppress every murmur of suffering that would discredittheir patriotism, and invoke "peace at any price." It was on this classthat the calamities of the siege now pressed the most heavily. Thestagnation of trade, and the stoppage of the rents, in which they hadinvested their savings, reduced many of them to actual want. Those onlyof their number who obtained the pay of one-and-a-half franc a day asNational Guards, could be sure to escape from starvation. But this payhad already begun to demoralise the receivers. Scanty for supply offood, it was ample for supply of drink. And drunkenness, hitherto rarein that rank of the Parisians, became a prevalent vice, aggravated in thecase of a National Guard, when it wholly unfitted him for the duties heundertook, especially such National Guards as were raised from the mostturbulent democracy of the working class.
But of all that population; there were two sections in which the mostbeautiful elements of our human nature were most touchingly manifest—the women and the priesthood, including in the latter denomination allthe various brotherhoods and societies which re