FOOTNOTES:
[163] See ante, 99.
[164] Ibid., 118.
[165] Souvenirs, III. 349 et seq.
[166] Souvenirs, III. 448.
[167] Souvenirs, III. 464.
[168] Ibid., 409.
[169] Ibid., 470.
[170] For Mme. Adam’s description of the grim incident which occurred at his funeral, see Souvenirs, V. 66.
[171] Grant Duff in Notes from a Diary, September 1864.
[172] Souvenirs, III. 471.
[173] Ibid., 468.
[174] Ibid., 471.
[175] Ibid., 470.
[176] Ibid., 473.
[177] Souvenirs, IV. 2.
[178] Souvenirs, IV. 7.
[179] This diary, first published in Le Rappel, was afterwards embodied in the series of Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs, of which it constitutes the fourth volume, entitled Mes Illusions et nos Souffrances pendant le siège de Paris.
[180] To Edmond de Goncourt (Journal under September 4, 1870) the 4th of September seemed a “grey day.” Jules Favre, Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale, I. 64, writes, “la journée ... se leva tiède et radieuse.”
[181] Souvenirs, IV. 23.
[182] For the complete list of members of the Government, see Jules Favre, Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale, I. 89.
[183] Souvenirs, IV. 40.
[184] Souvenirs, IV. 30.
[185] George Sand, Correspondance, VI. 29.
[186] Souvenirs, IV. 244.
[187] Souvenirs, IV. 62.
[188] Correspondance de George Sand, VI. 34.
CHAPTER XI
THE SIEGE OF PARIS
September 19, 1870-January 28, 1871
“Ce caractère parisien, qu’on peut aujourd’hui résumer en un seul mot: héroïsme?.”—Mme. Adam, Souvenirs, December 7, 1870.
“At present,” said Mme. Adam to a friend on the 27th of September, 1870, “we have barely endured ten days of siege. And I will wager that in three months I shall not be any more disgusted with it than I am at present.”[189]
Juliette won her bet, for during the first three months of the siege she bore her sufferings cheerfully and without flinching. And even during the fourth month, though her health broke down, her courage did not fail.
During those interminable four months the two million souls cooped up in Paris knew every misery which has ever fallen to the lot of the besieged: internal discontent and disorder, resulting in the abortive revolution of the 31st of October; extreme scarcity of food and munitions of war for nearly three weeks, the 20th of December until the 8th of January; complete isolation from the rest of France and from the whole outer world.[190] To these sufferings, which Juliette shared with her fellow-citizens, was added her personal anxiety for her daughter’s safety. She did not even know where her daughter was. She hoped that Alice, with her grandparents, had succeeded in crossing to Jersey; for the Prussians were said to have invaded Normandy. But for many a long week, from the 19th of September until the 20th of December, no news came. Juliette endured this agony of suspense with fortitude. Then at length, through Mme. de Pierreclos, came tidings that Alice was well and with her grandparents at St. Helier. Straightway Juliette’s motherly mind flies at once to other anxious parents in the besieged city who are still without news of their children. For all through those days of horror Mme. Adam’s heart never ceased to beat in unison with the hearts of her fellow-sufferers, to bleed with their sorrows, to throb with their anxieties and their fears. Living thus in constant communion with her neighbours, she was able to depict graphically in her journal the perpetual ebb and flow of public feeling and opinion: now it was confident and hopeful, now foreboding and doubtful, but never, not even in the ghastly days of the end, completely conquered by despair. Throughout, with the exception of the actual days of bombardment, the comic spirit, Juliette’s inseparable friend, never forsook her; and, while feeling to the tragic point the sufferings of others, she was able to joke about her own sorrows and privations.
Next to her separation from Alice, the hardest to bear of her personal trials during the siege was being compelled to leave her flat in the Boulevard Poissonnière. On the 11th of October, Adam having been appointed Prefect of Police, he and his wife had to take up their abode in the Préfecture.
In the halls and corridors of that gloomy building, what hours of weary waiting for a passport’s stamping have not many of us endured during this war-time! We can well sympathise, therefore, with Mme. Adam’s horror at the idea of spending not hours only, but days, weeks and months within the Préfecture’s lugubrious portals. We can understand her grief at being obliged to exchange her cheerful flat, her “dovecot” on the Boulevard Poissonnière, for l’affreuse prison in the Rue de Jérusalem.
To any one with her vivid imagination it was a perfect nightmare merely to watch the going and coming of the prison-vans, lumbering into the courtyard of La Sainte Chapelle, and to hear the cries of “No. 1 for Mazas, No. 2 for Ste. Pélagie.”[191]
It was during her residence in the Préfecture that occurred that insurrection of the 31st of October which proved a premonition of the Commune. The popular discontent with the Government, and especially with its President, General Trochu, who was also Governor of Paris, had been growing for some weeks. It was brought to a head by the news that Le Bourget, one of the forts outside the capital, which had been captured from the Prussians on the 28th of October, had been retaken on the 29th. On the 30th, Mme. Adam, on her way to her hospital from a concert in the Cirque Pas de Loup, found the boulevard in an almost revolutionary ferment. The people were exclaiming: “We do not demand successes, but we will not have defeats resulting from our general’s frivolity, carelessness and incapacity.”[192] Later in the evening, when the time came for Juliette to return home, she found the tumult had increased. As she pressed her way through the crowd she felt its sentiments possessing her. “My sorrows mingled with theirs,” she writes, “my patriotism with their patriotism.”
As soon as she saw Adam she warned him of the state of Paris. But he knew it better than she, and her warning was unnecessary. There was a dinner-party at the Préfecture that evening. Both at table and afterwards in her salon, the guests, among whom was Rochefort, complained as loudly as the crowd of the Government’s incapacity. Every one found fault with the mismanagement which had resulted in the loss of Le Bourget. Rochefort and Adam were obliged to leave to attend a Cabinet meeting,[193] held to receive the report of Thiers, who had just returned from an official visit to the Great Powers on the subject of an armistice. Adam did not come back to the Préfecture until three o’clock in the morning.
The news that he brought was of the gravest. The Prefect of the Police placed no reliance whatever on the repeated assurances of the Governor of Paris that he would maintain order. Juliette had long since lost all faith in that polished, placid person, of whom every one said, c’est un homme très distingué. She would have preferred an energetic corporal.[194] She had no faith in the famous “plan.” It had never been confided to any one; but already it was being ridiculed by the besieged in the following couplets, sung up and down Paris streets—
“Je sais le plan de Trochu,
Plan, plan, plan, plan, plan.
Mon Dieu! quel beau plan!
Je sais le plan de Trochu;
Grâce à lui rien n’est perdu!
Quand sur du beau papier blanc,
Il eut écrit son affaire,
Il alla porter son plan
Chez maître Ducloux, notaire—
C’est là, qu’est l’plan de Trochu,
Plan, plan, plan, plan, plan.
Mon Dieu! quel beau plan!
C’est là, qu’est l’plan de Trochu;
Grâce à lui rien n’est perdu!”
Most happily, as it turned out, Adam had resolved on taking his own measures in order to guard peaceful citizens from the forces of violence and disorder. He depended on the Gardes Mobiles, recruited in the provinces. The Garde Nationale could not be trusted. It would probably side with the populace. And a parade of regular troops would only irritate the malcontents.
M. Thiers, after the Cabinet meeting, had taken Adam apart and confided to him his fear that the mob, furious against Thiers for his attempt to negotiate an armistice, might attack his house on the Place St. Georges and endanger the lives of his old, faithful servants. Adam promised to have the house guarded. And he now requested Juliette in case of danger to bring his friend’s servants into the Préfecture.
Neither sleep nor rest was possible for the Préfet de Police that night: reports from various parts of Paris were coming in every moment.
Between seven and eight in the morning Adam brought his wife the official newspaper L’Officiel. It contained three items of news, as little calculated as might be to calm the effervescence of the Parisian populace. It announced the capitulation of Metz and the possibility of an armistice, and it confirmed what had only been rumoured the day before, the Prussian capture of Le Bourget.
The Prefect went off at once to consult Trochu as to the measures for controlling the manifestation of popular fury which would be sure to greet these disastrous announcements. He found the general, as usual, irresolute—one moment proclaiming that the Government nominated by public opinion must find therein its only support, the next declaring that a hostile manifestation must be met by a deployment of all the forces at the Government’s disposition. Determining to give his own interpretation to such contradictory instructions, Adam assembled twenty battalions of the Garde Nationale to defend the Hôtel de Ville. Thither he himself went about one o’clock. Juliette did not see him again until six. Overcome with restlessness and apprehension, Mme. Adam spent the afternoon with some friends at Romainville Fort, whence could be seen the lost Le Bourget. Returning through Belleville about four o’clock, they found the suburb in a state of extreme agitation. Angry crowds thronged the streets, vociferating loudly: “We won’t have an armistice. All our men must engage. Rather blow up Paris than surrender.”[195]
Round the Hôtel de Ville the crowd was so dense that it was impossible for the carriage to pass. Alighting, Juliette mingled with the people and asked, “What was happening?” The replies she received were so contradictory that she could learn nothing. From the windows of the Hôtel de Ville lists were being thrown out, containing the names, curiously assorted, of those who were being proposed for the new Government: on one list were Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin, Delescluze; on another, Blanqui, Delescluze, Flourens, Félix Peyrat. Every list contained the name of Dorian, an intimate friend of the Adams, the highly popular and capable Minister of Public Works. On one paper was written merely Commune décrétée, Dorian président.[196] Mingling in that self-same crowd were other distinguished diarists of the siege: Labouchère, then Paris correspondent for the Daily News, and Edmond de Goncourt, both of whom observed that list-making. De Goncourt saw workmen in round hats inscribing in pencil on thick writing-pads a list which was being dictated to them.[197] He caught the names of Blanqui, Flourens, Ledru-Rollin and Motte. “That will do now,” cried a workman in a blouse. And de Goncourt next found himself in a group of women timorously talking of the distribution of goods.
Up in the Hôtel de Ville, already invaded by the mob, were deliberating, in one room, the mayors of Paris, and in another the Government of National Defence.[198]
Where was her husband? was naturally Mme. Adam’s chief concern. Following a company of Gardes Nationaux, she penetrated through a little side door into the courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville. There she saw Gustave Flourens on horseback. He was a Revolutionist designated by one of the lists as leader of the Commune.
“Ce pauvre Gustave, brave garçon, mais un enfant,” murmured at her side a man who, perspiring freely and breathing deeply, like one who had been hustled in a crowd, seemed just to have escaped from the riot upstairs.
“You come from above, sir?” asked Mme. Adam. “What is going on there?”
“Everything is for the best, my little lady,” he replied. “Blanqui is proclaimed Dictator of the Commune.”
Juliette longed to ask about her husband. But she was afraid. She only dared to inquire—
“How about Dorian?”
“What would you have, madame? He himself replied to us, saying, ‘I refuse to preside over the Commune. I am no politician. I found cannon, and, in my opinion, this is a time when the country stands more in need of cannons than of insurrections!’”
“Fine words,” exclaimed Juliette.
“Yes, madame; take them away with you,” was the rejoinder.
Hoping that Adam had returned to the Préfecture, Juliette made her way home, but only to find her husband still absent. He returned, however, at half-past six. Only a few minutes before, his wife had heard from the lips of a friendly National Guard the news of her husband’s arrest and of his escape, which he owed to the good offices of the news-bearer. The Prefect had only a few minutes to stay. His wife spoke of dinner. He would not hear of it. He had come to take measures for the defence of the Préfecture. Those measures the events of that black, starless night proved to be only too necessary.[199]
But they must be read in Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs; for the limits of this volume require us to pass over them and to hasten on to record briefly the agreement which, by the intervention of Adam and his friend Dorian, was arrived at in the small hours of the morning. Standing in a narrow staircase of the Hôtel de Ville, with the angry riflemen of the Commune above him, and the treacherous National Guards below, the Prefect conducted a parley. This intervention, seconded by the negotiations which Dorian in an upper room was carrying on between the Government and the Revolutionists, resulted in the signing of a convention.
By this agreement[200] the Government promised three things: first, to hold municipal elections on the following day; second, political elections on the day after; third, not to prosecute the leaders of the insurrection.
After the signing of this agreement, Adam, having, with considerable difficulty, secured the evacuation of the Hôtel de Ville by the invaders and the re-establishment of order, returned to the Préfecture at half-past five on the morning of November 1st.
Barely had the Prefect thrown himself on his bed and begun to enjoy the sleep which for two nights had been denied him, when his wife, who was writing in the adjoining room, heard her husband’s bedroom door violently opened. This early morning visitor was a member of the Government, M. Picard, who came to demand the arrest of the rebel leaders. Picard and certain of his colleagues, who had contrived to escape from the besieged Hôtel de Ville, and who were, therefore, absent at the time of the Convention’s signing, refused to hold themselves responsible for it. Adam, however, rather than break his pledged word, sent in his resignation. Negotiations continued throughout the day. The Prefect was implored to reconsider his decision; but he was deaf to all entreaties. His wife, who was lunching with Mme. Dorian when she first heard the news of her husband’s resignation, thoroughly approved of his action, deploring the treachery of the Government and its inevitably disastrous effect upon the people.
The question arose as to what should be the attitude of Dorian himself. He, as well as Adam, had undertaken that the leaders of the insurrection should go free. He, like Adam, was a man of unimpeachable honour. But his position was somewhat different. As Minister of Public Works he was entrusted with the all-important task of providing with munitions the army defending Paris. In his exercise of this function he had displayed marvellous ingenuity, energy and organising power. He had transformed the goldsmiths of Paris into engineers. He had commandeered every possible assistance. He had seemed to create guns out of nothing.[201]
“Twenty thousand shells are to-day being turned out,” wrote Mme. Adam, “in a city where, according to the Ministry of War, all the materials for munitions were exhausted.”
Here was Dorian, the right man in the right place: a minister who, if his colleagues had only possessed half his brains and energy, might possibly have saved Paris. What was he to do? His dignity dictated resignation. But though modesty itself, he was not blind to his own worth. He knew what he and he alone could do for his country, and for the country he cared far more than for his personal dignity. That day at lunch his wife, his son, and his beautiful daughter, Aline Dorian, one of the most ardent of patriots, and his daughter’s husband, Paul Ménard, all entreated him to resign.[202] With tears in his eyes and without the slightest hesitation, he replied: “When I left my home and my foundries to come to Paris, I was prepared for every sacrifice. When I consented to enter the Government of Defence, I vowed to the Republic’s service my fortune, my life, and yours, Ménard, and yours, Charles. You tell me that I ought to reserve my honour. I do not consider that my honour is in question. Rather it is the honour of others which is at stake. It is my dignity that is attacked. I feel it. Nevertheless I will go so far as to make that sacrifice. I have carved out my own part in the national task which we are all performing. I found cannon. If I ceased to do so, then I am persuaded not another cannon, not a single bullet more would be manufactured.”
Dorian continued in office. Adam, as we have said, resigned; and after three weeks’ residence in her prison house, Juliette awoke on the morning of the 3rd of November to find herself back again in her “dovecot” of the Boulevard Poissonnière.
One of the privations of her sojourn across the water had been that she saw less of her friends. The Rue de Jérusalem was too far out of their beat. Now, sauntering along the boulevard, coming away from dinner at Brébant’s opposite, the Adams’ friends had only to climb their staircase on Wednesday or Friday evenings to find them at home and surrounded by interesting friends. Of this restored privilege the former frequenters of Mme. Adam’s salon were not slow to avail themselves. “Ah! que le salon du Boulevard Poissonnière est autrement fréquenté que celui de la Préfecture,” exclaims Juliette. On the 8th of November she writes: “This evening we have the whole Dorian family, for whom our friendship increases every day, also Eugène Pelletan, Rochefort, who had resigned after the 31st of October, Chenevard and Louis Blanc.”
As the siege dragged on and viands grew scarcer and scarcer, Mme. Adam was often hard put to it to provide dinners for her guests. They were dîners de guerre, which, of course, means guère de dîner.
“I invited our friends to dinner,” writes Mme. Adam on the 23rd of December. “But our dinners are now veritable picnics.” Jourdan, a well-known journalist, provided the butter, Peyrat the last box of Albert plums in Paris, another guest a little box of kidney beans, yet another had sent the joint—it was part of an interesting cow which for two months had been stabled in a salon. A few weeks later such a luxury as beef became quite unknown. Juliette for her New Year’s dinner-party considered herself lucky to be able to put before her friends a joint of elephant. It was part of the famous Castor from the Jardins d’Acclimation. The trunk of Castor’s twin, Pollux, which an English butcher of the Boulevard Haussman had temptingly displayed in a setting of camel kidneys, helped to furnish forth the war dinner-tables of Labouchère and Edmond de Goncourt. The Daily News correspondent found it tough and oily, une pièce de résistance, but not in the usual sense of the term.
The sufferings of the rich, however, were as nothing compared with those of the poor. They were aggravated by the severity of the winter and the scarcity of fuel. Guards on the Paris ramparts were found frozen stiff.[203] Well-dressed women were to be seen carrying bundles of faggots along the street, or bearing home in triumph the hoop of a cask.
Walking along the Rue St. Honoré, Juliette was terrified to see a man fall down before her; he had fainted, and was on the point of dying of starvation. Mme. Adam learned that he was a whipmaker, whose occupation had forsaken him at a time when carriage-horses fetched a high price as a table delicacy. That day Juliette became possessed of a stock of whips large enough to furnish forth all the chariots of the Olympic Festival.
“When my portion of horseflesh is tough,” she writes,[204] “I try to console myself with the thought that it is part of one of those poor skeletons I used to see beaten almost to death along the streets. When the meat is fat and tender I am always afraid it comes from one of those fine dapple greys belonging to the Western Railway Line, which you, Alice, loved to watch ascending the slight incline of the Boulevard Poissonnière.”
The fortitude with which all classes in Paris endured the hardships of the siege Juliette is never tired of extolling. “Not a woman complains,” she writes. “The prevailing idea is devotion to la patrie. C’est une si grande chose que la patrie quand on y pense,” exclaimed a working man whom she met in the street.
Of course there were ugly scenes: ferocity resulting from the pangs of hunger, wild lawlessness arising from the relaxation of the bonds of family discipline in a time of so much distress. Juliette, with an idealist’s determination in an hour of heroic struggle to see only what is best in her fellow-men, passes lightly over such incidents, leaving them for de Goncourt’s more realistic pen. She was even prepared to condone drunkenness, because it frequently arose from scarcity of food.[205] Nevertheless, she cannot refrain from remonstrating with an intoxicated National Guard. “I cannot bear to see a citizen of the Republic drunk,” she exclaimed. “The Republic! ... a citizen! ... no, I will never get tipsy again,” hiccuped the drunkard.[206]
The artists, the actors and actresses of Paris were among those who laboured hardest at doing their bit. “You would expect it of them,” writes Mme. Adam. They had been so far from becoming Buonapartiste. And she relates how Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, who had organised a hospital in the Odéon Theatre, se conduit en femme de grand cœur.
Juliette herself, by her untiring efforts to alleviate distress, won for herself the title of Notre Dame de Bon Secours. Besides having billeted on her three recruits from Auvergne, she nursed back to health in her flat a wounded convalescent soldier, and later, during the bombardment, she gave harbourage to a poor girl who had fled in panic from the outskirts of the city.
Much of Mme. Adam’s time was occupied in organising and directing two societies, L’Œuvre des Fourneaux, which provided the poor with cheap meals, and L’Œuvre du Travail des Femmes, destined to help poor sempstresses by enabling them to possess sewing-machines of their own.
With amazing endurance, though racked by her old enemies neuralgia and rheumatism, Mme. Adam kept up her energy and her spirits. For nine years she had been accustomed to spend the winter in the south. In November 1870 she had written: “In normal days we should now be preparing to go to Bruyères.” But, alas! for her there was to be no southern sunshine that winter. Such a deprivation alone could naturally not fail to tell upon her health. Then came, on the 2nd of December, the terrible disappointment of Champigny, the sortie which had raised so many hopes only to dash them to the ground. But it was not until January that Juliette was driven to admit to herself that she was ill and must stay in bed. The bombardment of Paris had begun on the 6th of January. It continued for a nightmare of three weeks.
As early as the 7th of November, Nefftzer, at no time a prophet of smooth things, had foretold the bombardment. He predicted that bombs might fall even on the centre of Paris, probably on the Institute.
“Am I afraid?” Juliette had written in her diary under that date.
“Well, no. Why should I fear a bombardment? The quarters not struck and not likely to be must receive the unfortunate inhabitants of those that are. As for the houses! By my faith! so much the worse for them! I would willingly sacrifice my own and a hundred others if it would enable us to hold out two days longer.”[207]
The bombardment was less imminent than the editor of the Temps had thought. When it began on the 6th of January, it took the Parisians by surprise. The invaders, with a disregard of international law to which we in these latter days have grown accustomed, omitted to give the usual warning. “Oh, the barbarians,” cries Juliette. “More than three thousand bombs have fallen round the Jardin des Plantes and the Luxembourg.... Several persons have been killed in their beds.... Many flew into a panic, and, instead of seeking refuge in cellars, rushed out into the streets, where they were killed.”[208]
Nevertheless, the courage of the Parisians did not waver.... “If the European capitals,” writes Mme. Adam, “ask how Paris, the gay, the light-hearted, the witty, takes this bombardment, let them know Paris is proud to be bombarded! Let them look at her, let them behold her calm, courageous, and let them try to emulate her.”[209]
Experts pronounced the bombardment to be unheard-of in its violence and fury. The Prussians appeared to be using up all their siege ammunitions in this final coup. Forty thousand kilogrammes of powder were said to have been fired on the plateau of Avron alone. The noise was infernal. The tumult and the cold together were maddening. “Impossible,” wrote Mme. Adam after an interval of a week, “to sleep, to rest even for a moment. Parisians have not slept for ten days. The bombardment is fearful. How glad I am that I sent my daughter away!”
A gleam of hope came to the besieged when, on the 18th of January, another attempt was made at a sortie, and when, on the following day, came the news that all was going well, that Montretout had been taken, that the Prussians had been everywhere repulsed.
“All Paris at three o’clock in the afternoon was out on the boulevards and in the Champs Elysées. The Garde Nationale was said to be fighting magnificently, and already to have entered the Buzenval Park. Then suddenly the appearance of a startling placard cast down from the heights of sanguine anticipation into the depths of black despair the spirits of that hopeful and expectant crowd. Trochu announced that the attack had been abandoned. Instead of declaring a victory he referred to an armistice, and demanded that every cab remaining in Paris should be sent out to bring in the wounded. Groans escaped from every breast.
“Another enterprise, elaborately prepared, inefficiently executed, miserably terminated,” exclaims Mme. Adam. Indeed, an identical description might be given of every sortie since the opening of the siege.
The talk of capitulation which now began to circulate was unendurable to Juliette and to those who, like her, had come to be nicknamed les à l’Outrance (to the bitter end). “Never,” she writes, “during all the cruellest trials of these last months, have I suffered more than at this moment.”[210]
All Paris and the twenty mayors of Paris and the Garde Nationale were of Mme. Adam’s way of thinking: they also were les à l’Outrance; they preferred death to surrender. “If the Prussians dare to defile down our boulevards,” writes Juliette, “I believe we shall do as the Russians did in Moscow.... Death is twenty times less cruel than the degradation of la patrie.”[211]
The Paris mayors, convoked by the Government to receive the announcement that further resistance was impossible, declared they were ready to die. They preferred the horrors of famine to the humiliation of surrender.[212]
Many of the terrors of famine the Parisians had already endured. They had already suffered the pangs of hunger. But those that awaited them, should this heroic recommendation be adopted, would be unspeakably more horrible. “The men who speak thus,” wrote Favre in his last dispatch to Gambetta,[213] “still eat. They endure misery; but they do just contrive to maintain life. On the day, and that day is imminent, when they have nothing but horseflesh, not even bread, the death-rate, now terribly high, will become too horrible.”
On the 21st of January one of the Adams’ friends announced in their salon that the food in Paris could not hold out for longer than two days. That was an exaggeration. Juliette maintained that it could last for fifteen. Jules Favre informed Gambetta that it might be made to suffice for ten.[214]
Had there been any chance of the capital’s deliverance by one of the armies which Gambetta had been organising in the provinces, then the Government might have been justified in holding out a few days longer, but the last hope of such a deliverance had faded when General Chanzy had been defeated on the 11th.
Nevertheless Juliette, dragging herself from her sick-bed out into the bitter January cold, spent the 21st visiting first one, than another, in the forlorn hope of inspiring some concerted anti-surrender movement.
“I have passed a horrible night,” she wrote on the 24th, “obsessed by hallucinations. The Republic, our France, taking to itself form and visage, appeared and spoke to me, called me....”[215]
“The Officiel this morning insults our grief. What! Our hearts are bleeding! ... the whole population of Paris is in despair, in tears!... And yet not a word, not a groan, not a cry escapes from the breasts of those who govern us. Would not M. Picard[216] and M. Vinoy[217] permit it?”
The armistice involving the surrender of Paris was signed on the 28th of January. The bombardment had ceased on the 26th. “Would that I could die at this hour,” wrote Mme. Adam.[218]