September 24th.
. . . This morning a furious cannonading is taking place. They are fighting before Paris. The siege is begun. It has given me a feeling of pain and anger impossible to describe. They are firing on Paris, the wretches! It is the intellect of the whole world that they attack. Oh, why am I not there with the others? . . .
Instantaneously all yesterday’s apprehensions have vanished. I became ashamed of my mole-like existence. For the last week I have drunk nothing but the water from the cistern, but now, I hardly know wherefore, I went out on purpose to fill my jug at the cloister well, and it seemed to do me good to run some kind of risk. I looked into the Guillards’ house as I passed by, and my anger increased at the sight of this humble home ruthlessly pillaged, the furniture destroyed and burnt, the window-panes broken. I could not help thinking of the fate of Paris if they enter it . . .
I do not know whether my unseen glance and the intense hatred I was feeling towards him, did not at last disturb him and put him on his guard; but all of a sudden he raised his head, a head covered with thick bristling hair, the eyes of an albino, and red moustaches, showing a grinning set of cruel-looking teeth. For one moment he threw a suspicious glance around him, and having rebuckled his belt and refilled his flask, he went off. As he passed in front of my window, I had my finger on the trigger. Well, no; I could not do it. To kill for the sake of killing, with such certainty, and so little personal danger, was beyond me. It is not such an easy thing as one fancies, to take a fellow-creature’s life in cold blood.
Once outside the precincts of the Hermitage, and having shaken off his undefined sensation of fear, the rascal again took up his song, and I heard him getting farther and farther away, giving forth to the forest his “Mein lieb, lieb Mai . . .”
Sing away, sing away, my lad! you have had a narrow escape of never seeing again your sweet month of May . . .
