January 30th.
…All is over. Paris has capitulated. The armistice is signed.
LAST LEAFLETS.
I end here my diary, in which I have tried to give the experiences of my five months of solitude. To-day I returned to Draveil in the Doctor’s carriage, but without hiding this time. The roads were full of peasants returning home. Many are already at work again on the land. All faces are sad, but no complaints are heard. Is it fatalism or resignation?
The Prussians still occupy the village, enforcing their triumph with cool insolence. They, however, appear less brutal with the inhabitants. I saw some walking about hand-in-hand with little children. It was like the beginning of a return to their forsaken hearths, to their sedentary lives, so long disturbed by this war . . . When I came home in the evening, I saw on the doorstep of the keeper’s house, old Guillard’s widow, dressed in deep mourning and hardly recognisable. Poor woman! her husband dead and her home a wreck. Her misfortunes are complete. I heard her weeping as she tried to put in order the remains of her household goods.
