“We shall be beaten,” said he, quietly.
I protested, but he shook his head, without giving any reasons. He felt it, he said. I spoke of his brother. Louis was already at Metz with his regiment, and Julien showed me a letter which he had received the night before, a letter full of gaiety, in which the captain declared that he should have died of barrack-life if the war had not come to lift him out of it. He vowed that he would come home a colonel, with a medal.
But when I tried to use this letter as an argument against Julien’s dark prognostications, he merely repeated:
“We shall be beaten.”
Paris’s time of anxiety began once more. I knew that solemn silence of the great city; I had witnessed it in 1859 before the first hostilities of the Italian campaign. But this time the silence seemed more tremulous. No one seemed in doubt about the victory; yet sinister rumours were current, coming no one knew whence. Surprise was felt that our army had not taken the initiative and carried the war at once into the enemy’s territory.
One afternoon on the Exchange a great piece of news broke forth; we had gained an immense victory, taken a considerable number of cannons, and made prisoners a whole division. Houses were actually beginning to be decorated, people were embracing one another in the street, when the falsehood of the news had to be acknowledged. There had been no battle. The victory had not seemed natural in the expected order of events, but the sudden contradiction, the trick played on a populace that had been too ready with its rejoicings and had to put off its enthusiasm to another day, struck a chill to my heart. All at once I felt an immense sadness, I felt the quivering wing of some unexampled disaster passing over us.
I shall always remember that ill-omened Sunday. It was a Sunday again, and many people must have remembered the radiant Sunday of Magenta. It was early in August; the sunshine had not the young brightness of June. The weather was heavy, great flags of stormcloud weighed upon the city. I was returning from a little town in Normandy, and I was particularly struck by the funereal aspect of Paris. On the boulevards, people were standing about in groups of three or four, and talking in low tones. At last I heard the horrible news: we had been defeated at Wörth, and the torrent of invasion was flowing into France.
I never beheld such deep consternation. All Paris was stupefied. What! Was it possible? We were conquered! The defeat seemed to us unjust and monstrous. It not only struck a blow at our patriotism; it destroyed a religion in us. We could not yet measure all the disastrous consequences of this reverse, we still hoped that our soldiers might avenge it; and yet we remained as it were annihilated. The despairing silence of the town was full of a great shame.
That day and that evening were frightful. The public gaiety of victorious days was not. Women no longer wore that tender smile, nor did people pass from group to group making friends. Night fell black on this despairing populace. Not a firework in the street; not a lamp at a window. Early on the morrow I saw a regiment going down the boulevard. People were pausing with sad faces, and the soldiers passed, hanging their heads, as if they had had their share in the defeat. Nothing saddened me so much as that regiment, applauded by no one, passing over the same ground where I had seen the army from Italy marching past amid rejoicings that shook the houses.
Then began the days cursed with suspense. Every two or three hours I used to go to the door of the Mairie in the ninth arrondissement, which is in the Rue Drouot, where the telegrams were put up. There were always people gathered there, waiting, to the number of a hundred or so. Often the crowd would extend right to the boulevard. There was nothing noisy about these crowds. People spoke in low tones, as if they were in a sick-room. Directly a clerk appeared to put a telegram on the board, there was a rush. Soon the news ran from mouth to mouth. But the news had long been persistently bad, and public consternation grew. Even to-day I cannot pass along the Rue Drouot without thinking of those days of mourning. There, on that pavement, the people of Paris had to undergo the most awful of torments. From hour to hour we could hear the gallop of the German armies drawing nearer to Paris.