COPYRIGHT, 1871, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER & CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1889, 1898
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
ILLUSTRATIONS
[ All were dead, as it were one long cemetery . . . . . Frontispiece ]
[ "Be so good as to come in, Mr. Sergeant" ]
[ I shuddered in my very soul and my hair bristled ]
[ Winter took him by the collar, and said: "I have you now!" ]
[ The sortie from the Tile-kiln ]
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
"The Blockade of Phalsburg" contains one of the happiest portraits in the Erckmann-Chatrian gallery—that of the Jew Moses who tells the story and who is always in character, however great the patriotic or romantic temptation to idealize him, and whose character is nevertheless portrayed with an almost affectionate appreciation of the sterling qualities underlying its somewhat usurious exterior.
The time is 1814, during the invasion of France by the allies after the disastrous battle of Leipsic and the campaign described in "The Conscript." The dwellers in Phalsburg—a little walled town of two or three thousand inhabitants in Lorraine—defend themselves with great intrepidity and determination during the siege which lasts until the capitulation of Paris. The daily life of the citizens and garrison, the various incidents of the blockade, the bombardment by night, the scarcity of food, the occasional sortie for foraging, all pass before the reader depicted with the authors' customary fidelity and life-likeness, and form as perfect a picture of a siege as "The Conscript" does of a campaign.