As soon as he was in bed, Dr. Duchesne sent for a barber to shave him, as his bushy whiskers had been ravaged by a bullet that had lodged itself in the salivary gland, carrying with it hair and flesh into the wound. The surgeon took up his pincers to extract the pieces of flesh which had stopped up the opening of the wound. He then had to take some very fine pincers to extract the hairs which were mixed up inextricably in the torn mass of flesh. When the barber laid his razor very gently near the wound, the unfortunate man turned livid, and an oath escaped his lips. He immediately glanced at me and muttered: “Pardon, mademoiselle.” I was very young, but I appeared much younger than my age. I looked like a very young girl, in fact. I was holding the poor fellow’s hand in mine and trying to comfort him with the hundreds of consoling words that spring from a woman’s heart to her lips, when she has to soothe moral or physical suffering.
“Ah, mademoiselle,” said poor Bloas, when the wound was finally dressed, “you gave me courage.”
When he was more easy I asked him if he would like something to eat.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Well, my boy, would you like cheese, soup, or sweets?” asked Mme. Lambquin.
“Sweets,” replied the strong, powerful-looking fellow, smiling.
Désiré Bloas often talked to me about his mother, who lived near Brest. He had a veritable adoration for this mother, but he seemed to have a terrible grudge against his father, for one day, when I asked him whether his father was still living, he looked up with his fearless eyes and appeared to fix them on a being visible only to himself, as though challenging him, with an expression of the most pitiful contempt. Alas, the brave fellow was destined to a cruel end, but I will return to that later on.
The sufferings endured through the siege began to have their effect on the “morale” of the Parisians. Bread had just been rationed out; there were to be three hundred grammes for adults, and one hundred and fifty grammes for children. A silent fury took possession of the people at this news. Women were the most courageous, the men were excited. Quarrels grew bitter, for some wanted war to the very death, and others wanted peace.
One day when I entered Frantz Mayer’s room to take him his meal, he went into the most ridiculous rage. He threw his piece of fowl down on the ground and declared that he would not eat anything, nothing more at all, for they had deceived him by telling him that the Parisians had not enough food to last two days before surrendering, and he had been in the ambulance seventeen days now, and was having fowl. What the poor fellow did not know was that I had bought about forty fowls and six geese at the beginning of the siege, and I was feeding them up in my dressing-room in the Rue de Rome. Oh, my dressing room was very pretty just then, and I let Frantz believe that all Paris was full of fowls, ducks, geese, and other domestic bipeds.
The bombardment continued, and one night I had to have all my patients transported to the Odéon cellars, for when Mme. Guérard was helping one of the sick men to get back into bed a shell fell on the bed itself, between her and the officer. It makes me shudder even now to think that three minutes previously the unfortunate man would have been killed as he lay in bed, although the shell did not burst.