We think the picture sufficiently complete. Over this huge mass of moral rottenness; over the heads of pagan gods yet standing erect in the midst of this foul corruption; over the great sinning empire, pagan still in its vices and its tastes, the threatening storm-cloud hangs, waiting the moment when God shall bid it belch forth its hidden terrors of fire and flame. That moment is close at hand. Then shall the martyrs be avenged, and this universal crime be punished.
THE LAST DAYS BEFORE THE SIEGE.
PART II.
EXCELSIOR!
“Great news! Extra! Three sous!” The newsvender, a ragged little urchin who nearly collapsed under the weight and volume of his extras, was shouting out these three startling facts at the top of his voice as I went out early in the morning. Two rheumatic old rag-women, immediately suspending their investigation of the dust-heaps, dropped their crooks, and cried out to him to know the news. Was it a victory or a defeat, or was it anything about the siege? But the urchin, as hard-hearted as any editor, waved the momentous sheet majestically with one hand, and answered, “Three sous!” To the renewed entreaties of the rag-women he condescended so far as to say that it was well worth the money, that they never spent three sous more advantageously, for the news was wonderful news, but for less than three sous they should not have it. I did not altogether believe either in the extra or in the wonderful news, but the newspaper fever was on me like the rest of the world, so I produced the inexorable three sous and took the paper. The moment the two women saw this they came up to me, and, evidently taking for granted that I was going to give them the benefit of my extravagance, stood to hear the news. I read it aloud for them, as well as to a milk-boy who was passing at the moment and stood also to get his share of the three sous, and a remarkably sympathetic audience the three made. The news was none of the best. The Prussians were at Chalons, and they might be at the gates of Paris before another week.
“That was MacMahon’s plan from the first,” observed the milk-boy, “and, if the Prussians fall into the trap, the game is ours.”
The rag-women, not being so well up in military tactics and technicalities, meekly begged to be enlightened as to the nature and aim of the trap in question, and the young politician was so kind as to explain to them that the marshal had all along been luring on the Prussians to Paris, which was to be their pitfall; Mont Valérien and the fortifications would annihilate them like flies; not a man of them would go back alive; the only fear was that that rascally Bismarck would be too many guns for the marshal, and make him fight before Chalons, in which case, he observed, “it was all up with the marshal, and consequently with France.”
Having delivered himself of this masterly exposition of the case, the milk-boy swung his cans, touched his cap to me, and, having achieved the most preternaturally knowing wink I ever beheld, strode off without waiting to see the effect of his words on the two old women. They looked after him aghast. Had they been talking to a confidential agent of the War Office, or to an emissary of the rascally Bismarck himself? A spy, in fact?
“One ought to have one’s mouth sewed up these times,” observed the more ancient of the beldames, casting a half-suspicious glance at me as I folded my newspaper and put it into my pocket. “One never knows whom one may be speaking to.”