This remark was too deep and too fearfully suggestive to admit of any commentary from her companion; the only thing to be done in such a crisis was to take refuge in professional pursuits that offered no ground for suspicion, so seizing her crook the rag-woman plunged prudently once more into her rubbish.
A little further on, turning the corner of a street, I came on two gentlemen whom I knew, standing in animated conversation. I stopped to ask what news? None, except that the horizon was growing darker from hour to hour. The despatches from the frontier were as bad as could well be. As to pooh-poohing the siege now it was sheer stupidity, one of them declared, and, for his part, he only wished it were already begun: it was the last chance left us of rejecting the disasters of the campaign and crushing the remains of the enemy. His companion indignantly scouted both the certainty of the siege and the desirability of it. The city was not to be trusted; no great city ever was; there were hundreds of traitors only too ready to open the gates to the enemy at his own price. Look at the proprietors! Did any one suppose there were fifty proprietors in Paris who would not cry Capitulons! before one week was out?
“Well, let the proprietors be taken down to their own cellars, and kept there under lock and key, and let them sit on their money-bags till the siege is over!” suggested the advocate of the siege.
“Then you must lock up half the National Guard and the Mobiles,” resumed the other, “for they are full of those money-loving traitors.”
This was not very reassuring. I kept repeating to myself that public opinion at a moment like this was always an alarmist, and that the wisest plan would be to read no papers and to consult nobody, but just wait till events resolved themselves, as they infallibly do, sooner or later, to those who have patience to wait for them, and then act as they decided; but it was no use. I went home in dire perplexity, and began to wish myself in Timbuctoo or the Fiji Islands, or anywhere out of the centre of civilization and the fashions and chronic alarm and discontent. Things went on in this way for another week, the tide advancing rapidly, but so gradually that it was difficult for those on shore to note its progress and be guided by it. No one would own to being frightened, but it was impossible to see the scared faces of the people, as they stood in groups before every new placard setting forth either a fresh order from the Hôtel de Ville or some dubious and disheartening despatch from the seat of war, without feeling that the panic was upon them, and that the complicated problems of the great national struggle had resolved themselves into the immediate question: Shall we stay, or must we fly? When you met a friend in the street, the first, the sole, the supreme salutation was: “Do you believe in the siege? Are you going to stay?” The obduracy of the Parisians in refusing to believe in the siege up to the very last moment was certainly one of the strangest phases of the siege itself. They were possessed by a blind faith in the sacredness and inviolability of their capital, and they could not bring themselves to believe that all Europe did not look upon it with the same eyes; they thought that Prussia might indeed push audacity so far as to come and sit down before the gates, but beyond that Bismarck would not go; he would not dare; all Europe would stand up and cry shame on him, not out of sympathy for France, but out of sheer selfishness, for Paris was not the capital of France, but of Europe. So the walls were white with proclamations and advertisements and invitations to non-combatants to withdraw, and practical advice to the patriotic citizens whose glorious duty it was soon to be to defend the city; and the great exodus of the so-called poltroons and strangers had begun to pour out, and the much more inconvenient sort of non-combatants, the homeless population of the neighboring villages, poured in—a sorry sight it was to see the poor little ménages, the husband trundling the few sticks of furniture on a hand-cart, with the household cat perched on the top of the pile, while the wife carried a baby and bundle, and a little one trotted on by her side, carrying the canary bird in its painted cage—and still the real, born Parisian said in the bottom of his heart: “It will never come to a siege, they will never dare; England will interfere, Europe will not allow it.”
On the morning of the third of September I went out to make some purchases on the Boulevards. Coming back, I saw the Madeleine draped in black, and a number of mourning-coaches drawn up in ghastly array on the Place. The solemn cortége was descending the last steps. I stood to let it pass, and then cast a glance round to see if there was any one I knew in the crowd. To my surprise I saw Berthe in the midst of a group of several persons who had broken away from the stream, and were standing apart in the space inside the rails; she was talking very emphatically, and the others were listening to her apparently with great interest, and seemed excited by whatever she was telling them. When the crowd had nearly cleared away, I beckoned to her. She ran out to me at once.
“You are the very person I wanted to see,” she said, clutching me by the arm in her vehement way. “I was going straight to your house. I have just been to the Etat Major, and met General Trochu there. He came down on account of despatches that had just come in, and have put them all in a state of terrible consternation. There is not a doubt of it now; the city will be blockaded in ten days from this. The Prussians are within as many days’ march from us. I thought of you immediately, and I asked the general what you ought to do; he said by all means to go, and within forty-eight hours; after that the rails may be cut from one moment to another; he was very emphatic about it, and said it would be the maddest imprudence of you to remain; there is a terrible time before us, and no one should stay in Paris who could leave. Of course, you will leave at once.”
I was too much taken aback to say what I would do. The news was so bewildering. I had never looked upon the siege as the impossible joke it had been so long considered, neither did I share the infatuation of the Parisians about the inviolability of Paris in the eyes of Europe, and for the last fortnight we had come to expect the siege as almost a certainty, that was now only a question of time, and yet we were as much startled by this cool official announcement of it as if the thing had never been seriously mentioned before.
“I don’t know what I will do,” I said; “if we had nerves equal to it, it would be the most fearfully interesting experience to go through.”
“No doubt,” assented Berthe; “but it is an experience that will tax the strongest nerves; of that you may be sure; and unless one has duties to keep one here, I think it would be mad imprudence, as the general said, to run the risk.”