“Am I afraid?” Juliette had written in her diary under that date.
“Well, no. Why should I fear a bombardment? The quarters not struck and not likely to be must receive the unfortunate inhabitants of those that are. As for the houses! By my faith! so much the worse for them! I would willingly sacrifice my own and a hundred others if it would enable us to hold out two days longer.”[207]
The bombardment was less imminent than the editor of the Temps had thought. When it began on the 6th of January, it took the Parisians by surprise. The invaders, with a disregard of international law to which we in these latter days have grown accustomed, omitted to give the usual warning. “Oh, the barbarians,” cries Juliette. “More than three thousand bombs have fallen round the Jardin des Plantes and the Luxembourg.... Several persons have been killed in their beds.... Many flew into a panic, and, instead of seeking refuge in cellars, rushed out into the streets, where they were killed.”[208]
Nevertheless, the courage of the Parisians did not waver.... “If the European capitals,” writes Mme. Adam, “ask how Paris, the gay, the light-hearted, the witty, takes this bombardment, let them know Paris is proud to be bombarded! Let them look at her, let them behold her calm, courageous, and let them try to emulate her.”[209]
Experts pronounced the bombardment to be unheard-of in its violence and fury. The Prussians appeared to be using up all their siege ammunitions in this final coup. Forty thousand kilogrammes of powder were said to have been fired on the plateau of Avron alone. The noise was infernal. The tumult and the cold together were maddening. “Impossible,” wrote Mme. Adam after an interval of a week, “to sleep, to rest even for a moment. Parisians have not slept for ten days. The bombardment is fearful. How glad I am that I sent my daughter away!”
A gleam of hope came to the besieged when, on the 18th of January, another attempt was made at a sortie, and when, on the following day, came the news that all was going well, that Montretout had been taken, that the Prussians had been everywhere repulsed.
“All Paris at three o’clock in the afternoon was out on the boulevards and in the Champs Elysées. The Garde Nationale was said to be fighting magnificently, and already to have entered the Buzenval Park. Then suddenly the appearance of a startling placard cast down from the heights of sanguine anticipation into the depths of black despair the spirits of that hopeful and expectant crowd. Trochu announced that the attack had been abandoned. Instead of declaring a victory he referred to an armistice, and demanded that every cab remaining in Paris should be sent out to bring in the wounded. Groans escaped from every breast.
“Another enterprise, elaborately prepared, inefficiently executed, miserably terminated,” exclaims Mme. Adam. Indeed, an identical description might be given of every sortie since the opening of the siege.
The talk of capitulation which now began to circulate was unendurable to Juliette and to those who, like her, had come to be nicknamed les à l’Outrance (to the bitter end). “Never,” she writes, “during all the cruellest trials of these last months, have I suffered more than at this moment.”[210]