All Paris and the twenty mayors of Paris and the Garde Nationale were of Mme. Adam’s way of thinking: they also were les à l’Outrance; they preferred death to surrender. “If the Prussians dare to defile down our boulevards,” writes Juliette, “I believe we shall do as the Russians did in Moscow.... Death is twenty times less cruel than the degradation of la patrie.”[211]
The Paris mayors, convoked by the Government to receive the announcement that further resistance was impossible, declared they were ready to die. They preferred the horrors of famine to the humiliation of surrender.[212]
Many of the terrors of famine the Parisians had already endured. They had already suffered the pangs of hunger. But those that awaited them, should this heroic recommendation be adopted, would be unspeakably more horrible. “The men who speak thus,” wrote Favre in his last dispatch to Gambetta,[213] “still eat. They endure misery; but they do just contrive to maintain life. On the day, and that day is imminent, when they have nothing but horseflesh, not even bread, the death-rate, now terribly high, will become too horrible.”
On the 21st of January one of the Adams’ friends announced in their salon that the food in Paris could not hold out for longer than two days. That was an exaggeration. Juliette maintained that it could last for fifteen. Jules Favre informed Gambetta that it might be made to suffice for ten.[214]
Had there been any chance of the capital’s deliverance by one of the armies which Gambetta had been organising in the provinces, then the Government might have been justified in holding out a few days longer, but the last hope of such a deliverance had faded when General Chanzy had been defeated on the 11th.
Nevertheless Juliette, dragging herself from her sick-bed out into the bitter January cold, spent the 21st visiting first one, than another, in the forlorn hope of inspiring some concerted anti-surrender movement.
“I have passed a horrible night,” she wrote on the 24th, “obsessed by hallucinations. The Republic, our France, taking to itself form and visage, appeared and spoke to me, called me....”[215]
“The Officiel this morning insults our grief. What! Our hearts are bleeding! ... the whole population of Paris is in despair, in tears!... And yet not a word, not a groan, not a cry escapes from the breasts of those who govern us. Would not M. Picard[216] and M. Vinoy[217] permit it?”
The armistice involving the surrender of Paris was signed on the 28th of January. The bombardment had ceased on the 26th. “Would that I could die at this hour,” wrote Mme. Adam.[218]