The siege — The Parisians convinced that the Germans will not invest Paris — Paris becomes a vast drill-ground, nevertheless — The Parisians leave off singing, but listen to itinerant performers, though the latter no longer sing the "Marseillaise" — The theatres closed — The ComÉdie-FranÇaise and the OpÉra — Influx of the Gardes Mobiles — The Parisian no longer chaffs the provincial, but does the honours of the city to him — The stolid, gaunt Breton and the astute and cynical Normand — The gardens of the Tuileries an artillery park — The mitrailleuse still commands confidence — The papers try to be comic — Food may fail, drink will not — My visit to the wine dÉpÔt at Bercy — An official's information — Cattle in the public squares and on the outer Boulevards — Fear with regard to them — Every man carries a rifle — The woods in the suburbs are set on fire — The statue of Strasburg on the Place de la Concorde — M. Prudhomme to his sons — The men who do not spout — The French shopkeeper and bourgeois — A story of his greed — He reveals the whereabouts of the cable laid on the bed of the Seine — Obscure heroes — Would-be Ravaillacs and Balthazar Gerards — Inventors of schemes for the instant annihilation of all the Germans — A musical mitrailleuse — An exhibition and lecture at the Alcazar — The last train — Trains converted into dwellings for the suburban poor — Interior of a railway station — The spy mania — Where the Parisians ought to have looked for spies — I am arrested as a spy — A chat with the officer in charge — A terrible-looking knife.

In spite of the frequent reports from the provinces that the Germans were marching on Paris, there were thousands of people in the capital who seriously maintained that they, the Germans, would not dare to invest, let alone, shell it. But it must not be inferred, as many English writers have done, that this confidence was due to a mistaken view of the Germans' pluck, or their reluctance to beard the "lion" in his den. Not at all. The Parisians simply credited their foes with the superstitious love and reverence for "the centre of light and civilization" which they themselves felt. They did not take their cue from Victor Hugo's "highfalutin'" remonstrance to King William; on the contrary, it was the poet who translated their sentiments. It was not a case of "one fool making many;" but of many mute inglorious visionaries inspiring a still greater one, who had the gift of eloquence, which eloquence, in this instance, bordered very closely on sublimated drivel. Nevertheless, the whole of Paris became suddenly transformed into one vast drill-ground, and the clang of arms resounded through the city day and night. For the time being, the crowds left off singing, albeit that they listened now and then devoutly and reverently to itinerant performers, male and female, who had paraphrased the patriotic airs of certain operas for the occasion. The "Pars beau mousquetaire," etc., of HalÉvy, became "Pars beau volontaire;" the "Guerre aux tyrans," of the same composer, "Guerre aux all'mands,"[82] and so forth.

All the theatres had closed their doors by this time, the ComÉdie-FranÇaise being last, I believe; though, almost immediately afterward, it threw open its portals once more for at least two performances a week, and often a third time, in aid of the victims of the siege. Meanwhile, several rooms were being got ready for the reception of the wounded; the new opera-house, still unfinished, was made into a commissariat and partly into a barracks, for the provincial Gardes Mobiles were flocking by thousands to the capital, and the camps could not hold them all. For once in a way the Parisian forgot to chaff the provincial who came to pay him a visit; and considering that, even under such circumstances, all drill and no play would make Jacques a dull boy, he not only received him very cordially, but showed him some of the lions of the capital, at which the long-haired gaunt and stolid Breton stared without moving a muscle, only muttering an unintelligible gibberish, which might be an invocation to his ancient pagan gods, or a tribute of admiration; while the more astute and cynical, though scarcely more impressionable Normand, ten thousand of which had come from the banks of the Marne, showed the thought underlying all his daily actions, in one sentence: "C'est ben beau, mais Ça a coÛtÉ beaucoup d'argent; fallait mieux le garder en poche." Even at this supreme moment, he remembered, with a kind of bitterness, that he had been made to pay for part of all this glorious architecture.

The Cirques NapolÉon and de l'ImpÉratrice—the Republic had not had time to change their names—had become a kind of left-luggage office for these human cargoes, taken thither at their arrival, which happened generally during the night. In the morning they were transferred to their permanent encampments, and their military education was proceeded with at once. I am afraid I am not competent to judge of the merits of the method adopted, but I was by no means powerfully impressed with the knowledge displayed by the instructors.

The gardens of the Tuileries had been closed to the public, who had to be satisfied with admiring the ordnance and long rows of horses parked there from a distance. Did the latter lend enchantment to the view? Apparently, for they were never tired of gazing with ecstasy on the mitrailleuses. The gunners in charge treated the foremost of the gazers now and then to a lecture on artillery practice, through the railings of the gates. In whatsoever else they had lost faith, those murderous engines of war evidently still commanded their confidence.

The frightful din that marked the first weeks of the war had ceased, but Paris did by no means look crestfallen. The gas burned brightly still, the cafÉs were full of people, the restaurants had all their tables occupied; for we were not "invested" yet, and the idea of scarcity, let alone of famine, though a much-discussed contingency, was not a staring, stubborn fact. "It will never become one," said and thought many, "and all that talk about doling out rations already is so much nonsense." The papers waxed positively comic on the subject. They also waxed comic over the telegrams of the King of Prussia to his Consort; but they left off harping on that string, for very shame' sake.

One thing was certain from the beginning of the siege—whatever else might fail, there was enough wine and to spare to cheer the hearts of men who professed to do and dare more than men. Though the best part of my life had been spent in Paris, I had, curiously enough, never seen the wine and spirit dÉpÔts at Bercy; in fact, I was profoundly ignorant of that, as well as of other matters connected with the food-supply of Paris. So I wrote to a member of the firm which had supplied me for many years with wine and spirits, and he took me thither.

I should think that the "entrepÔt-gÉnÉral," as it is called, occupied, at that time, not less than sixty acres of ground, which meant more than treble that area as far as storage was concerned; for there was not only the cellarage, but the buildings above ground, rising, in many instances, to three and four stories. The entrepÔt consisted, and consists still, I believe, of three distinct parts: one for wines; another for what the French call "alcohols," and we "spirits;" a third, much smaller, for potable, or, rather, edible oils. The latter wing contains the cellarage of the general administration of the hospitals. The spirit-cellars were absolutely empty at the time of my visit; their contents had been removed to a bomb and shell proof cellarage hard by.

Though I had come to see, I felt very little wiser after leaving the cellars than before; for, truth to tell, I was absolutely bewildered. I had no more idea of the quantity of wine stored there than a child. My guide laughed.

"We'll soon make the matter clear to you," he said, shaking hands with a gentleman who turned out to be one of the principal employÉs. "This gentleman will tell you almost to a hectolitre the quantity of ordinary wine in store. You know pretty well the number of inhabitants of the capital, and though it has considerably increased during the last few days, and is not unlikely to decrease during the siege, if siege there be, the influx does not amount to a hundred thousand. Now, monsieur, will you tell this gentleman what you have in stock?"

"We have got at the present moment 1,600,000 hectolitres of ordinary wine in our cellars. Ten days ago we had nearly one hundred thousand more, but the wine-shops and others have laid in large provisions since then. The more expensive wines I need not mention, because the quantity is very considerably less, and, moreover, they are not likely to be wanted; though, if they were wanted, they would keep us going for many, many weeks. At a rough guess, the number of 'souls' within the fortifications is about 1,700,000, with the recent increase 1,800,000; consequently, with what the 'liquoristes' have recently bought, one hundred litres for every man, woman, and child. I do not reckon the contents of private cellars, nor those of the wine-merchants, apart from their recent purchases. Nor is ordinary wine much dearer than it was in years of great plenty; it is, in fact, less by twenty-five francs or thirty francs than in the middle of the fifties. I am comparing prices for quarter pipes, containing from two hundred and ten to two hundred and thirty litres. There is no fear of regrating here, nor the likelihood of our having to drink water for some time."

On our homeward journey, we noticed bullocks, pigs, and sheep littered down in some of the public squares and on the outer boulevards. The stunted grass in the former had already entirely disappeared, and it was evident that, with the utmost care, the cattle would deteriorate under the existing circumstances; for fodder would probably be the first commodity to fail; as it was, it had already risen to more than twice its former price. Moreover, the competent judges feared that, in the event of a rainy autumn, the cattle penned in such small spaces would be more subject to epidemic diseases, which would absolutely render them unfit for human food. In view of such a contingency, the learned members of the AcadÉmie des Sciences were beginning to put their heads together, but the results of their deliberations were not known as yet.

We returned on foot as we had come; private carriages had entirely disappeared, and though the omnibuses and cabs were plying as usual, their progress was seriously impeded by long lines of vans, heavily laden with neat deal boxes, evidently containing tinned provisions. Very few female passengers in the public conveyances, and scarcely a man without a rifle. They were the future defenders of the capital, who had been to Vincennes, where the distribution of arms was going on from early morn till late at night. In fact, the sight of a working-man not provided with a rifle, a mattock, a spade, or a pickaxe was becoming a rarity, for a great many had been engaged to aid the engineers in digging trenches, spiking the ground, etc.

I did not, and do not, feel competent to judge of the utility of all these means of defense; one of them, however, seemed to be conceived in the wrong spirit: I allude to the firing of the woods around Paris. With the results of Forbach and Woerth to guide them, the generals entrusted with the defence of Paris could not leave the woods to stand; but was there any necessity to destroy them in the way they did? In spite of the activity displayed, there were still thousands of idle hands anxious to be employed. Why were not the trees cut down and transported to Paris, for fuel for the coming winter? At that moment there were lots of horses available, and such a measure would have given us the double advantage of saving coals for the manufacture of gas, and of protecting from the rigours of the coming winter hundreds whose sufferings would have been mitigated by light and heat. Personally, I did not suffer much. From what I have seen during the siege, I have come to the conclusion that shortcomings in the way of food are far less hard to bear, nay, are almost cheerfully borne, in a warm room and with a lamp brightly burning. I leave out of the question the quantities of mineral oil wasted in the attempt to set fire to the woods, because in many instances the attempt failed utterly.

Meanwhile, patriotism was kept at the boiling point, by glowing reports of the heroic defence of General Uhrich at Strasburg. The statue, representing the capital of Alsace on the Place de la Concorde, became the goal of a reverent pilgrimage on the part of the Parisians, though the effect of it was spoiled too frequently by M. Prudhomme holding forth sententiously, to his sons apparently, to the crowd in reality. These discourses reminded one too much of Heine's sneer, that "all Frenchmen are actors, and the worse are generally on the stage." In this instance, however, the amateurs ran the professional very hard. The crowds were not hypercritical, though, and they applauded the speaker, who departed, accompanied by his offspring, with the proud consciousness that he was a born orator, and that he had done his duty to his country by spouting platitudes. It is not difficult to give the general sequel to that amateur performance. Next morning there is a line in some obscure paper, and M. Prudhomme, beside himself with joy, leaves his card on the journalist who wrote it; the journalist leaves his in return, and for the next six months the latter has his knife and fork laid at M. Prudhomme's table. The acquaintance generally terminates on M. Prudhomme's discovery that Madame Prudhomme carried her friendship too far by looking after the domestic concerns of the scribe, at the scribe's bachelor quarters.

The men who did not spout were the Duruys, the Meissoniers, and a hundred others I could mention. The eminent historian and grand-master of the University, though sixty, donned the simple uniform of a National Guard, and performed his garrison duties like the humblest artisan, only distinguished from the latter by his star of grand-officer of the LÉgion d'Honneur; the great painter did the same. The French shopkeeping bourgeois is, as a rule, a silly, pompous creature; very frequently, he is mean and contemptible besides.

Here is a story for the truth of which I can vouch, and which shows him in his true light. In the skirmish in which Lieutenant Winslow was killed, some damage had been done to the inn at Schirlenhoff, where the Baden officers were at breakfast when they were surprised by General de Bernis and his men. The general had his foot already in the stirrup, and was about to remove his prisoners, when Boniface made his appearance, coolly asking to whom he was to present the bill for the breakage. The general burst out laughing: "The losing party pays the damage as a rule," he said, "but France is sufficiently rich to reverse the rule. Here is double the amount of your bill."

A second story, equally authentic. A cable had been secretly laid on the bed of the Seine between Paris and Havre, shortly before the siege. Two small shopkeepers of St. Germain revealed the fact for a consideration to the Germans, who had but very vague suspicions of it, and who certainly did not know the land-bearings; one of the scoundrels was caught after the siege, the other escaped. The one who was tried pleaded poverty, and received a ridiculously small sentence. It transpired afterwards that he was exceedingly well paid for his treachery, and that he cheated his fellow-informer out of his share.

The contrast is more pleasant to dwell upon. There were hundreds of obscure heroes, by which I do not mean those prepared to shed their blood on the battle-field, but men with a sublime indifference to life, courting the fate of a Ravaillac and a Balthazar Gerard. History would have called them regicides, and perhaps ranked them with paid assassins had they accomplished their purpose, would have held them up to the scorn of posterity as bloodthirsty fanatics,—and history, for once in a way, would have been wrong. In their reprehensible folly, they were more estimable than the Jules Favres, the Gambettas who played at being the saviours of the country, and who were only the saviours of their needy, fellow political adventurers.

Apart from the former, there were the inventors of impossible schemes for the instantaneous annihilation of the three hundred thousand Germans around Paris,—inventors who supply the comic note in the otherwise terrible drama,—inventors, who day by day besiege the Ministry for War, and to whom, after all, the minister's collaborateurs are compelled to listen "on the chance of there being something in their schemes."

"I am asking myself, every now and then, whether I am a staff-officer or one of the doctors at Charenton," said Prince Bibesca, one evening. "Since yesterday morning," he went on, "I have been interviewed by a dozen inventors, every one of whom wanted to see General Trochu or General Schmitz, and would scarcely be persuaded that I would do as well. The first one simply took the breath out of me. I had no energy left to resist the others, or to bow them out politely; if they had chosen to keep on talking for four and twenty hours, I should have been compelled to listen. He was a little man, about the height of M. Thiers. His opening speech was in proportion to his height; it consisted of one line. 'Monsieur, I annihilate the Germans with one blow,' he said. I was thrown off my guard in spite of myself, for etiquette demands that I should keep serious in spite of myself; and I replied, 'Let me fill my pipe before you do it.'

"Meanwhile, my visitor spread out a large roll of paper on the table. 'I am not an inventor,' he said; 'I merely adapt the lessons of ancient history to the present circumstances. I merely modify the trick of the horse of Troy. Here is Paris with its ninety-six bastions, its forts, etc. I draw three lines: along the first I send twenty-five thousand men pretending to attack the northern positions of the enemy; along the second line I send a similar number, apparently bent on a similar attempt to the south; my fifty thousand troops are perfectly visible to the Germans, for they commence their march an hour or so before dusk. Meanwhile darkness sets in, and that is the moment I choose to despatch a hundred and fifty thousand troops, screened and entirely concealed by a movable wall of sheet iron, blackened by smoke. My inventive powers have gone no further than this. My hundred and fifty thousand men behind their wall penetrate unhindered as far as the Prussian lines, where a hundred thousand fall on their backs, taking aim over the wall, while fifty thousand keep moving it forward slowly. Twelve shots for every man make twelve hundred thousand shots—more than sufficient to cause a panic among the Germans, who do not know whence the firing proceeds, because my wall is as dark as night itself. Supposing, however, that those who have been left in the camp defend themselves, their projectiles will glance off against the sheet iron of the wall, which, if necessary, can be thrown down finally by our own men, who will finish their business with the bayonet and the sword.'

"My second visitor had something not less formidable to propose; namely, a sledge-hammer, fifteen miles in circumference, and weighing ten millions of tons. It was to be lifted up to a certain altitude by means of balloons. A favourable wind had to be waited for, which would send the balloons in the direction of Versailles, where the ropes confining the hammer would be cut. In its fall it would crush and bury the head-quarters and the bulk of the German army.

"The third showed me the plan of a musical mitrailleuse, which would deal death and destruction while playing Wagner, Schubert, and Mendelssohn, the former by preference. 'The Germans,' he remarked, 'are too fond of music to be able to resist the temptation of listening. They are sure to draw near in thousands when my mitrailleuses are set playing. We have got them at our mercy.' I asked him to send me a small one as a sample: he promised to do so."

Another evening I was induced to go to the Alcazar. I had been there once before, to hear ThÉrÈsa. This time it was to see an "Exhibition of Engines of War," and to listen to a practical lecture thereon. The audience was as jolly as if the Germans were a thousand miles away—jollier, perhaps, than when they listened to "Rien n'est sacrÉ pour un sapeur;" because they were virtually taking part in the performance. The lecturer began by an exhibition of bullet-proof pads, by means of which the soldier might fearlessly advance towards the enemy; "because they render that part of the body on which they are worn invulnerable." A wag among the spectators made a remark about "retreating soldiers," which I cannot transcribe; but the exhibitor, an Italian or Spanish major, to judge by his accent, was in no way disconcerted. He placed his pad against an upright board in the shape of a target and began firing at it with a revolver at a distance of four or five paces. The material, though singed, was not pierced, but the spectators seemed by no means convinced. "You wear the pad, and let me have a shot at you," exclaimed one; at which offer the major made a long face. "Have you ever tried the experiment on a living animal?" asks another. "Perfectly," replied the major; "I tried it on my clerk," which admission was hailed with shouts of laughter. There were cries for the clerk, who did not appear. A corporal of the National Guards proposed to try an experiment on the major and the pad with the bayonet fastened to a chassepot; thereupon major and pad suddenly disappeared behind the wings. The next inventor exhibits a fire-extinguisher; the audience require more than a verbal explanation; some of them propose to set the Alcazar on fire. A small panic, checked in time; and the various demonstrations are proceeded with amidst shouts, and laughter, and jokes. They yield no practical results, but they kill time. They are voted the next best thing to the theatre.

By this time we were shut off from the outer world. On the 17th of September, at night, the last train of the OrlÉans Railway Company had left Paris. The others had ceased working a day or so before, and placed their rolling stock in safety. Not the whole of it, though. A great many of the third-class carriages have had their seats taken out, the luggage and goods vans have been washed, the cattle trucks boarded in, and all these transformed into temporary dwellings for the suburban poor who have been obliged to seek shelter within the walls of the capital. The interiors of the principal railway stations present scenes that would rejoice the hearts of genre-painters on a large scale. The washing and cooking of all these squatters is done on the various platforms, the carriages have become parlor and bedroom in one, and there has even been some ingenuity displayed in their decoration. The womankind rarely stir from their improvised homes; the men are on the fortifications or roaming the streets of Paris. Part of the household gods has been stowed inside the trucks, the rest is piled up in front. The domestic pets, such as cats and dogs, have, as yet, not been killed for food, and the former have a particularly good time of it, for mice and rats abound, especially in the goods-sheds. Here and there a goat gravely stalking along, happily unconscious of its impending doom; and chanticleer surrounded by a small harem trying to make the best of things.

Of course, the sudden and enormous influx of human beings could not be housed altogether in that way, but care has been taken that none of them shall be shelterless. All the tenantless apartments, from the most palatial in the Faubourg St. HonorÉ and Champs-ÉlysÉes to the humblest in the popular quarters, have been utilized, and the pot-au-feu simmers in marble fireplaces, while Gallic Hodge sees his face reflected in gigantic mirrors the like of which he never saw before. The dwellings that have been merely vacated by their tenants who have flitted to Homburg and Baden-Baden, to Nice and elsewhere, are as yet not called into requisition by the authorities.

From the moment we were cut off from the outer world, the spy mania, which had been raging fiercely enough before, became positively contagious. There is not the slightest doubt that there were spies in Paris, but I feel perfectly certain that they were not prowling about the streets, and that to have caught them one would have had to look among the personnel of the ministries. For a foreigner, unless he spoke French without the slightest accent, to have accepted such a mission, would have been akin to madness; and there were and are still few foreigners, however well they may know French, who do not betray their origin now and then by imperfect pronunciation. Besides, there was nothing to spy in the streets; nevertheless, the spy mania, as I have already said, had reached an acute crisis. The majority of the National Guard seemed to have no other occupation than to look for spies. A poor Spanish priest was arrested because he had been three times in the same afternoon to the cobbler for the only serviceable pair of shoes he possessed. Woe to the man or woman who was ill-advised enough to take out his pocket-book in the streets. If you happened to be of studious habits, or merely inclined to sit up late, the lights peeping through the carelessly drawn curtains exposed you to a sudden visit from half a dozen ill-mannered, swaggering National Guards, your concierge was called out of his bed, while you were taken to the nearest commissary of police to explain; or, what was worse still, to the nearest military post, where the lieutenant in command made it a point to be altogether soldier-like—according to his ideas, i. e. brutal, rude, disgustingly familiar. You might get an apology from the police-official for having been disturbed and dragged through the streets for no earthly reason; the quasi-military man would have considered it beneath his dignity to offer one.

Of course, every now and then, one happened to meet with a gentleman who was only too anxious to atone for the imbecile "goings-on" of his men, and I was fortunate enough to do so one night. It was on the 20th of September, when the feelings of the Parisians had already been embittered by their first and not very creditable defeat under their own walls. I do not suppose there were more than a score of Englishmen in Paris, besides the Irishmen engaged in salting beef at the slaughter-house of La Villette, when, but for that gentleman, I should have been in a sore strait. Among the English, there was a groom who, at the time of the general exodus, was so dangerously ill that the doctor absolutely forbade his removal, even to a hospital. The case had been brought under my notice, and as the poor fellow was very respectable and had been hard-working, as he had a wife and a young family besides, we not only did all we could for him, but I went to see him personally two or three times to cheer him up a bit. He was on the mend, but slowly, very slowly. He lived in one of the side streets of the Avenue de Clichy, and had lived there a good while, and the concierge of the house had her mind perfectly at rest with regard to his nationality, albeit that the fact of being an Englishman was not always a sufficient guarantee against the suspicion of being a spy on the part of the lower classes. Moreover, they would not always take the fact for granted; they were unable to distinguish an English from a German or any other accent, and, with them, to be a foreigner was necessarily to be a German, and a German could not be anything but a spy. However, in this instance, I felt no anxiety for my protÉgÉ.

Unfortunately, a few days before the closing of Paris, the concierge herself fell ill, and another one took her place. The successor was a man, and not by any means a pleasant man. There was a scowl on his face, as, in answer to his summons, I told him whither I was going; and he cast a suspicious look at a box I was carrying under my arm, which happened to contain nothing more formidable than a surgical appliance. I took no notice, however, and mounted the stairs.

My visit may have lasted between twenty minutes and half an hour. When I came out, a considerable crowd had assembled on the footway and in the road, and a dozen National Guards were ranged in a semicircle in front of the door.

The first cry that greeted me was "Le voilÀ," and then a corporal advanced. "Your name, citizen," he said, in a hectoring tone, "and what brings you to this house?" I kept very cool, and told him that I would neither give him my name nor an explanation of my visit, but that if he would take me to his lieutenant or captain, I should be pleased to give both to the latter. But he would not be satisfied. "Where is the box you had in your hand? what did it contain? and what have you done with it?" he insisted. I knew that it would be useless to try and enlighten him, so I stuck to my text. Meanwhile the crowd had become very excited, so I simply repeated my request to be taken to the post.

The crowd would have willingly judged me there and then; that is, strung me up to the nearest lamp-post. If they had, not a single one among them would have been prosecuted for murder, and by the end of the siege the British Government would have considered it too late to move in the matter; besides, a great many of my countrymen would have opined that "it served me right" for remaining in Paris, when I might have made myself so comfortable in London or elsewhere. So I felt very thankful when the corporal, though very ungraciously, ordered his men to close around me and "to march." I have, since then, been twice to the Avenue de Clichy on pleasure bent; that is, to breakfast at the celebrated establishment of "le pÈre Lathuille," and the sight of the lamp-posts there sent a cold shudder down my back.

The journey to the military post did not take long. It had been established in a former ball-room or music-hall, for at the far end of the room there was a stage, representing, as far as I can remember, an antique palace. The floor of it was littered with straw, on which a score or so of civic warriors were lazily stretched out; while others were sitting at the small wooden tables, that had, not long ago, borne the festive "saladier de petit bleu." Some of the ladles with which that decoction had been stirred were still hanging from the walls; for in those neighbourhoods the love of portable property on the part of the patrons is quite Wemmickian, and the proprietors made and make it a rule to throw as little temptation as possible in the way of the former. The place looked quite sombre, though the gas was alight. There was an intolerable smell of damp straw and stale tobacco smoke.

Part of the crowd succeeded in making their way inside, notwithstanding the efforts of the National Guards. My appearance caused a certain stir among the occupants of the room; but in a few moments the captain, summoned from an apartment at the back, came upon the scene, and my preliminary trial was proceeded with at once.

The indictment of the corporal who had arrested me was brief and to the point. "This man is a foreigner who pays constant visits to another foreigner, supposed to be sick. This evening he arrived with a box under his arm which he left with his friend. The concierge has reason to suppose that there is something wrong, for he does not believe in the man's illness. He is supposed to be poor, and still he and his family are living on the fat of the land. My prisoner refused to give me his name and address, or an explanation of his visit."

"What have you to say, monsieur?" asked the captain, a man of about thirty-five, evidently belonging to the better classes. I found out afterwards that his name was Garnier or Garmier, and that he was a cashier in one of the large commercial establishments in the Rue St. Martin. He was killed in the last sortie of the Parisians.

It was the first time I had been addressed that evening as "monsieur." I simply took a card from my pocket-book and gave it to him. "If that is not sufficient, some of your men can accompany me home and ascertain for themselves that I have not given a false name or address," I said.

He looked at it for a moment. "It is quite unnecessary. I know your name very well, though I have not the honour of knowing you personally. I have seen your portrait at my relatives' establishment"—he named a celebrated picture-dealer in the Rue de la Paix,—"and I ought to have recognized you at once, for it is a very striking likeness, but it is so dark here." Then he turned to his men and to the crowd: "I will answer for this gentleman. I wish we had a thousand or so of foreign spies like him in Paris. France has no better friend than he."

I was almost as much afraid of the captain's praise as I had been of the corporal's blame, because the crowd wanted to give me an ovation; seeing which, M. Garmier invited me to stay with him a little while, until the latter should have dispersed. It was while sitting in his own room that he told me the following story.

"My principal duty, monsieur, seems to consist, not in killing Germans, but in preventing perfectly honest Frenchmen and foreigners from being killed or maimed. Not later than the night before last, three men were brought in. They were all very powerful fellows; there was no doubt about their being Frenchmen. They did not take their arrest as a matter of course at all, but to every question I put they simply sent me to the devil. It was not the behaviour of the presumed spy, who, as a rule, is very soft spoken and conciliating until he sees that the game is up, when he becomes insulting. Still, I reflected that the violence of the three men might be a clever bit of acting also, the more that I could see for myself that they were abominably, though not speechlessly, drunk. Their offence was that they had been seen loitering in a field very close to the fortifications, with their noses almost to the ground. Do what I would, an explanation I could not get, and at last the most powerful of the trio made a movement as if to draw a knife. With great difficulty a dozen of my men succeeded in getting his coat off; and there, between his waistcoat and his shirt, was a murderously looking blade, a formidable weapon indeed.

"'He is a Prussian spy, sure enough!' exclaimed the roomful of guards.

"I examined the knife carefully, tried to find the name of the maker, and all at once put it to my nose. Then I took up a candle and looked more carefully still at the prisoners. 'They are simply drunk,' I said, 'and the best thing you can do is to take them home.'

"'But the knife?' insisted the sergeant.

"'The knife is all right,' I answered.

"'I should think it is all right,' said the owner, 'seeing that I am cutting provisions all day with it for those confounded Parisians.'

"But the guards were not satisfied with the explanation. They began to surround me. 'That was surely a sign you made to the fellow when you lifted the blade to your face, captain,' said the sergeant.

"'Not at all, friend; I was simply smelling it. And it smelt abominably of onions.' That will give you an idea, monsieur, of the life they lead me also. Still, I would ask you, as a particular favour, monsieur, not to mention your mishap to any one. As you are aware, I am not to blame; but we are in bad odour enough as it is at the Ministry of War, and we do not wish to increase our somewhat justified reputation for irresponsible rowdyism and lack of discipline."

I gave him my promise to that effect, and have not mentioned the matter until this day.