THE SIEGE OF PARIS
September 19, 1870-January 28, 1871
_“Ce caractère parisien, qu’on peut aujourd’hui résumer en un seul
mot: héroïsme?.”_—Mme. Adam, _Souvenirs_, December 7, 1870.
“At present,” said Mme. Adam to a friend on the 27th of September,
1870, “we have barely endured ten days of siege. And I will wager that
in three months I shall not be any more disgusted with it than I am at
present.”[189]
Juliette won her bet, for during the first three months of the siege
she bore her sufferings cheerfully and without flinching. And even
during the fourth month, though her health broke down, her courage did
not fail.
During those interminable four months the two million souls cooped up
in Paris knew every misery which has ever fallen to the lot of the
besieged: internal discontent and disorder, resulting in the abortive
revolution of the 31st of October; extreme scarcity of food and
munitions of war for nearly three weeks, the 20th of December until
the 8th of January; complete isolation from the rest of France and
from the whole outer world.[190] To these sufferings, which Juliette
shared with her fellow-citizens, was added her personal anxiety for
her daughter’s safety. She did not even know where her daughter
was. She hoped that Alice, with her grandparents, had succeeded in
crossing to Jersey; for the Prussians were said to have invaded
Normandy. But for many a long week, from the 19th of September until
the 20th of December, no news came. Juliette endured this agony of
suspense with fortitude. Then at length, through Mme. de Pierreclos,
came tidings that Alice was well and with her grandparents at St.
Helier. Straightway Juliette’s motherly mind flies at once to
other anxious parents in the besieged city who are still without
news of their children. For all through those days of horror Mme.
Adam’s heart never ceased to beat in unison with the hearts of her
fellow-sufferers, to bleed with their sorrows, to throb with their
anxieties and their fears. Living thus in constant communion with
her neighbours, she was able to depict graphically in her journal
the perpetual ebb and flow of public feeling and opinion: now it was
confident and hopeful, now foreboding and doubtful, but never, not
even in the ghastly days of the end, completely conquered by despair.
Throughout, with the exception of the actual days of bombardment, the
comic spirit, Juliette’s inseparable friend, never forsook her; and,
while feeling to the tragic point the sufferings of others, she was
able to joke about her own sorrows and privations.
Next to her separation from Alice, the hardest to bear of her personal
trials during the siege was being compelled to leave her flat in the
Boulevard Poissonnière. On the 11th of October, Adam having been
appointed Prefect of Police, he and his wife had to take up their
abode in the Préfecture.
In the halls and corridors of that gloomy building, what hours of
weary waiting for a passport’s stamping have not many of us endured
during this war-time! We can well sympathise, therefore, with Mme.
Adam’s horror at the idea of spending not hours only, but days,
weeks and months within the Préfecture’s lugubrious portals. We can
understand her grief at being obliged to exchange her cheerful flat,
her “dovecot” on the Boulevard Poissonnière, for _l’affreuse prison_
in the Rue de Jérusalem.
To any one with her vivid imagination it was a perfect nightmare
merely to watch the going and coming of the prison-vans, lumbering
into the courtyard of La Sainte Chapelle, and to hear the cries of
“No. 1 for Mazas, No. 2 for Ste. Pélagie.”[191]
It was during her residence in the Préfecture that occurred that
insurrection of the 31st of October which proved a premonition of the
Commune. The popular discontent with the Government, and especially
with its President, General Trochu, who was also Governor of Paris,
had been growing for some weeks. It was brought to a head by the news
that Le Bourget, one of the forts outside the capital, which had been
captured from the Prussians on the 28th of October, had been retaken
on the 29th. On the 30th, Mme. Adam, on her way to her hospital from
a concert in the Cirque Pas de Loup, found the boulevard in an almost
revolutionary ferment. The people were exclaiming: “We do not demand
successes, but we will not have defeats resulting from our general’s
frivolity, carelessness and incapacity.”[192] Later in the evening,
when the time came for Juliette to return home, she found the tumult
had increased. As she pressed her way through the crowd she felt its
sentiments possessing her. “My sorrows mingled with theirs,” she
writes, “my patriotism with their patriotism.”
As soon as she saw Adam she warned him of the state of Paris. But
he knew it better than she, and her warning was unnecessary. There
was a dinner-party at the Préfecture that evening. Both at table
and afterwards in her salon, the guests, among whom was Rochefort,
complained as loudly as the crowd of the Government’s incapacity.
Every one found fault with the mismanagement which had resulted in
the loss of Le Bourget. Rochefort and Adam were obliged to leave to
attend a Cabinet meeting,[193] held to receive the report of Thiers,
who had just returned from an official visit to the Great Powers on
the subject of an armistice. Adam did not come back to the Préfecture
until three o’clock in the morning.
The news that he brought was of the gravest. The Prefect of the Police
placed no reliance whatever on the repeated assurances of the Governor
of Paris that he would maintain order. Juliette had long since lost
all faith in that polished, placid person, of whom every one said,
_c’est un homme très distingué_. She would have preferred an energetic
corporal.[194] She had no faith in the famous “plan.” It had never
been confided to any one; but already it was being ridiculed by the
besieged in the following couplets, sung up and down Paris streets—
“Je sais le plan de Trochu,
Plan, plan, plan, plan, plan.
Mon Dieu! quel beau plan!
Je sais le plan de Trochu;
Grâce à lui rien n’est perdu!
Quand sur du beau papier blanc,
Il eut écrit son affaire,
Il alla porter son plan
Chez maître Ducloux, notaire—
C’est là, qu’est l’plan de Trochu,
Plan, plan, plan, plan, plan.
Mon Dieu! quel beau plan!
C’est là, qu’est l’plan de Trochu;
Grâce à lui rien n’est perdu!”
Most happily, as it turned out, Adam had resolved on taking his own
measures in order to guard peaceful citizens from the forces of
violence and disorder. He depended on the Gardes Mobiles, recruited
in the provinces. The Garde Nationale could not be trusted. It would
probably side with the populace. And a parade of regular troops would
only irritate the malcontents.
M. Thiers, after the Cabinet meeting, had taken Adam apart and
confided to him his fear that the mob, furious against Thiers for his
attempt to negotiate an armistice, might attack his house on the Place
St. Georges and endanger the lives of his old, faithful servants. Adam
promised to have the house guarded. And he now requested Juliette in
case of danger to bring his friend’s servants into the Préfecture.
Neither sleep nor rest was possible for the Préfet de Police that
night: reports from various parts of Paris were coming in every moment.
Between seven and eight in the morning Adam brought his wife the
official newspaper _L’Officiel_. It contained three items of news,
as little calculated as might be to calm the effervescence of the
Parisian populace. It announced the capitulation of Metz and the
possibility of an armistice, and it confirmed what had only been
rumoured the day before, the Prussian capture of Le Bourget.
The Prefect went off at once to consult Trochu as to the measures for
controlling the manifestation of popular fury which would be sure to
greet these disastrous announcements. He found the general, as usual,
irresolute—one moment proclaiming that the Government nominated by
public opinion must find therein its only support, the next declaring
that a hostile manifestation must be met by a deployment of all the
forces at the Government’s disposition. Determining to give his own
interpretation to such contradictory instructions, Adam assembled
twenty battalions of the Garde Nationale to defend the Hôtel de Ville.
Thither he himself went about one o’clock. Juliette did not see him
again until six. Overcome with restlessness and apprehension, Mme.
Adam spent the afternoon with some friends at Romainville Fort, whence
could be seen the lost Le Bourget. Returning through Belleville about
four o’clock, they found the suburb in a state of extreme agitation.
Angry crowds thronged the streets, vociferating loudly: “We won’t
have an armistice. All our men must engage. Rather blow up Paris than
surrender.”[195]
Round the Hôtel de Ville the crowd was so dense that it was impossible
for the carriage to pass. Alighting, Juliette mingled with the people
and asked, “What was happening?” The replies she received were so
contradictory that she could learn nothing. From the windows of the
Hôtel de Ville lists were being thrown out, containing the names,
curiously assorted, of those who were being proposed for the new
Government: on one list were Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin,
Delescluze; on another, Blanqui, Delescluze, Flourens, Félix Peyrat.
Every list contained the name of Dorian, an intimate friend of the
Adams, the highly popular and capable Minister of Public Works. On one
paper was written merely _Commune décrétée, Dorian président_.[196]
Mingling in that self-same crowd were other distinguished diarists
of the siege: Labouchère, then Paris correspondent for the _Daily
News_, and Edmond de Goncourt, both of whom observed that list-making.
De Goncourt saw workmen in round hats inscribing in pencil on thick
writing-pads a list which was being dictated to them.[197] He caught
the names of Blanqui, Flourens, Ledru-Rollin and Motte. “That will do
now,” cried a workman in a blouse. And de Goncourt next found himself
in a group of women timorously talking of the distribution of goods.
Up in the Hôtel de Ville, already invaded by the mob, were
deliberating, in one room, the mayors of Paris, and in another the
Government of National Defence.[198]
Where was her husband? was naturally Mme. Adam’s chief concern.
Following a company of Gardes Nationaux, she penetrated through a
little side door into the courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville. There she
saw Gustave Flourens on horseback. He was a Revolutionist designated
by one of the lists as leader of the Commune.
_“Ce pauvre Gustave, brave garçon, mais un enfant,”_ murmured at her
side a man who, perspiring freely and breathing deeply, like one who
had been hustled in a crowd, seemed just to have escaped from the riot
upstairs.
“You come from above, sir?” asked Mme. Adam. “What is going on there?”
“Everything is for the best, my little lady,” he replied. “Blanqui is
proclaimed Dictator of the Commune.”
Juliette longed to ask about her husband. But she was afraid. She only
dared to inquire—
“How about Dorian?”
“What would you have, madame? He himself replied to us, saying, ‛I
refuse to preside over the Commune. I am no politician. I found
cannon, and, in my opinion, this is a time when the country stands
more in need of cannons than of insurrections!’”
“Fine words,” exclaimed Juliette.
“Yes, madame; take them away with you,” was the rejoinder.
Hoping that Adam had returned to the Préfecture, Juliette made her way
home, but only to find her husband still absent. He returned, however,
at half-past six. Only a few minutes before, his wife had heard from
the lips of a friendly National Guard the news of her husband’s
arrest and of his escape, which he owed to the good offices of the
news-bearer. The Prefect had only a few minutes to stay. His wife
spoke of dinner. He would not hear of it. He had come to take measures
for the defence of the Préfecture. Those measures the events of that
black, starless night proved to be only too necessary.[199]
But they must be read in Mme. Adam’s _Souvenirs_; for the limits of
this volume require us to pass over them and to hasten on to record
briefly the agreement which, by the intervention of Adam and his
friend Dorian, was arrived at in the small hours of the morning.
Standing in a narrow staircase of the Hôtel de Ville, with the angry
riflemen of the Commune above him, and the treacherous National Guards
below, the Prefect conducted a parley. This intervention, seconded by
the negotiations which Dorian in an upper room was carrying on between
the Government and the Revolutionists, resulted in the signing of a
convention.
By this agreement[200] the Government promised three things: first,
to hold municipal elections on the following day; second, political
elections on the day after; third, not to prosecute the leaders of the
insurrection.
After the signing of this agreement, Adam, having, with considerable
difficulty, secured the evacuation of the Hôtel de Ville by the
invaders and the re-establishment of order, returned to the Préfecture
at half-past five on the morning of November 1st.
Barely had the Prefect thrown himself on his bed and begun to
enjoy the sleep which for two nights had been denied him, when his
wife, who was writing in the adjoining room, heard her husband’s
bedroom door violently opened. This early morning visitor was a
member of the Government, M. Picard, who came to demand the arrest
of the rebel leaders. Picard and certain of his colleagues, who
had contrived to escape from the besieged Hôtel de Ville, and who
were, therefore, absent at the time of the Convention’s signing,
refused to hold themselves responsible for it. Adam, however, rather
than break his pledged word, sent in his resignation. Negotiations
continued throughout the day. The Prefect was implored to reconsider
his decision; but he was deaf to all entreaties. His wife, who was
lunching with Mme. Dorian when she first heard the news of her
husband’s resignation, thoroughly approved of his action, deploring
the treachery of the Government and its inevitably disastrous effect
upon the people.
The question arose as to what should be the attitude of Dorian
himself. He, as well as Adam, had undertaken that the leaders of the
insurrection should go free. He, like Adam, was a man of unimpeachable
honour. But his position was somewhat different. As Minister of Public
Works he was entrusted with the all-important task of providing with
munitions the army defending Paris. In his exercise of this function
he had displayed marvellous ingenuity, energy and organising power.
He had transformed the goldsmiths of Paris into engineers. He had
commandeered every possible assistance. He had seemed to create guns
out of nothing.[201]
“Twenty thousand shells are to-day being turned out,” wrote Mme. Adam,
“in a city where, according to the Ministry of War, all the materials
for munitions were exhausted.”
Here was Dorian, the right man in the right place: a minister who, if
his colleagues had only possessed half his brains and energy, might
possibly have saved Paris. What was he to do? His dignity dictated
resignation. But though modesty itself, he was not blind to his own
worth. He knew what he and he alone could do for his country, and for
the country he cared far more than for his personal dignity. That day
at lunch his wife, his son, and his beautiful daughter, Aline Dorian,
one of the most ardent of patriots, and his daughter’s husband, Paul
Ménard, all entreated him to resign.[202] With tears in his eyes and
without the slightest hesitation, he replied: “When I left my home and
my foundries to come to Paris, I was prepared for every sacrifice.
When I consented to enter the Government of Defence, I vowed to
the Republic’s service my fortune, my life, and yours, Ménard, and
yours, Charles. You tell me that I ought to reserve my honour. I do
not consider that my honour is in question. Rather it is the honour
of others which is at stake. It is my dignity that is attacked. I
feel it. Nevertheless I will go so far as to make that sacrifice. I
have carved out my own part in the national task which we are all
performing. I found cannon. If I ceased to do so, then I am persuaded
not another cannon, not a single bullet more would be manufactured.”
Dorian continued in office. Adam, as we have said, resigned; and
after three weeks’ residence in her prison house, Juliette awoke on
the morning of the 3rd of November to find herself back again in her
“dovecot” of the Boulevard Poissonnière.
One of the privations of her sojourn across the water had been that
she saw less of her friends. The Rue de Jérusalem was too far out of
their beat. Now, sauntering along the boulevard, coming away from
dinner at Brébant’s opposite, the Adams’ friends had only to climb
their staircase on Wednesday or Friday evenings to find them at home
and surrounded by interesting friends. Of this restored privilege
the former frequenters of Mme. Adam’s salon were not slow to avail
themselves. “_Ah! que le salon du Boulevard Poissonnière est autrement
fréquenté que celui de la Préfecture_,” exclaims Juliette. On the 8th
of November she writes: “This evening we have the whole Dorian family,
for whom our friendship increases every day, also Eugène Pelletan,
Rochefort, who had resigned after the 31st of October, Chenevard and
Louis Blanc.”
As the siege dragged on and viands grew scarcer and scarcer, Mme. Adam
was often hard put to it to provide dinners for her guests. They were
_dîners de guerre_, which, of course, means _guère de dîner_.
“I invited our friends to dinner,” writes Mme. Adam on the 23rd of
December. “But our dinners are now veritable picnics.” Jourdan, a
well-known journalist, provided the butter, Peyrat the last box of
Albert plums in Paris, another guest a little box of kidney beans, yet
another had sent the joint—it was part of an interesting cow which
for two months had been stabled in a salon. A few weeks later such
a luxury as beef became quite unknown. Juliette for her New Year’s
dinner-party considered herself lucky to be able to put before her
friends a joint of elephant. It was part of the famous Castor from
the Jardins d’Acclimation. The trunk of Castor’s twin, Pollux, which
an English butcher of the Boulevard Haussman had temptingly displayed
in a setting of camel kidneys, helped to furnish forth the war
dinner-tables of Labouchère and Edmond de Goncourt. The _Daily News_
correspondent found it tough and oily, _une pièce de résistance_, but
not in the usual sense of the term.
The sufferings of the rich, however, were as nothing compared with
those of the poor. They were aggravated by the severity of the winter
and the scarcity of fuel. Guards on the Paris ramparts were found
frozen stiff.[203] Well-dressed women were to be seen carrying bundles
of faggots along the street, or bearing home in triumph the hoop of a
cask.
Walking along the Rue St. Honoré, Juliette was terrified to see a
man fall down before her; he had fainted, and was on the point of
dying of starvation. Mme. Adam learned that he was a whipmaker, whose
occupation had forsaken him at a time when carriage-horses fetched a
high price as a table delicacy. That day Juliette became possessed of
a stock of whips large enough to furnish forth all the chariots of the
Olympic Festival.
“When my portion of horseflesh is tough,” she writes,[204] “I try to
console myself with the thought that it is part of one of those poor
skeletons I used to see beaten almost to death along the streets.
When the meat is fat and tender I am always afraid it comes from one
of those fine dapple greys belonging to the Western Railway Line,
which you, Alice, loved to watch ascending the slight incline of the
Boulevard Poissonnière.”
The fortitude with which all classes in Paris endured the hardships
of the siege Juliette is never tired of extolling. “Not a woman
complains,” she writes. “The prevailing idea is devotion to _la
patrie_. _C’est une si grande chose que la patrie quand on y pense_,”
exclaimed a working man whom she met in the street.
Of course there were ugly scenes: ferocity resulting from the pangs
of hunger, wild lawlessness arising from the relaxation of the
bonds of family discipline in a time of so much distress. Juliette,
with an idealist’s determination in an hour of heroic struggle to
see only what is best in her fellow-men, passes lightly over such
incidents, leaving them for de Goncourt’s more realistic pen. She was
even prepared to condone drunkenness, because it frequently arose
from scarcity of food.[205] Nevertheless, she cannot refrain from
remonstrating with an intoxicated National Guard. “I cannot bear to
see a citizen of the Republic drunk,” she exclaimed. “The Republic!
... a citizen! ... no, I will never get tipsy again,” hiccuped the
drunkard.[206]
The artists, the actors and actresses of Paris were among those who
laboured hardest at doing their bit. “You would expect it of them,”
writes Mme. Adam. They had been so far from becoming Buonapartiste.
And she relates how Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, who had organised a hospital
in the Odéon Theatre, _se conduit en femme de grand cœur_.
Juliette herself, by her untiring efforts to alleviate distress, won
for herself the title of _Notre Dame de Bon Secours_. Besides having
billeted on her three recruits from Auvergne, she nursed back to
health in her flat a wounded convalescent soldier, and later, during
the bombardment, she gave harbourage to a poor girl who had fled in
panic from the outskirts of the city.
Much of Mme. Adam’s time was occupied in organising and directing two
societies, _L’Œuvre des Fourneaux_, which provided the poor with cheap
meals, and _L’Œuvre du Travail des Femmes_, destined to help poor
sempstresses by enabling them to possess sewing-machines of their own.
With amazing endurance, though racked by her old enemies neuralgia
and rheumatism, Mme. Adam kept up her energy and her spirits. For
nine years she had been accustomed to spend the winter in the south.
In November 1870 she had written: “In normal days we should now be
preparing to go to Bruyères.” But, alas! for her there was to be
no southern sunshine that winter. Such a deprivation alone could
naturally not fail to tell upon her health. Then came, on the 2nd of
December, the terrible disappointment of Champigny, the sortie which
had raised so many hopes only to dash them to the ground. But it was
not until January that Juliette was driven to admit to herself that
she was ill and must stay in bed. The bombardment of Paris had begun
on the 6th of January. It continued for a nightmare of three weeks.
As early as the 7th of November, Nefftzer, at no time a prophet of
smooth things, had foretold the bombardment. He predicted that bombs
might fall even on the centre of Paris, probably on the Institute.
“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]
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]
FOOTNOTES:
[189] _Souvenirs_, IV. 88.
[190] Sarcey, _Le Siège de Paris_, Eng. trans., 250.
[191] _Souvenirs_, IV. 143.
[192] _Souvenirs_, IV. 150.
[193] The Government usually met in the evening at nine o’clock, and
the sessions always continued until after midnight, sometimes till two
or three in the morning. “From the 4th of September till the 8th of
February we never missed a day, and often we had additional meetings,”
writes Jules Favre (_Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale_, I. 215).
[194] _Souvenirs_, IV. 89.
[195] _Souvenirs_, IV. 161.
[196] Labouchère, _A Resident besieged in Paris_, 161.
[197] See de Goncourt, _Journal_ under October 31, 1870.
[198] A vivid description of the proceedings inside the Hôtel de Ville
is given by Labouchère, _op. cit._
[199] _Souvenirs_, IV. 167-87.
[200] The Revolutionists were discontented with the Provisional
Government’s regulation of municipal affairs. After the 4th of
September the twenty mayors of Paris had been appointed by the
Minister of the Interior, Gambetta, and the Chief Mayor, Etienne Arago.
[201] See Jules Favre, _Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale_, I. 300.
“_M. Dorian déploya la plus louable activité pour obtenir de prompts
résultats. Cet excellent et digne citoyen ... était à ce moment
entouré d’une immense popularité.... Il semblait personnifier la
défense._”
[202] _Souvenirs_, IV. 193.
[203] De Goncourt, _Journal_, December 1870.
[204] _souvenirs_, IV. 273.
[205] _Ibid._, 129.
[206] _Souvenirs_, IV. 119.
[207] _Souvenirs_, IV. 210.
[208] _Ibid._, 303.
[209] _Ibid._, 306.
[210] _Souvenirs_, IV. 315.
[211] _Ibid._, 324.
[212] Favre, _op. cit._, III. 342.
[213] _Ibid._, 345.
[214] Favre, _op. cit._, III. 347.
[215] _Souvenirs_, IV. 324.
[216] Minister of Finance. See _ante_, 140.
[217] Trochu, who had resigned after Buzenval, had been succeeded as
Governor of Paris by General Vinoy.
[218] Mme. Adam dates the signing of the armistice on the 26th, the
day when firing ceased. But by an arrangement between Favre and
Bismarck the bombardment closed two days before the signing of the
capitulation. See Jules Favre, _Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale_,
II. 403.