ould have at his disposal. One of them
made the wild assertion that there would be three hundred thousand;
the other, who seemed to be more at home upon the subject, stated the
strength of the four corps: the 12th, which had just been made complete
at the camp with great difficulty with the assistance of provisional
regiments and a division of infanterie de marine; the 1st, which had
been coming straggling in in fragments ever since the 14th of the
month and of which they were doing what they could to perfect the
organization; the 5th, defeated before it had ever fought a battle,
swept away and broken up in the general panic, and finally, the 7th,
then landing from the cars, demoralized like all the rest and minus its
1st division, of which it had just recovered the remains at Rheims;
in all, one hundred and twenty thousand at the outside, including the
cavalry, Bonnemain's and Margueritte's divisions. When the sergeant took
a hand in the quarrel, however, speaking of the army in terms of the
utmost contempt, characterizing it as a ruffianly rabble, with no
_esprit de corps_, with nothing to keep it together,--a pack of
greenhorns with idiots to conduct them, to the slaughter,--the two
bourgeois began to be uneasy, and fearing there might be trouble
brewing, made themselves scarce.

When outside upon the street Maurice hailed a newsboy and purchased a
copy of every paper he could lay hands on, stuffing some in his pockets
and reading others as he walked along under the stately trees that line
the pleasant avenues of the old city. Where could the German armies be?
It seemed as if obscurity had suddenly swallowed them up. Two were
over Metz way, of course: the first, the one commanded by General von
Steinmetz, observing the place; the second, that of Prince Frederick
Charles, aiming to ascend the right bank of the Moselle in order to cut
Bazaine off from Paris. But the third army, that of the Crown Prince
of Prussia, the army that had been victorious at Wissembourg and
Froeschwiller and had driven our 1st and 5th corps, where was it now,
where was it to be located amid the tangled mess of contradictory
advices? Was it still in camp at Nancy, or was it true that it had
arrived before Chalons, and was that the reason why we had abandoned
our camp there in such hot haste, burning our stores, clothing, forage,
provisions, everything--property of which the value to the nation was
beyond compute? And when the different plans wi