nce taken their
departure. None of the factories and workshops had opened their doors;
trade and commerce there was none; there was no employment for labor;
the life of enforced idleness went on amid the alarmed expectancy of the
frightful denouement that everyone felt could not be far away. And the
people depended for their daily bread on the pay of the National Guards,
that dole of thirty sous that was paid from the millions extorted from
the Bank of France, the thirty sous for the sake of which alone many men
were wearing the uniform, which had been one of the primary causes and
the _raison d'etre_ of the insurrection. Whole districts were deserted,
the shops closed, the house-fronts lifeless. In the bright May sunshine
that flooded the empty streets the few pedestrians beheld nothing moving
save the barbaric display of the burial of some federates killed in
action, the funeral train where no priest walked, the hearse draped
with red flags, followed by a crowd of men and women bearing bouquets
of immortelles. The churches were closed and did duty each evening as
political club-rooms. The revolutionary journals alone were hawked about
the streets; the others had been suppressed. Great Paris was indeed an
unhappy city in those days, what with its republican sympathies
that made it detest the monarchical Assembly at Versailles and its
ever-increasing terror of the Commune, from which it prayed most
fervently to be delivered among all the grisly stories that were
current, the daily arrests of citizens as hostages, the casks of
gunpowder that filled the sewers, where men patrolled by day and night
awaiting the signal to apply the torch.

Maurice, who had never been a drinking man, allowed himself to be
seduced by the too prevalent habit of over-indulgence. It had become
a thing of frequent occurrence with him now, when he was out on picket
duty or had to spend the night in barracks, to take a "pony" of
brandy, and if he took a second it was apt to go to his head in the
alcohol-laden atmosphere that he was forced to breathe. It had become
epidemic, that chronic drunkenness, among those men with whom bread was
scarce and who could have all the brandy they wanted by asking for it.
Toward evening on Sunday, the 21st of May, Maurice came home drunk, for
the first time in his life, to his room in the Rue des Orties, where he
was in the habit of sleeping occasionally. He had been at Neuilly again
that day, blazing away at the en