of my weakness, however, was in calling their baby
after me. I have an uncomfortable suspicion, too, that William has
given the other waiters his version of the affair, but I feel safe so
long as it does not reach the committee.

ALPHONSE DAUDET

The Siege of Berlin[266-1]

We were walking up the Avenue des Champs-Elysees with Dr. V----, trying
to read the story of the siege of Paris in the shell-scarred walls and
the sidewalks plowed up by grape-shot. Just before we reached the
Circle, the doctor stopped and, pointing out to me one of the big
corner houses so pompously grouped around the Arc de Triomphe,[266-2]
told me this story.

You see those four closed windows above the balcony? During the first
day of August, that terrible August of last year, so full of storms and
disaster, I was called there to attend a very severe case of apoplexy.
The patient was Colonel Jouve, once a cuirassier of the First
Empire,[266-3] and now an old gentleman mad about glory and patriotism.
At the outbreak of war he had gone to live in the Champs-Elysees, in an
apartment with a balcony. Can you guess why? That he might be present
at the triumphant return of our troops. Poor old boy! The news of
Wissemburg reached him just as he was leaving the table. When he read
the name of Napoleon at the foot of that bulletin of defeat, he had a
stroke and fell.

I found the old cuirassier stretched out on the carpet with his face
bleeding and motionless as if struck by a heavy blow. If he had been
standing, he would have seemed a tall man. Stretched out as he was, he
seemed immense. He had a fine face, magnificent teeth, a thick head of
curly white hair, and though eighty years old did not look more than
sixty. Near him his granddaughter knelt weeping. There was a strong
family resemblance between them. Seeing them side by side, you thought
of two beautiful Greek medals struck from the same matrix, but one old
and worn and the other bright and clear-cut with all the brilliancy and
smoothness of a first impression.

I found the child's grief very touching. Daughter and granddaughter of
a soldier (her father was on Mac Mahon's[267-1] staff), the sight of
this splendid old man stretched out before her had suggested to her
another scene, no less terrible. I did all I could to reassure her, but
in my own mind I was not any too hopeful. There was no question that
the stroke had been apoplectic, and that is the sort of thing from
which at ei