de Thaller's house,
of which he had charge. They refused, and instead of getting angry,
as he certainly would have done formerly, he commenced describing to
them the splendors of the apartments, the magnificent furniture, the
carpets and the hangings, the paintings by the great masters, the
objects of arts, the bronzes, in a word, all that dazzling luxury
of which financiers make use, somewhat as hunters do of the mirror
with which larks are caught.

Of business, nothing was ever said.

He went every morning as far as the office of the Mutual Credit;
but, as he said, it was solely as a matter of form. Once in a long
while, M. Saint Pavin and the younger Jottras paid a visit to the
Rue St. Gilles. They had suspended,--the one the payments of his
banking house; the other, the publication of "The Financial Pilot."

But they were not idle for all that; and, in the midst of the public
distress, they still managed to speculate upon something, no one
knew what, and to realize profits.

They rallied pleasantly the fools who had faith in the defence, and
imitated in the most laughable manner the appearance, under their
soldier's coat, of three or four of their friends who had joined
the marching battalions. They boasted that they had no privations
to endure, and always knew where to find the fresh butter wherewith
to dress the large slices of beef which they possessed the art of
finding. Mme. Favoral heard them laugh; and M. Saint Pavin, the
manager of "The Financial Pilot," exclaimed,

"Come, come! we would be fools to complain. It is a general
liquidation, without risks and without costs." Their mirth had
something revolting in it; for it was now the last and most acute
period of the siege.

At the beginning, the greatest optimists hardly thought that Paris
could hold out longer than six weeks. And now the investment had
lasted over four months. The population was reduced to nameless
articles of food. The supply of bread had failed; the wounded, for
lack of a little soup, died in the ambulances; old people and
children perished by the hundred; on the left bank the shells came
down thick and fast, the weather was intensely cold, and there was
no more fuel.

And yet no one complained. From the midst of that population of
two millions of inhabitants, not one voice rose to beg for their
comfort, their health, their life even, at the cost of a
capitulation.

Clear-sighted men had never hoped that Paris alone