inevitable, the fatal law which at a given moment hurls nation against
nation. Then Paris was convulsed from center to circumference; he
remembered that burning summer's night, the tossing, struggling human
tide that filled the boulevards, the bands of men brandishing torches
before the Hotel de Ville, and yelling: "On to Berlin! on to Berlin!"
and he seemed to hear the strains of the Marseillaise, sung by a
beautiful, stately woman with the face of a queen, wrapped in the
folds of a flag, from her elevation on the box of a coach. Was it all
a lie, was it true that the heart of Paris had not beaten then? And
then, as was always the case with him, that condition of nervous
excitation had been succeeded by long hours of doubt and disgust;
there were all the small annoyances of the soldier's life; his arrival
at the barracks, his examination by the adjutant, the fitting of his
uniform by the gruff sergeant, the malodorous bedroom with its fetid
air and filthy floor, the horseplay and coarse language of his new
comrades, the merciless drill that stiffened his limbs and benumbed
his brain. In a week's time, however, he had conquered his first
squeamishness, and from that time forth was comparatively contented
with his lot; and when the regiment was at last ordered forward to
Belfort the fever of enthusiasm had again taken possession of him.

For the first few days after they took the field Maurice was convinced
that their success was absolutely certain. The Emperor's plan appeared
to him perfectly clear: he would advance four hundred thousand men to
the left bank of the Rhine, pass the river before the Prussians had
completed their preparations, separate northern and southern Germany
by a vigorous inroad, and by means of a brilliant victory or two
compel Austria and Italy to join hands immediately with France. Had
there not been a short-lived rumor that that 7th corps of which his
regiment formed a part was to be embarked at Brest and landed in