One day when I entered Frantz Mayer’s room to take him his meal, he went into the most ridiculous rage. He threw his piece of fowl down on the ground and declared that he would not eat anything, nothing more at all, for they had deceived him by telling him that the Parisians had not enough food to last two days before surrendering, and he had been in the _ambulance_ seventeen days now, and was having fowl. What the poor fellow did not know was that I had bought about forty fowls and six geese at the beginning of the siege, and I was feeding them up in my dressing-room in the Rue de Rome. Oh, my dressing room was very pretty just then, and I let Frantz believe that all Paris was full of fowls, ducks, geese, and other domestic bipeds. The bombardment continued, and one night I had to have all my patients transported to the Odéon cellars, for when Mme. Guérard was helping one of the sick men to get back into bed a shell fell on the bed itself, between her and the officer. It makes me shudder even now to think that three minutes previously the unfortunate man would have been killed as he lay in bed, although the shell did not burst. We could not stay long in the cellars. The water was getting deeper in them and rats tormented us. I therefore decided that the _ambulance_ must be moved, and I had the worst of the patients taken to the Val-de-Grâce Hospital. I kept about twenty men who were on the way to convalescence. I rented an immense empty flat for them in the Rue de Provence, and it was there that we awaited the armistice. I was half dead with anxiety, as I had had no news from my own family for so long. I could not sleep and had become the very shadow of my former self. Jules Favre was entrusted with the negotiations with Bismarck. Oh, those two days of preliminaries! They were the most unnerving days of any for the besieged. False reports were spread. We were told of the maddest, and most exorbitant demands on the part of the Germans, who certainly were not tender to the vanquished. There was a moment of stupor when we heard that we had to pay two hundred million francs down, for our finances were in such a pitiful state that we shuddered at the idea that we might not be able to make up the sum of two hundred millions immediately. Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, who was shut up in Paris with his wife and brothers, gave his signature for the two hundred millions. This fine deed was soon forgotten, and there are even people who gainsay it. When we heard in Paris that the armistice was signed for twenty days, a frightful sadness took possession of us all, even of those who most ardently wished for peace. Every Parisian felt on his cheek the hand of the conqueror. It was the brand of shame, the blow given by the abominable treaty of peace.