A few days later I again journeyed to Champrosay, but the road no longer presented the same aspect. The approach of the enemy, so long threatened and now imminent, could be felt by the deserted state of the suburbs, and the care displayed by our main-guards. Endless formalities were required in order to pass through. Amongst the loitering peasants might be seen the prowling figures of suspicious-looking spies, recalling the sinister plunderers of the battlefields; and the solitude, the agonised expectation of the districts I passed through—Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, Draveil—abandoned and silent, imparted a mystery to the very windings of the road, where one almost expected to see the shadow of an Uhlan vidette on the watch. Champrosay, with its solitary street bordered on each side by villas, seemed to grow larger in the death-like stillness: “Vasta silentio,” as Tacitus says. Glimpses of parks, caught sight of through the iron gates, a background of dark shrubberies in the distance, flower-beds glowing in the brightness of a September day, here and there a circle of garden chairs on a terrace, forgotten like the idle talk that has melted into thin air, garden tools leaning against the palings, all spoke of a rural existence hastily interrupted, a precipitate flight, the sudden surprise, in the midst of its life, of a small Pompeï, whose last hour has struck. But Nature, ever the same, was nevertheless undergoing a change; the broken bridge at Ris, that had been blown up, and whose loosened chains dipped into the water, transformed the landscape, isolating on each side of the river the two little districts hitherto united by the traffic to and fro over the toll-bridge. From all these scenes uprose the agonising sensation of a great catastrophe, rendered more striking by the magnificent sun of an exceptionally fine season. At the same moment, as I closed behind me the door of our now deserted dwelling, an aged peasant, old Casaquet, came out of a neighbouring house. When all the others had taken flight and run away, he alone obstinately refused to take refuge in Paris, where his family had settled themselves as best they could. “I’m much too old!” he said; and he had some potatoes, a little wine, a few hens, not to speak of the grunting porker he kept under his roof. I proposed bringing him away to rejoin his people. But he stubbornly stuck to his words: “I’m much too old!” The recollection of this old Robinson Crusoe, the last living being I had seen at Champrosay, often crossed my mind during the terrible cold and famine of the siege. What had become of him, and of the whole village, which I pictured to myself burning and blazing; our house, our books, the piano, everything tarnished, broken, and laid waste by the invasion, like the suburban regions of Nogent, Champigny, Petit-Bry, and Courneuve, among whose sad ruins, villas with broken stairways and half-hanging shutters, I wandered every day? . . .