Eleven years later, in 1870, we were grown men. Louis had reached the rank of captain. Julien, after various beginnings, had settled down to the idle, ever-occupied life of those wealthy Parisians who frequent literary and artistic society without themselves ever touching pen or paint brush. There was great excitement at the first report of a war with Germany. People’s brains were fevered: there was talk about our natural frontier on the Rhine, and about avenging Waterloo, which had remained a weight on our hearts. If the campaign had been opened by a victory, France would certainly have blessed this war which she ought to have cursed. Paris certainly would have felt disappointed if peace had been maintained, after the stormy sittings of the Corps Legislatif. On the day when conflict became inevitable, all hearts beat high. I am not speaking now of the scenes which took place in the evenings on the boulevards, of the shrieking crowds, or the shouts of men who may have been paid, as, later on, it was declared that they had been. I only say that, among sober citizens, the greater number were marking out on maps the different stages of our army as far as Berlin. The Prussians were to be driven back with the butt end of the rifle. This absolute confidence of victory was our inheritance from the days in which our soldiers had passed, always conquering, from one end of Europe to the other. Nowadays we are thoroughly cured of that very dangerous patriotic vanity. One evening when I was on the Boulevard des Capucines, watching hordes of men in blouses who passed along, yelling, “_À Berlin! À Berlin_,” I felt someone touch me on the shoulder. It was Julien. He was very gloomy. I reproached him with his lack of enthusiasm. “We shall be beaten,” said he, quietly. I protested, but he shook his head, without giving any reasons. He felt it, he said. I spoke of his brother. Louis was already at Metz with his regiment, and Julien showed me a letter which he had received the night before, a letter full of gaiety, in which the captain declared that he should have died of barrack-life if the war had not come to lift him out of it. He vowed that he would come home a colonel, with a medal. But when I tried to use this letter as an argument against Julien’s dark prognostications, he merely repeated: “We shall be beaten.” Paris’s time of anxiety began once more. I knew that solemn silence of the great city; I had witnessed it in 1859 before the first hostilities of the Italian campaign. But this time the silence seemed more tremulous. No one seemed in doubt about the victory; yet sinister rumours were current, coming no one knew whence. Surprise was felt that our army had not taken the initiative and carried the war at once into the enemy’s territory.