“There,” said he, quietly, “I wanted to say ‘good-bye’ to you. Now that I am alone I could not endure to do nothing.... So as I found that a company of _franc-tireurs_ was going, I joined yesterday. That will give me something to do.” “When do you leave Paris?” I asked him. “Why, in a couple of hours. Good-bye.” He embraced me in his turn. I did not dare to ask him any more questions. He went, and the thought of him was always with me. After the catastrophe of Sedan, some days before the surrounding of Paris, I had news of him. One of his comrades came to tell me that this young fellow, so pale and slender, fought like a wolf. He kept up a savage warfare against the Prussians, watching them from behind a hedge, using a knife rather than his gun. Whole nights long he would be on the hunt, watching for men as for his prey, and cutting the throat of anyone who came within his reach. I was stupefied. I could not think that this was Julien; I asked myself whether it was possible that the nervous poet could have become a butcher. Then Paris was isolated from the rest of the world, and the siege began with all its fits of sleepiness and of fever. I could not go out without remembering Aix on a winter evening. The streets were dark and empty, the houses were shut up early. There were, indeed, distant sounds of cannon and of shots, but the sounds seemed to get lost in the dull silence of the vast town. Some days, breaths of hope would come over, and then the whole population would awake, forgetful of the long standing at the baker’s door, the rations, the cold chimneys, the shells showering upon some districts of the left side of the river. Then the crowd would be struck dumb by some disaster, and the silence began again--the silence of a capital in the death agony. Yet, in the course of this long siege, I saw little glimpses of quiet happiness; people who had a little to live on, who kept up their daily “constitutional” in the pale wintry sunshine, lovers smiling at each other in some out of the way nook and never hearing the cannonade. We lived from day to day. All our illusions had fallen; we counted on some miracle, help from the provincial armies, or a sortie of the whole populace, or some prodigious intervention to arise in its due time.