He had never been a rich man, but the outbreak of the war between France and Prussia robbed him in a day of his employment and left him a beggar. Nero had fiddled while Rome was burning, but no one in Strasburg desired to emulate that incomparable artist; and while there had been days when Sadi might have earned a good dinner by playing the Marseillaise to patriotic hosts, his pride forbade him and his violin was silent. The same sense of the dignity of his art kept him from the public distribution of food ordered by the Mayor and the brave General Uhrich. He, Sadi Descourcelles, had the blood of kings in his veins. A philosophic observer might have remarked that it ran thin and sluggish upon that twenty-first day of September, for he, Sadi, was famishing, ravenous, desperate with the gnawing hunger as of youth and strenuous life. He felt that he could commit any crime for bread. He searched the very gutters with his eyes for any scrap of food that fortune might have cast there. Such lighted windows as showed to him the tables spread for dinner or supper moved him to frenzies of desire. Why should some eat when others were starving? And the Prussians killed all indiscriminately, he said, rich or poor, old and young, mothers and children. What folly resisted the right of Bismarck and the Red Prince? Sadi prayed that the city might fall and bread be given to him; but with the next breath he was cursing the blue-coats and hoping in his heart that Strasburg might never surrender. For he was a patriot in spite of his poverty. It was a warm night of September, with a starry sky to be seen here and there between the clouds of sulphurous smoke which floated above the ramparts. Few walked abroad, for there was danger in the streets, and scarcely any cessation of the flying shells which the Prussians hurled upon the doomed city. Sadi was accustomed to the awful sounds and sights which accompanied the siege, and they were powerless any longer to affright him. Even the dead in the gutters--the children who had not made the war but paid the price of it with their young blood--found him callous and without sympathy. As these had died, so he would die and be at rest. He envied them as they lay there--the flare of the burning houses showed him the white faces and they seemed to sleep. Sadi believed that when next he slept it would be as these--eternally and without pain.