Then began the days cursed with suspense. Every two or three hours I used to go to the door of the Mairie in the ninth _arrondissement_, which is in the Rue Drouot, where the telegrams were put up. There were always people gathered there, waiting, to the number of a hundred or so. Often the crowd would extend right to the boulevard. There was nothing noisy about these crowds. People spoke in low tones, as if they were in a sick-room. Directly a clerk appeared to put a telegram on the board, there was a rush. Soon the news ran from mouth to mouth. But the news had long been persistently bad, and public consternation grew. Even to-day I cannot pass along the Rue Drouot without thinking of those days of mourning. There, on that pavement, the people of Paris had to undergo the most awful of torments. From hour to hour we could hear the gallop of the German armies drawing nearer to Paris. I saw Julien very often. He did not boast to me of having foreseen the defeat. He only seemed to think what had happened was natural and in the order of things. Many Parisians shrugged their shoulders when they heard talk of a siege of Paris. Could there be a siege of Paris? And others would demonstrate mathematically that Paris could not be invested. Julien, by a sort of foreknowledge, which struck me later, declared that we should be surrounded on September 15th. He was still the schoolboy to whom physical exercises were strangely repulsive. All this war, upsetting all his customary ways, put him beside himself. Why, in the name of God, did people want to fight? And he would lift up his hands with a gesture of supreme protestation. Yet he read the telegrams greedily. “If Louis were not out there,” he would repeat, “I might make verses while we are waiting for the end of the commotion.” At long intervals letters came to him from Louis. The news was terrible, the army was getting discouraged. On the day when we heard of the battle of Borny I met Julien at the corner of the Rue Drouot. Paris had a gleam of hope that day. There was talk of a success. He, on the other hand, seemed to me gloomier than usual. He had read, somewhere, that his brother’s regiment had done heroically, and that its losses had been severe. Three days later a common friend came to tell me the terrible news. A letter had brought word to Julien the night before of his brother’s death. He had been killed at Borny by the bursting of a shell. I immediately hurried to go to the poor fellow, but I found no one at his lodging. The next morning, while I was still in bed, a young man came in dressed as a _franc-tireur_. It was Julien. At first I hardly knew him. Then I folded him in my arms and embraced him heartily, while my eyes were full of tears. He did not weep. He sat down for a moment and made a sign to stop my condolences.