When Strauss and his two stayed a moment to consult as to the way, the crowd of noisy whelps pressed upon them, snarling and showing their teeth.  Then Strauss and his men grimly fitted a cartridge into each carbine.  Seeing which, it was enough for these very faint-heart patriots.  They turned and ran, and with them ran Jules of the Midi that waited at the Hotel de Ville.  He ran as fast as the best of them; and so no man took me for a German that day or any other day that I was in Paris.

Then, after this deliverance, I went on to the Halles.  The streets were more ploughed with shells than a German field when the teams go to and fro in the spring.

There were two men with me in the uniform of the Hotel de Ville, to carry the provisions.  For already the new marketings were beginning to come in by the Porte Maillot at Neuilly.

As ever, when we came to the market-stalls, it was “Give place to the Hotel de Ville!” While I made my purchases, an old man came up to the butcher-fellow who was serving, and asked him civilly for a piece of the indifferent beef he was cutting for me.  The rascal, a beast of Burgundy, dazed with absinthe and pig by nature, answered foully after his kind.  The old man was very old, but his face was that of a man of war.  He lifted his stick as though to strike, for he had a beautiful young girl on his arm.  But I saw the lip of the Burgundian butcher draw up over his teeth like a snarling dog, and his hand shorten on his knife.

“Have politeness,” I said sharply to the rascal, “or I will on my return report you to the General, and have you fusiladed!”

This made him afraid, for indeed the thing was commonly done at that time.

The old man smiled and held out his hand to me.  He said—­

“My friend, some day I may be able to repay you, but not now.”

Yet I had interfered as much for the sake of the lady’s eyes as for the sake of the old man’s grey hairs.  Besides, the butcher was but a pig of a Burgundian who daily maligned the Prussians with words like pig’s offal.

Then we went back along the shell-battered streets, empty of carriages, for all the horses had been eaten, some as beef and some as plain horse.

“Monsieur the Commissary,” said one of the porters, “do you know that the old man to whom you spoke, with the young lady, is le Pere Felix, whom all the patriots of Paris call the ’Deliverer of Forty-eight’?”

I knew it not, nor cared.  I am a Prussian, though born in Elsass.

So in Paris the days passed on.  In our Hotel de Ville the officials of the Provisional Government became more and more uneasy.  The gentlemen of the National Guard took matters in their own hands, and would neither disband nor work.  They sulked about the brows of Montmartre, where they had taken their cannon.  My word, they were dirty patriots!  I saw them every day as I went by to the Halles, lounging against the walls—­linesmen among them, too, absent from duty without leave.  They sat on the kerb-stone leaning their guns against the placard-studded wall.  Some of them had loaves stuck on the points of their bayonets—­dirty scoundrels all!