When she had concluded her narrative Rose launched out into a detailed account of the tremendous excitement the tidings had produced in the city.  At the Sous-Prefecture she had seen officers tear the epaulettes from their shoulders, weeping meanwhile like children.  Cavalrymen had thrown their sabers from the Pont de Meuse into the river; an entire regiment of cuirassiers had passed, each man tossing his blade over the parapet and sorrowfully watching the water close over it.  In the streets many soldiers grasped their muskets by the barrel and smashed them against a wall, while there were artillerymen who removed the mechanism from the mitrailleuses and flung it into the sewer.  Some there were who buried or burned the regimental standards.  In the Place Turenne an old sergeant climbed upon a gate-post and harangued the throng as if he had suddenly taken leave of his senses, reviling the leaders, stigmatizing them as poltroons and cowards.  Others seemed as if dazed, shedding big tears in silence, and others also, it must be confessed (and it is probable that they were in the majority), betrayed by their laughing eyes and pleased expression the satisfaction they felt at the change in affairs.  There was an end to their suffering at last; they were prisoners of war, they could not be obliged to fight any more!  For so many days they had been distressed by those long, weary marches, with never food enough to satisfy their appetite!  And then, too, they were the weaker; what use was there in fighting?  If their chiefs had betrayed them, had sold them to the enemy, so much the better; it would be the sooner ended!  It was such a delicious thing to think of, that they were to have white bread to eat, were to sleep between sheets!

As Delaherche was about to enter the dining room in company with Maurice and Jean, his mother called to him from above.

“Come up here, please; I am anxious about the colonel.”

M. de Vineuil, with wide-open eyes, was talking rapidly and excitedly of the subject that filled his bewildered brain.

“The Prussians have cut us off from Mezieres, but what matters it!  See, they have outmarched us and got possession of the plain of Donchery; soon they will be up with the wood of la Falizette and flank us there, while more of them are coming up along the valley of the Givonne.  The frontier is behind us; let us kill as many of them as we can and cross it at a bound.  Yesterday, yes, that is what I would have advised—­”

At that moment his burning eyes lighted on Delaherche.  He recognized him; the sight seemed to sober him and dispel the hallucination under which he was laboring, and coming back to the terrible reality, he asked for the third time: 

“It is all over, is it not?”

The manufacturer explosively blurted out the expression of his satisfaction; he could not restrain it.

“Ah, yes, God be praised! it is all over, completely over.  The capitulation must be signed by this time.”