There were scheming men among these “beards,” and particularly terrible inventors, who all had an infallible way of destroying at a blow the Prussian army, and who accused General Trochu of treason, and of refusing their offers, giving as a reason the old prejudices of military laws among nations.  One of these visionary people had formerly been physician to a somnambulist, and took from his pocket—­with his tobacco and cigarette papers—­a series of bottles labelled:  cholera, yellow fever, typhus fever, smallpox, etc., and proposed as a very simple thing to go and spread these epidemics in all the German camps, by the aid of a navigable balloon, which he had just invented the night before upon going to bed.  Amedee soon became tired of these braggarts and lunatics, and no longer went to the Cafe de Seville.  He lived alone and shut himself up in his discouragement, and he had never perhaps had it weigh more heavily upon his shoulders than this morning of the second of December, the last day of the battle of Champigny, while he was sadly promenading before the stacked guns of his battalion.

The dark clouds, heavy with snow, were hurrying by, the tormenting rumble of the cannons, the muddy country, the crumbling buildings, and these vanquished soldiers shivering under their rags, all threw the poet into the most gloomy of reveries.  Then humanity so many ages, centuries, perhaps, old, had only reached this point:  Hatred, absurd war, fratricidal murder!  Progress?  Civilization?  Mere words!  No rest, no peaceful repose, either in fraternity or love!  The primitive brute always reappears, the right of the stronger to hold in its clutches the pale cadaver of justice!  What is the use of so many religions, philosophies, all the noble dreams, all the grand impulses of the thought toward the ideal and good?  This horrible doctrine of the pessimists was true then!  We are, then, like animals, eternally condemned to kill each other in order to live?  If that is so, one might as well renounce life, and give up the ghost!

Meanwhile the cannonading now redoubled, and with its tragic grumbling was mingled the dry crackling sound of the musketry; beyond a wooded hillock, which restricted the view toward the southeast, a very thick white smoke spread over the horizon, mounting up into the gray sky.  The fight had just been resumed there, and it was getting hot, for soon the ambulances and army-wagons drawn by artillery men began to pass.  They were full of the wounded, whose plaintive moans were heard as they passed.  They had crowded the least seriously wounded ones into the omnibus, which went at a foot pace, but the road had been broken up by the bad weather, and it was pitiful to behold these heads shaken as they passed over each rut.  The sight of the dying extended upon bloody mattresses was still more lugubrious to see.  The frightful procession of the slaughtered went slowly toward the city to the hospitals, but the carriages sometimes