One evening Amedee Violette was belated upon the boulevards, and saw coming out of a restaurant Maurice in full uniform, with one of the pretty comedienes from the Varietes leaning upon his arm.  This meeting gave Amedee one heart-ache the more.  It was for such a husband as this, then, that Maria, buried in some country place, was probably at this very time overwhelmed with fears about his safety.  It was for this incorrigible rake that she had disdained her friend from childhood, and scorned the most delicate, faithful, and tender of lovers.

Finally, to kill time and to flee from solitude, Amedee went to the Cafe de Seville, but he only found a small group of his former acquaintances there.  No more literary men, or almost none.  The “long-haired” ones had to-day the “regulation cut,” and wore divers head-gears, for the most of the scattered poets carried cartridge-boxes and guns; but some of the political “beards” had not renounced their old customs; the war and the fall of the Empire had been a triumph for them, and the fourth of September had opened every career for them.  Twenty of these “beards” had been provided with prefectures; at least all, or nearly all, of them occupied public positions.  There was one in the Government of National Defence, and three or four others, chosen from among the most rabid ones, were members of the Committee on Barricades; for, improbable as the thing may seem today, this commission existed and performed its duties, a commission according to all rules, with an organized office, a large china inkstand, stamped paper, verbal reports read and voted upon at the beginning of each meeting; and, around a table covered with green cloth, these professional instigators of the Cafe de Seville, these teachers of insurrection, generously gave the country the benefit of the practical experience that they had acquired in practising with the game of dominoes.

The “beards” remaining in Paris were busied with employments more or less considerable in the government, but did not do very much, the offices in which they worked for France’s salvation usually closed at four o’clock, and they went as usual to take their appetizers at the Cafe de Seville.  It was there that Amedee met them again, and mixed anew in their conversations, which now dwelt exclusively upon patriotic and military subjects.  These “beards” who would none of them have been able to command “by the right flank” a platoon of artillery, had all at once been endowed by some magical power with the genius of strategy.  Every evening, from five to seven, they fought a decisive battle upon each marble table, sustained by the artillery of the iced decanter which represented Mount Valerien, a glass of bitters, that is to say, Vinoy’s brigade, feigned to attack a saucer representing the Montretout batteries; while the regular army and National Guard, symbolized by a glass of vermouth and absinthe, were coming in solid masses from the south, and marching straight into the heart of the enemy, the match-box.