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Imagine Southwark, with every man armed in it, and a battle going on at Greenwich, and you will have an idea of the excitement of Montrouge. 6 o'clock P.M. The Boulevards almost impassable; the streets before the Mairies absolutely impassable; no official confirmation of the victory. Everyone who is not inventing news is waiting for it.
He replied: "Willingly." The six of us held a council. We decided that three thousand tickets should be distributed on Sunday, the day before the lecture, at the mairies of the twenty arrondissements to the first persons who presented themselves after noon. Each arrondissement will receive a number of tickets in proportion to the number of its population.
Three students from the Ecole Polytechnique have arrived at the Mairie. They report that the students have broken out of the school and have come to place themselves at the disposition of the people. A certain number have therefore distributed themselves among the mairies of Paris. The insurrection is making progress every hour.
Those who were entitled to the suffrage, and by accident did not get one of these cards, went the next day to their respective mairies to obtain one. I have just come from one of the rooms in which the votes are taken. I say rooms; for the Parisians do not follow our silly example, and build up sheds at the cost of the candidate. At one end of this room was a long table.
Although the news that Bourget had been retaken by the Prussians had been affiché at the Mairies, those who asserted it were at first treated as friends of Prussia. Little by little the fact was admitted, and then, every one fell to denouncing the Government. To-day the official bulletin states that we retreated in good order, leaving "some" prisoners.
He brings no money to his wife and children, who consequently only just keep body and soul together by going to the national cantines, where they get soup, and to the Mairies, where they occasionally get an order for bread. Almost all their clothes are in pawn, so how it is they do not positively die of cold I cannot understand. As for fuel even the wealthy find it difficult to procure it.
There are crowds on the Boulevard; every one is asking his neighbour for news. I went to one of the Mairies to hear the bulletins read. The street was almost impassable. At last I got near enough to hear an official read out a despatch nothing important. The commanders at Montrouge and Vincennes announce that the Prussians are being driven back. "Et Clamart?" some one cries.
So it was with them in the first weeks of the war, and it was a pitiable thing to watch the long queues of women waiting patiently outside the mairies, hour after hour and sometimes day after day, to get that one franc twenty-five which would buy their children's bread.
She is up at daylight, and after dealing with a mass of correspondence, is out in her motor-car before seven o'clock, on a round of the various mairies, to see that the permanent maternity office, which it has been found necessary to start in every one of these municipal centers, is doing its work properly.
The despatches announcing these successes are read aloud at the doors of the mairies. Victory! The Second of December has been wiped out! December 3. General Renault, who was wounded in the foot by a splinter from a shell, is dead. I told Schoelcher that I want to go out with my sons if the batteries of the National Guard to which they belong are sent to the front. The batteries drew lots.
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