XII.
A RESCUING ANGEL.
And then came a scene which is probably only possible in France. Whatever may be going on there—farce, comedy, the high tension of tragedy—woman steps in and asserts her right of control. I don't know anything which makes upon me so strange an impression as the frou-frou of these French petticoats in the midst of slaughter, terror, and universal chaos. I read a book some time ago which had Zola and his acolytes for its contributors. It was a series of stories, all associated with the terrible war of 1870. It is the book which contains Zola's own splendid and pathetic little story, "The Attack on the Mill," and, if I mistake not, it is in the same volume that one finds that weird, amusing, appalling sketch, "Boule de Suif," Maupassant's most powerful, thrilling, and most pessimistic contribution to contemporary literature. There was another story, which was the history of an intrigue between Trochu and a high-class demi-mondaine in the very midst of the siege, and the sense of awe, horror, disgust, which you feel at this odious episode in the midst of the crash of bombs and the submergence in awful suffering of a whole world, is something that you can never forget.
All this I think of as I read the episode Pasquier tells in the history of his imprisonment:
