has sunk, an anxious silence reigns, and every ear is on the stretch for the first cry from the army. Will it be a cry of triumph or of defeat? It is a terrible moment. Contradictory news comes; every tiniest indication is seized, every word is[Pg 136] pondered and discussed until the hour when the truth is known. And what an hour that is, of delirious joy or horrible despair! [Pg 136] I. I was fourteen at the time of the Crimean war. I was a pupil in the College of Aix, shut up with two or three hundred other urchins in an old Benedictine convent, whose long corridors and vast halls retained a great dreariness. But the two courts were cheerful under the spreading blue immensity of that glorious Southern sky. It is a tender memory that I keep of that college, in spite of the sufferings that I endured there. I was fourteen then; I was no longer a small boy, and yet I feel to-day how complete was the ignorance of the world in which we were living. In that forgotten corner, even the echo of great events hardly reached us. The town, a sad, old, dead capital, slumbered in the midst of its[Pg 137] arid landscape; and the college, close to the ramparts, in the deserted quarter of the town, slumbered even more deeply. I do not remember any political catastrophe ever passing its walls while I was cloistered there. The Crimean war alone moved us, and even as to that it is probable that weeks elapsed before the fame of it reached us. [Pg 137] When I recall my memories of that time, I smile to think what war was to us country schoolboys. In the first place, everything was extremely vague. The theatre of the struggle was so distant, so lost in a strange and savage country, that we seemed to be looking on at a story come true out of the “Arabian Nights.” We did not clearly know where the fighting was; and I do not remember that we had at any time curiosity enough to consult the atlases in our hands. It must be said that our teachers kept us in absolute ignorance of modern life. They themselves read the papers and learned the news; but they never opened their mouths to us about such[Pg 138] things, and if we had questioned them, they would have dismissed us sternly to our exercises and essays. We knew nothing precise, except that France was fighting in the East, for reasons not within our ken. [Pg 138] Certain points, however, stood out clear. We repeated the classic jokes about the
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