TOPICS OF TITE DAY.
PARIS IN ECLIPSE. LAST week Paris had only just passed into the penumbra cast by the Prussian Army. It was the week of flight. The railways were besieged all day by crowds of fugitives who had to return at the end of the day without getting within a hundred yards of the railway stations. The country Gerdes Mobiles streamed into the city as the fugitives streamed, or tried to stream, out. The "military zone" was cleared of human habitations. The paraffin was laid at the root of the trees in many of the splendid groves round Paris, and partly fired. The last open theatre was closed during the week. The railways,—except the western lines to St. Germain's and Rouen,—were all cut, leaving that one remaining line of egress still open till the Prussians cut it near Conflans, on Sunday. Even on Saturday, Mr. Odger had an audience of M. Jules Favre, to communicate to him the congratulations and advice of the English working-class, and he was able to return to London without difficulty. All last week there were still the regular arrivals and departures of the post in Paris ; the threat of cutting off the gas lest explosions should follow bombardment was not carried into effect ; the Prussians had appeared in the distance in the north, the south, and the south-east, but they were not very close to Paris except at one or two points, and altogether more of the pleasurable element in the excitement had shown itself amongst the poorer inha- bitants,—Paris dearly loves excitement of all kinds,—than of the gloom and panic. The women indeed might be heard occa- sionally sighing for "a good fat peace," (une bonne grosse paix), but the men even of the Belleville were still able to talk of the coming Prussians as if they were the best joke in the world. The population was never more orderly or more cheerful ; indeed, it was a miracle of true patriotic "light-heartedness" and self- command. The people were not even quite without their pastimes. They filled the lap of the statue (or idol) of Strasburg with flowers, as honourable tributes to the real Strasburg's noble defence. Also Commissions had been issued by the Provisional Government, —which well understands that Paris in time of political danger must be amused with trifles that seem to have some bearing on politics,—for all sorts of fanciful purposes,—to rename the streets, for instance, and transform the Avenue de l'Imperatrice into the Avenue de General Ulrich (the Commander of Strasburg) ; and to inquire into the possibility of discovering new chemical compounds with which to defend Paris,—a speculative investigation which seems to assume those vast periods of time which scientific progress involves, instead of the few hours of delay between the appearance of the heads of the Prussian columns, and the appearance of those columns themselves. Again, the firing of the great Montmorency woods on the north of Paris, which presented a lurid, brilliant, and terrible spectacle for all the inhabitants however far from the scene, must have been dramatic excitement enough for one week. In short, if the regular amusements of Paris were cut off, last week there was still room enough for doubt and hope, to allow of Paris feeling something very like gaiety in the intervals of the perpetual drilling and the perpetual work on the Paris fortifications. An English city would have been far more grave in the agony of such an expectation. But Paris is not an English city, and she showed earnest purpose enough in refraining, or all but refraining, from internal political squabbles, and put- ting down so summarily the predatory instincts of the worst elements of her population. M. Jules Ferry, perhaps in order to bring home to the people of Paris the character of the events to be expected, had caused long trenches to be opened on the hill of Montmartre,—intruding into the well-known cemetery, —for the burial of the expected dead. But this device had not succeeded apparently in either quelling the spirits of the Parisians or making them cry out for peace. Paris at the con- clusion of last week was at once grim and gay, not wavering in her purpose, and not realizing, or not choosing to realize, its horrors.
Thus, last week Paris was, as we said, only in the penumbra.
It was in shadow, but not full shadow. It could speak freely to the outward world of its own emotions, and freely receive encouragement from the outward world. But on Mon- day, as the King of Prussia telegraphs, the complete invest- ment of Paris was accomplished,—and the total eclipse began ; for since then not a letter with a Paris date has been received in London. The foreign ambassadors and legations went off to Tours. The Crown Prince of Prussia dates his telegrams from the Palace of Versailles, about as far from Paris as Twickenham from London,—i.e., within the twelve-mile circle.. The correspondents of the newspapers—such, at least, as still manifest themselves in England—are skirmishing round the dark ring of Prussian besiegers, at a distance of some eighteen to twenty miles in the direction of Rouen, with a good "velocipede staff" to take their letters to the nearest. practicable post. Almost the only regular troops Paris has at, command—the corps of General Vinoy which never reached MacMahon,—after a slight success between Wissous and Montlhery, some fifteen miles to the south of Paris, on Sunday, had been defeated—one Prussian account, though one apparently inconsistent with the King's and Crown Prince's official telegrams, says "routed"—in any case driven back, after the capture of a redoubt, with a loss of some 2,000 prisoners near Sceaux, in the immediate neighbourhood of Versailles, and it was as the result of that action that the Crown Prince had occupied Versailles. The King had himself reconnoitred the northern defences of Paris at Fort St. Denis, and found the position occupied by the French at Pierrefitte, outside the range of the fort, abandoned. From St. Denis, round the whole eastern and southern side of Paris as far as Versailles at the south-west, the Prussian circle is now com- plete, and clearly none of the north-western roads are at present open, or we should hear of what is going on inside.
In other words, Paris is isolated from the world, and the " capital of pleasure" has really entered on one of those "allotropic" states,—as the chemists call a condition in which any substance ceases to be known by its qualities, which are not indeed quite new to the city, but are certainly absolutely new to all men in it under sixty years of age. In this city of kings and emperors, the great imperial palace, the Tuileries, is prepared for the wounded, and fully provided with ambulances to bring them from the walls, while the great suburban palace is the head-quarters of the commander whose guns are to fill the Tuileries with tortured and dying men. The pictures in the Louvre are packed away in cellars. The savants are idly " protesting " against the destruction of the libraries and collections, as if the Prussian shells could help destroying scientific collections if the latter come in their way. The inhabitants of Paris, instead of buying and selling, hearing and making talk, sunning themselves in the Champs Elysees, laughing in their theatres, chatting in their cafes, feeling themselves at the junction of all the political wires of France and well nigh of the universe, hearing before all the rest of the world what the world thinks most important, receiving accounts from hour to hour of what all the rest of the world thinks of the doings of the • Parisians,—are occupied heart and soul with one engrossing subject, the signs of force given by the beleaguering Prussians, the signs of weakness or of strength, of irresolution or reso- lution, given by the great, raw garrison of Paris. As yet there are not, in all probability, even the diversifying occupa- tions of carrying away the wounded men by the circular railway within the enceinte, and tending them in the various hospitals, for the siege has hardly yet begun. The citizens are still looking to the condition of their wells and the quantities of their stores, counting the days during which the butchers' meat, and the game so plentifully killed in the preserves of Versailles, and since stored in ice, will last, speculating on the results of M. Favre's mission to head- quarters, and consulting eagerly the few meagre fly-leaves that represent all that remain of the once teeming and flippant newspapers of Paris,—of which some have emigrated with the Government to Tours, others have ceased to be, and the survivors are reduced to the minimum of size, both from the scarcity of paper and the deficiency of literary and print- ing power.
Conceive even London, comparatively grim London, which never seems to live for gaiety or gladness of any sort, shut up in an iron wall, reaching as near as Twicken- ham on one side, and perhaps as near as Hendon and the Alexandra Park on the other, over which nothing could reach the city but frightful messengers of destruction :—hearing nothing, except in vague rumours from isolated individual couriers, of what was going on in Yorkshire or Norfolk for its succour ;—with shops all closed ;—with Buckingham Palace laid out with beds for the wounded ;—with the further supply of gas at night uncertain from one evening to the next ;—with the Times removed to Liverpool, the Daily News patriotically appear- ing (for Londoners only) on a little sheet as big as half an Echo; —with the river-bottom lined with sunk vessels and torpedoes, the banks with mitrailleuses, and Richmond, Hammersmith, and Vauxhall bridges blown up ;—with the trees in Kensington 'Gardens levelled, and Maida and Hampstead Hills cleared of houses by the order of General Mansfield ;—with Colonel Dixon superintending the making of scientific barricades through all the great thoroughfares, and the Beehive according him a dubious confidence, while expressing openly its loud distrust of Mr. Forster and Mr. Stansfeld ;—with the once rich proprie- tors of the Regent Street shops drilling daily in Volunteer costumes, and companies of Essex, and Wiltshire, and perhaps Yorkshire, lads drilling side by side in rough Militia uniforms ; —with the police force all dispersed, and its place supplied by special constables raw to the work ;—with the East-Enders professing national sentiments for the moment, but declaring that as soon as the foe should disappear, they would have a share in the property of Lombard street ;—with hourly arrests of supposed spies in every street, and no news beyond such daily information as that the enemy had occupied Watford, had ap- peared in force at Hanwell, had just taken a redoubt at Black- wall, and cut the Kent line of rail at Bromley, while advanced cavalry had levied a contribution on the inhabitants of Roe-
ampton, Putney, Kew, and Isle worth ;—with the head-quarters of the first army established at Windsor Castle ;—with every- body in anxiety about his pump and his supply of food ;—with the savings-banks authorized by Government to pay no more Than £2 to each depositor, and give the rest in Consolidated Stock, to be redeemed by the Government three months hence ; —imagine what all this would be even to grim and satur- nine London, and then conceive what it must be to Paris, —brilliant, gay, flippant Paris, accustomed to have all the world singing to her, and flattering her, and bring- ing her gifts, and feeding the lust of the eye and the pride of life on the vision of her beauty and the spectacle of her grandeur! Thus only can we form some faint notion of the transformation which a fortnight has made in that great capital of pleasure. If she bear this time of trial well,— neither flinching from suffering nor becoming cruel in despair, -the greatest miracle that is not quite a miracle may yet happen, and war shed blessings over the people it afflicts. We will not, with some of the blind enthusiasts for the French genius, call the great city ' heroic ' for merely gather- ing up her energies to face a siege. But if, indeed, the siege finds her children all that the people vow that it shall find them, we will join, even with the most enthusiastic, in thanking God that self-will, and pleasure, and vanity, and the pageantry of life, have not so enervated this great people as to make them reluctant, not merely to give their lives in a public cause,— that they have never been,—but reluctant to give them in a disciplined, orderly, matter-of-fact way, without any of that intoxicating transport of popular emotion as stimulus, which is the life and breath of revolutionary surprises and of the ,grand achievements of the barricades.
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