A Girl of the Commune. Henty George Alfred
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another franc suffices for supper. So you see that my necessaries of life, including lodgings and fuel, do not come to anything like half my income, and I can spend the rest in riotous living if I choose."
The girl looked at him earnestly.
"You are not growing cynical, I hope, Cuthbert?"
"I hope not. I am certainly not conscious of it. I don't look cynical, do I?"
"No," she said, doubtfully. "I do not see any change in you, but what do you do with yourself?"
"I paint," he said.
"Really!"
"Really and truly, I have become what you wanted me to become, a very earnest person indeed, and some day people may even take to buying my pictures."
"I never quite know when you are in earnest, Cuthbert; but if it is true it is very good news. Do you mean that you are really studying?"
"I am indeed. I work at the studio of one M. Goudé, and if you choose to inquire, you will find he is perhaps the best master in Paris. I am afraid the Prussians are going to interrupt my studies a good deal. This has made me angry and I have enlisted—that is to say, been sworn in as a member of the Chasseurs des Écoles, which most of the students at Goudé's have joined."
"What! You are going to fight against the Germans!" she exclaimed, indignantly. "You never can mean it, Cuthbert."
"I mean it, I can assure you," he said, amused at her indignation. "I suppose you are almost Germanized, and regard their war against the French as a just and holy cause."
"Certainly I do," she said, "though of course, I should not say so here. I am in France and living in a French family, and naturally I would say nothing that would hurt the feelings of the people round me, but there can be no doubt that the French deserve all the misfortunes that have fallen upon them. They would have invaded Germany, and all these poor young Germans have been torn away from their friends and families to fight."
"So have these young Frenchmen. To my mind the war was deliberately forced upon France, but I think we had better agree to differ on this subject. You have been among Germans and it is not unnatural that you should have accepted their version. I have been living among Frenchmen, and although I do not say that it would not have been much wiser if they had avoided falling into the pit dug for them, my sympathies are wholly with them, except in this outburst of folly that has resulted in the establishment, for a time at any rate, of a Republic. Now, I have no sympathy whatever with Republics, still less for a Republic controlled by political adventurers, and like many Frenchmen I am going to fight for France, and in no way for the Republic. At any rate let us agree to avoid the subject altogether. We shall never convince each other however much we might argue it over."
The girl was silent for two or three minutes, and then said—
"Well, we will agree not to quarrel over it. I don't know how it is that we always see things so differently, Cuthbert. However, we may talk about your doings without arguing over the cause. Of course you do not suppose there will be much fighting—a week or two will see the end of it all."
"Again we differ," he said. "I believe that there will be some sharp fighting, and I believe that Paris will hold out for months."
She looked at him incredulously.
"I should have thought," she said, after a pause, "you were the last person who would take this noisy shouting mob seriously."
"I don't think anything of the mob one way or the other," he said. "I despise them utterly; but the troops and the mobiles are sufficient to man the forts and the walls, and I believe that middle-class corps, like the one I have entered, will fight manfully; and the history of Paris has shown over and over again that the mob of Paris, fickle, vain-headed, noisy braggadocios as they are, and always have been, can at least starve well. They held out against Henry of Navarre till numbers dropped dead in the streets, and until the Spaniards came at last from the Netherlands and raised the siege, and I believe they will hold out now. They have courage enough, as has been shown over and over again at the barricades, but they will be useless for fighting because they will submit to no discipline. Still, as I said, they can starve, and it will be a long time indeed before the suffering will become intense enough to drive them to surrender. I fear that you have altogether underrated the gravity of the situation, and that you will have very severe privations to go through before the siege is over."
"I suppose I can stand it as well as others," she laughed, "but I think you are altogether wrong. However, if it should come it will be very interesting."
"Very," he said, shortly, "but I doubt if you will see it quite in the same light when it comes to eating rats."
"I should not eat them," she said, decidedly.
"Well, when it comes to that or nothing, I own that I myself shall eat rats if I can get them. I have heard that the country rat, the fellow that lives in ricks, is by no means bad eating, but I own to having a doubt as to the Paris rat."
"It is disgusting to think of such a thing," she said, indignantly, "the idea is altogether ridiculous."
"I do not know whether you consider that betting is among the things that woman has as much right to do as man; but if you do, I am ready to wager it will come to rats before Paris surrenders."
"I never made a bet in my life," she said, "but I will wager five francs with you that there will be nothing of the sort. I do not say that rats may not be eaten in the poor quarters. I do not know what they eat there. I hear they eat horse-flesh, and for anything I know they may eat rats; but I will wager that rats will never be openly sold as an article of food before Paris surrenders."
"It is a bet," he said, "and I will book it at once," and he gravely took out a pocket-book and made an entry. "And now," he said, as he replaced the book in his pocket, "how do you pass your time?"
"I spend some hours every day at the Bibliothêque. Then I take a walk in this quarter and all round the Boulevards. One can walk just as freely there as one could in Germany, but I find that I cannot venture off them into the poorer quarters; the people stare, and it is not pleasant."
"I certainly should not recommend you to make experiments that way. In the great thoroughfares a lady walking by herself passes unnoticed, especially if she looks English or American. They are coming to understand that young women in those countries are permitted an amount of freedom that is shocking to the French mind, but the idea has not permeated to the lower strata of society.
"If you are really desirous of investigating the ways of the female population of the poorer quarters, I shall be happy to escort you whenever you like, but I do not think you will be altogether gratified with the result of your researches, and I think that you would obtain a much closer insight into French lower class life by studying Balzac and some of the modern writers—they are not always savory, but at least they are realistic."
"Balzac is terrible," she said, "and some of the others I have read a little of are detestable. I don't think you can be serious in advising me to read them."
"I certainly should not advise you to read any of them, Miss Brander, if you were a young lady of the ordinary type; but as you take up the cause of woman in general it is distinctly necessary that you should study all the phases of female life. How else can you grapple with the question?"
"You are laughing at me again, Mr. Hartington," she said, somewhat indignantly.
"I can assure you that I am not. If your crusade is in favor only of girls of the upper and middle classes, you are touching but the fringe of the subject, for they are outnumbered by twenty to one by those of other classes, and those in far greater need of higher life than the others."
"It seems rather hopeless," Mary Brander said, despondently, after a pause, "one is so unable to influence them."
"Exactly so. You are setting yourself to move a mountain. When the time comes there may be an upheaval, and the mountain may move of its own accord; but the efforts of a thousand or ten thousand women as earnest as yourself would be no more use in proportion, than those of a colony of ants working to level the mountain."
"Don't discourage me, Cuthbert," she said, pitifully. "I do believe with