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Chapter 21 one. It was the nearness of the Germans that was spreading alarm in Paris. Imaginative ladies with upper glasses standing in the chancel is a reported that they could see Prussian soldiers on the skyline. But it was no imagination that in places the German canon actually overshot the city. The morale off the people, however, remain the admiration of the civilized world down in the slums of Belleville and love. Yet where food, always scarce, was now almost unobtainable. There were already murmurs off the rising that was to come. But the slums are never the whole of the city and on the boulevards and in the big cafes. The extraordinary belief lingered that France was not only holding her own but was actually winning the carrier pigeons, which Gambetta had released. The Germans were now using falcons in an attempt to interrupt this Ariel Maale had come safely home to roost, and the knowledge that this Hercules among statesmen had descended safely from the clouds and was now raising an army in the provinces was taken as nothing less than a token of victory. There was also the belief that the solution of the whole thing still lay in the power of money. That father, on behalf of the French nation, would get Bismarck to accept a lump sum to stop molesting them and that the war would then be over. Moreover, the defenses of the city had been transformed into something pretty formidable. Soldiers were camped by the doctor, Tian. The Garduno was an aerodrome for balloons, and new forts had been erected. The's forts gradually came to occupy the place in the popular imagination, which famous battleships do in the mind of a sea loving nation. Streets and borrows adopted them. There were other indications to the adrenal trust Shoe was taking his task seriously. The woods to the north and east of Paris had all been fired, and fresh rows of houses were demolished to give a clear field to the Gunness. In this atmosphere of furious energy and improvisation, the natural lunacy of inventors bloomed and flourished. One man came forward with proposals for an incendiary gas which recover an advancing enemy with an all unfolding blanket of naked flame, and another inventor proposed nothing less than the induced combustion of explosive elements in the soil so that the Germans would find the very ground that they were marching on, suddenly disappearing under their feet in a titanic upheaval. Off far and smoke and dissolving fragments and the sheer pressure of his task. The inventor had not yet her time to work out the actual details of his scheme. But the idea was there just the same. Most important of all, however, in supporting the public morale were two fundamental feelings that united everyone. These were hatred of the deposed emperor and resentment of the English crude caricatures of the abdicated and despised bad in *** was still on sale in the streets, and the figure of John Bull irritating you, fat and well fed, appeared in the cartoons. The double face iveness of this nation just across the channel seemed to the French to surpass all existing levels in hypocrisy. The English papers were full of condemnations of Prussian ism in general, and Bismarck in particular. They talked about the Huns and quoted Tacitus. They published articles on the art and culture of France, and they did precisely nothing to assist this neighbourly exalted nation. In its misery, Perfidia seemed the least of objectives to characterize such behavior, and in the result, the position of English journalist in Paris was more than a little invidious. They came over these gentlemen, Mr Frederick Hardman of The Times, Mr Lebel, Share of The Telegraph, Archibald Forbes of The Daily News and the rest and the French did not quite know what to make of thumb for all the good will of these correspondents, and every one of them had the educated Englishman's fervent love of Paris, they seem to the parish ins to be taking a rather box office view of things they were risking their lives was, in a sense, a token of their sincerity. But it is one thing to risk one's own life because it is one's job, and it is quite another to sit by and see one's wife and Children being blown to bits by bombs. The position of the British Embassy was the cause of further puzzlement. Lord Clarendon sat there in the four Burl, sent on our way, issuing passports right up into December as though the siege of Paris were kind of game in which the French happened to hold all the low cards, the Prussians, the trumps and the English, the Joker. But there was one trick which even the Joker could not win, and that was a square meal. The rationing of food had been vigorously stiffened and a severe control imposed, but the control had come too late. Those herds of sheep and oxen and the bar had already being consumed. The Persians had quietly and almost unthinkingly, eaten their way through the whole lot of thumb and that had bean no control at all over the supplies of horse meat. As many as 500 horses a day were being slaughtered, and the horse market in the who'd affair did a roaring and sanguinary trade. But not for long. The horses like the cheap and cows that have gone before them. We're gradually exterminated, and the people of Paris were forced to turn to stranger meats. At first, no one admitted theory gin of the new dishes that appeared a table, but the rate of which poodles disappeared from the parks the moment their owners backs returned the way cats, particularly the cream fed kind, vanished from the streets and courtyards gave sufficient indication, and by the middle of December, all concealment was at an end. Dogs at 10 francs apiece, and cats plant ones at eight francs were being eagerly bid for even by people who happen to have lost their own domestic pets and mysterious circumstances. In the face of hunger, squeamishness had already bean extinguished. By the first weeks of January, dogs and cats seemed the dentist of dirt. Rats had by now become luxuries anything and everything, in fact, that it flesh on its bones was greedily and hungrily picked clean. One man, a banker, boasted of having dined off a crow and a dahlia route to the decision to slaughter the animals and the Judge Azul Logic was therefore a natural and perfectly logical one. It would have been too much for human nature to endure to expect the keepers off the great cats to go on thrusting huge joints of meat through the bars when they were in need of it themselves. And the joints, in any case, were no longer obtainable. But the death sentences of thes unfortunate beasts was a particularly hard one to pronounce. The'keeper's had grown up with their animals and had come to love them like their own Children. They could not bring themselves to cut the throats of creatures that put their heads up against the cage door ready to be tickled. And for a time, the same humane feelings permeated the minds of the committee of management. It was even proposed that as a compromise, the smaller animals should be slaughtered first to provide food for the larger so that at the end of the war, one or two sleek and well fed lines might still be able to sit back, importantly on their haunches and survey all around them the waste of empty cages whose occupants they had methodically devoured. There were, however, other and hungrier eyes already fixed on those same smaller animals, and it was the demand for antelope steak in the restaurants that in the end decided down which throats they should go. The order for this new massacre, the slaughter off, the dumb innocence was given, and the grim work began.