Excerpts from the Journal of Edmond de Goncourt

Friday, November 11

The wounded man is in favor. As I go along the Boulevard Montmorency, I see a lady  taking a wounded in  grey overcoat  and  police cap for  a ride in her open carnage.  She has eyes only for him; she continually adjusts the fur laprobe; the hands of mother and wife are constantly  running  over his body

The  wounded man has become fashionable. For others he is an object of utility, a lightning rod. He  defends your dwelling from invasion by  the suburban  population;  he will  save you later on from fire, pillage, and Prussian requisition. Someone was telling me that one of his acquaintances  had set up a hospital in hi's house. Eight  beds, two  nursing  sisters, lint, bandages, nothing was lacking.  But  no  wounded man in sight. The  householder  was full  of anxiety  about  his house. What did he do? He went  to a hospital where  there were lots of wounded men and  paid  three   thousand  francs,  yes,  three thousand  francs,  to have one of them turned  over to him.

I deeply wish for  peace; I very selfishly hope that no shells will fall on my house and my treasures. However, I was walking sad  as death  the  full  length  of  the  fortifications.  I  vas looking at all those works which  will not  protect  us against German victory. I felt from the attitude of the workmen, the National  Guards,  and the soldiers, from what people around me were admitting to each other, that peace was signed in advance and on M. de Bismarck's terms. And I suffered stupidly as from a disappointment,  a disillusionment about one I loved. Someone  was saying  to  me   this  evening: "The  National Guards! Let's not talk about them. The infantry will raise their rifles in  the  air;  the Mobiles  will hold  out  for  a little while; the  sailors will fire without  conviction.  That's   how they will fight, if they do fight."

Saturday, November 12

Let posterity  beware of telling future  generations about the heroism of the Parisians in 187o. Their  heroism will have consisted solely in eating strong butter  on their beans and serving horse meat instead of beef-without being too much aware of it, since the  Parisian has little  discrimination  about  what he eats.

Sunday, November  13

In the midst of everything  that straitens and menaces life at this moment, there is one thing that sustains it and stirs it up, almost makes you love it: emotion. To  go beneath the cannon fire, to risk your  life at the foot of the Bois de Boulogne, to see flames leaping out of the houses at Saint Cloud as they are today, to live under the constant emotion of a war which surrounds you and almost touches you, to rub elbows with danger, always to have your  heart beating fast: that has its sweetness, and I feel that,  when  this is all over, hectic enjoyment will be followed by dull boredom, very dull, very dull.

This  evening in  the  resonance  of  a frosty  night  you  can hear constantly  repeated  all along the ramparts  in a striking chant: "Sentinels, on guard,"  accompanied by the continuous sound of distant cannons, which arc like bursts and cracklings of lightning in the mountains.

Tuesday, December 6

On today's  bill of fare in the restaurants we have authentic buffalo, antelope, and kangaroo.

In the open air this evening under any light, under any improvised street light, consternation-struck faces bend over squares of newspaper. It is the news of the defeat of the Army of the Loire and the recapture of Orleans.

Thursday, December 8

You talk only about what is eaten, can be eaten, or can be found to eat. Conversation does not go beyond that.

"You know, a fresh egg costs twenty-five sous!"

"I hear there is an individual who is buying up all the candles in Paris, and  out  of  them, by  adding  a little  color,  he makes that grease which is so expensive."

"Oh, keep away from cocoa butter;  it stinks up the house
for at least three days."

"I saw some  dog  cutlets;  they're   really  very  appetizing: they look just like mutton chops."

"Now tell me, who has eaten kangaroo?"

"Let  me tell you  about  something good!  You  cook some macaroni and put  it in a salad with  plenty  of greens. What more can you ask for in these times!"

"Don't  forget.  There   are  still  some  canned  tomatoes  at Corcelet's.''

Hunger is beginning and famine is on the horizon. Elegant Parisian women  are  beginning  to  turn  their  dressing rooms into  henhouses.  You  figure,  you  count,   and  you  wonder whether even by using all the waste, all the scrapings, all the parings, there will be anything left to eat in two weeks.

We .shall lack not only food, but also light. Oil for lamps is becoming scarce, candles are at an end. Worse than that, with the cold weather  we are having we are getting  close to  the time when we will be without coal, or coke, or wood. Then we shall endure  famine, cold, and darkness; the future  seems
to hold sufferings and horrors such as have not  been experienced in any other siege.

Saturday, December 10

Nothing more  unnerving  than this  state in which  hope stupidly tries to believe for a moment all the untruths,  the lies, the nonverities of journalism, then falls back immediately into doubt  and unbelief about  everything. Nothing  more painful than this state in which you  don't  know whether the provincial armies are at Corbeil or at Bordeaux, or whether those armies even exist any more. Nothing  more cruel than to live in darkness, in night, in ignorance of the tragic fate which threatens, surrounds,  and stifles you. It really seems as though M.  de Bismarck has shut  up  all Paris incommunicado in  a prison cell.

For  the first time I see people in line at the dry-grocers'­disturbing lines of people pouncing indiscriminately on all the canned goods that are left in these shops.

In  the streets, collections  on behalf of  the wounded  cross convoys  of the dead; and  big calico alms bags, looking  like those you see in Italy at carnival time, are carried even to the second floor  to solicit  charity  from the  people  at the windows.

These days there is nothing more provincial than one of the big Paris cafes. How is that? Perhaps because of the scarcity of waiters, because of the endless reading  of the same newspaper, because of the crowds that form in the middle of the cafe to talk about the things they  know, as people talk about local things in a small city,  or indeed  because of a stupefied habituation to the  place, where  in  former  days,  distracted only by light thoughts and eager for  the pleasures and thousand distractions of Paris, people paused only  for  a moment, with the lightness of birds of passage.

Everybody is losing weight; everybody  is getting thin. You are always hearing of men who have to  have their  trousers taken in: Theo laments that he has to wear suspenders for the first time, since his belly won't  hold up his pants.

Friday, December  16

Today  the official news of the fall of Rouen. I am happy in my  confidence  that Flaubert's  threat to blow out his  brains was nothing but hyperbole.                                                    .
To  be overcome by a stupid love for my shrubbery, passing hours trimming the old ivy of its dead stalks, cultivating my violet plants, mixing up earth and fertilizer for them -- all  this while the Krupp  cannons threaten to make a ruin of my house and garden; it's too stupid! Grief  has turned  me into animal, has given me the manias of an old shopkeeper in  retirement. I am afraid  that under my man-of-letters  skin there s nothing left but a gardener.

Sunday, December 25

It is Christmas. I hear a soldier say: "By way of celebration we had five men frozen in our tent."

What  a remarkable transformation of business and what a bizarre transformation  of  shops! A  jeweler on  the  Rue  de Clichy now shows eggs wrapped in cotton wool in his jewel boxes. In the part of the window usually given over to silver, you  see  chickens,  ducks,  jellied  meat; and  a  big  sign announces:  Roast Goose by the Piece.

Right now the mortality  is very  high in Paris. It is not absolutely the result of hunger, and the deaths are not confined to the sick and sickly--who  are finished off by  the restricted diet  and  present  hardships.  Much  of  this mortality   comes from grief, displacement, homesickness for the sunny  corners in the Paris region from which  these refugees came. Of  the tiny migration  from Croissy-Beaubourg--twenty-five people at most-five are already dead.

Friday, December 30

Tuesday,  January 1o

The gunfire this morning is so rapid that it seems as regular as a steam-engine piston.

As I ride into Paris with a sailor from the Point du Jour battery,  he tells me that yesterday  there was such a hail of shells that they had  to endure seventeen salvos lying on the ground without being able to return  the fire. After  that they fired a whole  battery  and blew up an ammunition dump. In spite of the terrible fire they so far have had only three wounded: one with  his thigh severed who died, another seriously wounded, and a seaman who had his eyes and beard burned when a shell burst in front  of his face.

There are  a good  many  of  us at  Brebant's  this evening. Everybody who has been under  bombardment wants to hear what   as happened to other  people. Charles Edmond  gives a fantastic  description  of the bombs that rained on the Luxembourg.  Because shell fell in the Place Saint Sulpice, Saint­Victor  deserts his lodgings on the Rue Furstenberg  at night. Renan has emigrated  to the Right Bank.

Wednesday,  ]anuary  18

Today the  ration  is 400 grams per  person.  Imagine  that there are people condemned  to live on so little!  Women were weeping in the line at the Auteuil bakery.

Now it is not  just a few stray shells as on previous days but a hail of lead, which bit by bit surrounds  and hems us in. All around  me  explosions  which burst fifty,   ninety-five feet away:  at  the  railroad  station,  on  the Rue Poussin, where a woman's foot  was blown  off, in  the  house next  door  which had already had its first experience day before yesterday.  And while I am at the window picking out  the Meudon batteries with my glasses, a shell fragment  almost hits me and spatters mud against the door of my house. . . .

Friday, January 20

Trochu's dispatch last night seems to me to  be the  beginning of the end; it poisons my stomach. . . .

In Paris, on the boulevard, I encounter  anew the despairing discouragement of  a great  nation which has done  much  to save itself  by its Own  efforts,  its resignation, its morale, and feels that it has been lost by military stupidity.

I have dinner at Peters' next to three of Franchetti's scouts. Theirs is absolute despair under  the mask of irony,  the special form that·French  despair takes: ''We've had it, we've  had it!" They speak of the Army  of Paris which is unwilling to fight any longer, of the heroic core which kept it together killed at Champigny and  at  Montretout, and  always, always, they speak of their leaders' incapacity.                             .

It is odd that in the situation  I am in, in the grief  that devours me, I still have a cowardly desire to live, and  on  the way home I seek to avoid the  shell whistling  by  me which might bring me deliverance!

Saturday, January 21

I am  struck  more than  ever  by  the silence,  the silence of death, which disaster brings in a great city. Today you can no longer hear Paris live.

Every face is that of a sick man or a convalescent.  You seeonly thin, drawn, pale faces; you see only yellowy  pallor like horse fat.

In front of the me on the omnibus are women in full mourning: mother and daughter. The black-gloved hands of the mother are constantly twisting and moving mechanically to her red eyes, which are unable to weep any more, while a tear, slow of fall, dries from time to time at the edge of the daughter's eyes, which are raised to heaven.

On the Place de la Concorde near the tattered flags and withered immortelles on the Strasbourg statue a company is encamped, blackening the walls of the Tuilleries garden with their fires, their heavy knapsacks making a sort of shield for the balustrade. As you go among them you  hear words like these: "Yce,  our  poor  little adjutant  is being buried  tomorrow."

I go  up  to  the  Luxembourg Palace, to  Julie's  house; she reads me a letter from her son-in-law saying that in the Montretout  battle he had to drive the fleeing National Guards and Mobiles back with a stick.

We  have seen the pork-butcher  shops become empty places one by one, decorated  only  by  yellow  pottery  and  aucuba plants with leaves veined like white marble; the butcher shops have drawn curtains behind padlocked grilles. Today  it is the bakery shops' turn, and they have become dark holes with hermetically sealed show windows.

Burty had  it from  Rocheforte that  when  Chanzy  saw his troops flee, he charged them sword  in hand; then, seeing that blows and abuse were of no use, he ordered  the artillery  to fire on them.      

A curious and very symptomatic phrase: A girl whose heels clip-clop behind me on the Rue Saint Nicholas says to me: "Sir, will you come up to my room in return for a piece of bread?"                                                                              ,