The Sun.
London, England, 1871-02-11 00:00:00

IN AND AUOUND PARIS,

Writing from Paris, February 8, the special correspon-
dent of the Daily News with the Saxon Army says :
There is no want of food now in St. Denis ; where the
want lies is as regards the money to buy it wherewithal.
A few of the rich inhabitants are trying what they can to
stem the torrent of misery, but they are utterly unable to
cope with it with any success. You can buy mutton
for 15 sous a pound, and beef for 20 sous ; but then if
you have got never so much as a single sou, the prices
might as well be ten times as much. In their rough
hearty way the German soldiers are doing a great deal to
help to tae off starvation; but the place is full of
misery of the most abject kind. The station of St. Denis
is already in full working order, and passengers are for-
warded from it, although the class of carriage is not
guaranteed.
" Why, they have got over it already ! " Such was the
remark I made to myself as I rode through Paris in the;
dusk—a Paris no more like the Paris I had seen a week
before than is Niobe to a clown grinning through a
horse-collar. Paris has in a great measure recovered her
spirits, and with them her complacency. The general
population looks no more as if all was lost.
Groups form and converse—they even enliven into
gesticulation. The wineshops get up quite a creditable
illumination, and they are the reverse of empty. But they
are: not so full as are the public soup-kitchens, from which
as I ride past, I reason that the contents of the twenty-
seven trains have not quite diffused themselves so widely
as to bring plenty. into every household, and there still
are cries outside the bakers' shops ; but there is something
better to wait for than in the old days. True the bread is
still brown ; but it is not like glue, jam, starch, molasses,
brown paper, bill-stickers' paste, and printers'ink, blocked
together, as it was the other day. There is in it a goodly
proportion of wholesome British flour, and It is a
toothsome morsel compared to the stuff that I loathed
here the other day. There are many more shutters down
from the shop fronts than on the occasion of my first visit.
It is true there is not much food about yet, and prices are
" famine ; " but still the look ahead is toward a harbour
of plenty pretty soon, not to misery,- cold, hunger,
bombshells, and despair. So Paris has got over
the terrible twinge which the surrender gave her at
first, and has owned to herself that things are
looking up. " After all," says Paris, " I do well to get
rid of my moping humour, and to abjure my intention
of jumping into the Seine and finding my way into
the Morgue. It cut me very deeply, no doubt, to
have to sign that convention, but only just think
what I have braved, done, and suffered. You can't in
common decency refuse to own that-I am at least some-
thing of a heroine ; that I have deserved well of my
country and of my traditional reputation. Well, vive
la glory; I have the glory if I have not the success ; so
let one smooth my face and pluck my spirits a bit,
and go out for a week on the Boulevards, and once
more assert the tongue gift I am endowed with." Who
can blame Paris if she reasons thus, providing only
her tongue-gift, her gloire, and her shortness of memory
do not combine to make her forgetful of the terrible
ordeal she has gone through ? Keep that memory
fresh in the mind of Paris, and you may be easy
about any more war on the part of France that Paris can
help. Even now, while the last act of the tragedy seems
thickenings and there is the possibility of a hitch and a
postponement in the dropping of the curtain,
Paris wants peace at almost any price. and wishes
Gambetta dead. The entente cordiale between the autho-
rities is not on the increase, rather the reverse. There are
hitches about the exchanging of prisoners and then it
seems as if Paris in her great strait will eat up the
environs, and superinduce a want of anything but
bare rations among the Germans. This is nearly done
already.