I never went
out without my passport. But even a passport was no safeguard. It was
enough for someone to make some utterly unfounded accusation, express
some foolish, chance suspicion, for the non-Frenchman to be maltreated
as a "spy." Both in Metz and in Paris, in the month of August, people
who were taken for "Prussians" were hanged or dismembered. In the latter
part of August the papers reported from the Dordogne that a mob there
had seized a young man, a M. de Moneys, of whom a gang had asserted that
he had shouted _"Vive la Prusse!"_ had stripped him, bound him with
ropes, carried him out into a field, laid him on a pile of damp wood,
and as this would not take fire quick enough, had pushed trusses of
straw underneath all round him, and burnt him alive. From the
_Quartier La Vilette_ in Paris, one heard every day of similar
slaughter of innocent persons who the people fancied were Prussian
spies. Under such circumstances, a trifle might become fatal. One
evening at the end of August I had been hearing _L'Africaine_ at the
grand opera, and at the same time Marie Sass' delivery of the
_Marseillaise_--she sang as though she had a hundred fine bells in
her voice, but she sang the national anthem like an aria. Outside the
opera-house I hailed a cab. The coachman was asleep; a man jogged him to
wake him, and he started to drive.
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