This great army in retreat was made up of every type familiar in Paris.
Here were women of the gay world, poor creatures whose painted faces had
been washed with tears, and whose tight skirts and white stockings were
never made for a long march down the highways of France.
Here also were thousands of those poor old ladies who live on a few
francs a week in the top attics of the Paris streets, which Balzac knew;
they had fled from their poor sanctuaries and some of them were still
carrying cats and canaries, as dear to them as their own lives.
There was one young woman who walked with a pet monkey on her shoulder
while she carried a bird in a golden cage. Old men, who remembered 1870,
gave their arms to old ladies to whom they had made love when the
Prussians were at the gates of Paris then.
It was pitiful to see these old people now hobbling along together.
Pitiful, but beautiful also, because of their lasting love.
Young boy students, with ties as black as their hats and rat-tail hair,
marched in small companies of comrades, singing brave songs, as though
they had no fear in their hearts, and very little food, I think, in
their stomachs.
Shopgirls and concierges, city clerks, old aristocrats, young boys and
girls, who supported grandfathers and grandmothers and carried new-born
babies and gave pick-a-back rides to little brothers and sisters, came
along the way of retreat.
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