Read "The Aspirations of Jean Servien" by Anatole France online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
On top of the ramparts. Bivouac huts and stacked rifles guarded by a sentinel. National Guards are playing shove ha'-penny. The autumn sunshine lies clear and soft and splendid on the roofs of the beleaguered city. Outside the fortifications, the bare, grey fields; in the distance the barracks of the outlying forts, over which fleecy puffs of smoke sail upwards; on the horizon the hills whence the Prussian batteries are firing on Paris, leaving long trails of white smoke. The guns thunder. They have been thundering for a month, and no one so much as hears them now. Servien and Garneret, wearing the red-piped "kepi" and the tunic with brass buttons, are seated side by side on sand-bags, bending over the same book.
It was a Virgil, and Jean was reading out loud the delicious episode of Silenus. Two youths have discovered the old god lying in a drunken sleep -- he is always drunk and it makes men mock at him, albeit they still revere him -- and have bound him in chains of flowers to force him to sing. AEgle, the fairest of the Naiads, has stained his cheeks scarlet with juice of the mulberry, and lo! he sings.