the city at their beck and call, could have requisitioned a hundred carriages and brought a thousand horses from their stables. And he denied her prayer with the haughty air of a victor who has made it a law to himself not to interfere with the concerns of the vanquished, lest thereby he might defile himself and tarnish the luster of his new-won laurels.
'At all events,' continued Henriette, 'you know what is going on in the city; you won't refuse to tell me that much.'
He gave a smile, so faint as scarce to be perceptible. 'Paris is burning. Look! come this way, you can see more clearly.'
Leaving the station, he preceded her along the track for a hundred steps or so until they came to an iron foot- bridge that spanned the road. When they had climbed the narrow stairs and reached the floor of the structure, resting their elbows on the railing, they beheld the broad level plain outstretched before them, at the foot of the slope of the embankment.
'You see, Paris is burning.'
It was in the neighborhood of ten o'clock. The fierce red glare that lit the southern sky was ever mounting higher. The blood-red clouds had disappeared from where they had floated in the east; the zenith was like a great inverted bowl of inky blackness, across which ran the reflections of the distant flames. The horizon was one unbroken line of fire, but to the right they could distinguish spots where the conflagration was raging with greater fury, sending up great spires and pinnacles of flame, of the most vivid scarlet, to pierce the dense opacity above, amid billowing clouds of smoke. It was like the burning of some great forest, where the fire bridges intervening space, and leaps from tree to tree; one would have said the very earth must be calcined and reduced to ashes beneath the heat of Paris' gigantic funeral pyre.
'Look,' said Otto, 'that eminence that you see profiled in black against the red background is Montmartre. There on the left, at Belleville and la Villette, there has not been a house burned yet; it must be they are selecting the districts of the wealthy for their work; and it spreads, it spreads. Look! there is another conflagration breaking out; watch the flames there to the right, how they seethe and rise and fall; observe the shifting tints of the vapors that rise from the blazing furnace. And others, and others still; the heavens are on fire!'
He did not raise his voice or manifest any sign of feeling, and it froze Henriette's blood that a human being could stand by and witness such a spectacle unmoved. Ah, that those Prussians should be there to see that sight! She saw an insult in his studied calmness, in the faint smile that played upon his lips, as if he had long foreseen and been watching for that unparalleled disaster. So, Paris was burning then at last, Paris, upon whose monuments the German shells had scarce been able to inflict more than a scratch! and he was there to see it burn, and in the spectacle found compensation for all his grievances, the inordinate length to which the siege had been protracted, the bitter, freezing weather, the difficulties they had surmounted only to see them present themselves anew under some other shape, the toil and trouble they had had in mounting their heavy guns, while all the time Germany from behind was reproaching them with their dilatoriness. Nothing in all the glory of their victory, neither the ceded provinces nor the indemnity of five milliards, appealed to him so strongly as did that sight of Paris, in a fit of furious madness, immolating herself and going up in smoke and flame on that beautiful spring night.
'Ah, it was sure to come,' he added in a lower voice. 'Fine work, my masters!'
It seemed to Henriette as if her heart would break in presence of that dire catastrophe. Her personal grief was lost to sight for some minutes, swallowed up in the great drama of a people's atonement that was being enacted before her eyes. The thought of the lives that would be sacrificed to the devouring flames, the sight of the great capital blazing on the horizon, emitting the infernal light of the cities that were accursed and smitten for their iniquity, elicited from her an involuntary cry of anguish. She clasped her hands, asking:
'Oh, merciful Father, of what have we been guilty that we should be punished thus?'
Otto raised his arm in an oratorical attitude. He was on the point of speaking, with the stern, cold-blooded vehemence of the military bigot who has ever a quotation from Holy Writ at his tongue's end, but glancing at the young woman, the look he encountered from her candid, gentle eyes checked him. Besides, his gesture had spoken for him; it told his hatred for the nation, his conviction that he was in France to mete out justice, delegated by the God of Armies, to chastise a perverse and stiff-necked generation. Paris was burning off there on the horizon in expiation of its centuries of dissolute life, of its heaped-up measure of crime and lust. Once again the German race were to be the saviors of the world, were to purge Europe of the remnant of Latin corruption. He let his arm fall to his side and simply said:
'It is the end of all. There is another quartier doomed, for see, a fresh fire has broken out there to the right. In that direction, that line of flame that creeps onward like a stream of lava-'
Neither spoke for a long time; an awed silence rested on them. The great waves of flame continued to ascend, sending up streamers and ribbons of vivid light high into the heavens. Beneath the sea of fire was every moment extending its boundaries, a tossing, stormy, burning ocean, whence now arose dense clouds of smoke that collected over the city in a huge pall of a somber coppery hue, which was wafted slowly athwart the blackness of the night, streaking the vault of heaven with its accursed rain of ashes and of soot.
Henriette started as if awaking from an evil dream, and, the thought of her brother flowing in again upon her mind, once more became a supplicant.
'Can you do nothing for me? won't you assist me to get to Paris?'
With his former air of unconcern Otto again raised his eyes to the horizon, smiling vaguely.
'What would be the use? since to-morrow morning the city will be a pile of ruins!'
And that was all; she left the bridge, without even bidding him good-by, flying, she knew not whither, with her little satchel, while he remained yet a long time at his post of observation, a motionless figure, rigid and erect, lost in the darkness of the night, feasting his eyes on the spectacle of that Babylon in flames.
Almost the first person that Henriette encountered on emerging from the station was a stout lady who was chaffering with a hackman over his charge for driving her to the Rue Richelieu in Paris, and the young woman pleaded so touchingly, with tears in her eyes, that finally the lady consented to let her occupy a seat in the carriage. The driver, a little swarthy man, whipped up his horse and did not open his lips once during the ride, but the stout lady was extremely loquacious, telling how she had left the city the day but one before after tightly locking and bolting her shop, but had been so imprudent as to leave some valuable papers behind, hidden in a hole in the wall; hence her mind had been occupied by one engrossing thought for the two hours that the city had been burning, how she might return and snatch her property from the flames. The sleepy guards at the barrier allowed the carriage to pass without much difficulty, the worthy lady allaying their scruples with a fib, telling them she was bringing back her niece with her to Paris to assist in nursing her husband, who had been wounded by the Versaillese. It was not until they commenced to make their way along the paved streets that they encountered serious obstacles; they were obliged at every moment to turn out in order to avoid the barricades that were erected across the roadway, and when at last they reached the boulevard Poissoniere the driver declared he would go no further. The two women were therefore forced to continue their way on foot, through the Rue du Sentier, the Rue des Jeuneurs, and all the circumscribing region of the Bourse. As they approached the fortifications the blazing sky had made their way as bright before them as if it had been broad day; now they were surprised by the deserted and tranquil condition of the streets, where the only sound that disturbed the stillness was a dull, distant roar. In the vicinity of the Bourse, however, they were alarmed by the sound of musketry; they slipped along with great caution, hugging the walls. On reaching the Rue Richelieu and finding her shop had not been disturbed, the stout lady was so overjoyed that she insisted on seeing her traveling companion safely housed; they struck through the Rue du Hazard, the Rue Saint- Anne, and finally reached the Rue des Orties. Some federates, whose battalion was still holding the Rue Saint- Anne, attempted to prevent them from passing. It was four o'clock and already quite light when Henriette, exhausted by the fatigue of her long day and the stress of her emotions, reached the old house in the Rue des Orties and found the door standing open. Climbing the dark, narrow staircase, she turned to the left and discovered behind a door a ladder that led upward toward the roof.
Maurice, meantime, behind the barricade in the Rue du Bac, had succeeded in raising himself to his knees, and Jean's heart throbbed with a wild, tumultuous hope, for he believed he had pinned his friend to the earth.
'Oh, my little one, are you alive still? is that great happiness in store for me, brute that I am? Wait a moment, let me see.'
He examined the wound with great tenderness by the light of the burning buildings. The bayonet had gone through the right arm near the shoulder, but a more serious part of the business was that it had afterward entered the body between two of the ribs and probably touched the lung. Still, the wounded man breathed without much
