The Downfall

apparent difficulty, but the right arm hung useless at his side.

'Poor old boy, don't grieve! We shall have time to say good-by to each other, and it is better thus, you see; I am glad to have done with it all. You have done enough for me to make up for this, for I should have died long ago in some ditch, even as I am dying now, had it not been for you.'

But Jean, hearing him speak thus, again gave way to an outburst of violent grief.

'Hush, hush! Twice you saved me from the clutches of the Prussians. We were quits; it was my turn to devote my life, and instead of that I have slain you. Ah, tonnerre de Dieu! I must have been drunk not to recognize you; yes, drunk as a hog from glutting myself with blood.'

Tears streamed from his eyes at the recollection of their last parting, down there, at Remilly, when they embraced, asking themselves if they should ever meet again, and how, under what circumstances of sorrow or of gladness. It was nothing, then, that they had passed toilsome days and sleepless nights together, with death staring them in the face? It was to bring them to this abominable thing, to this senseless, atrocious fratricide, that their hearts had been fused in the crucible of those weeks of suffering endured in common? No, no, it could not be; he turned in horror from the thought.

'Let's see what I can do, little one; I must save you.'

The first thing to be done was to remove him to a place of safety, for the troops dispatched the wounded Communists wherever they found them. They were alone, fortunately; there was not a minute to lose. He first ripped the sleeve from wrist to shoulder with his knife, then took off the uniform coat. Some blood flowed; he made haste to bandage the arm securely with strips that he tore from the lining of the garment for the purpose. After that he staunched as well as he could the wound in the side and fastened the injured arm over it, He luckily had a bit of cord in his pocket, which he knotted tightly around the primitive dressing, thus assuring the immobility of the injured parts and preventing hemorrhage.

'Can you walk?'

'Yes, I think so.'

But he did not dare to take him through the streets thus, in his shirt sleeves. Remembering to have seen a dead soldier lying in an adjacent street, he hurried off and presently came back with a capote and a kepi. He threw the greatcoat over his friend's shoulders and assisted him to slip his uninjured arm into the left sleeve. Then, when he had put the kepi on his head:

'There, now you are one of us-where are we to go?'

That was the question. His reviving hope and courage were suddenly damped by a horrible uncertainty. Where were they to look for a shelter that gave promise of security? the troops were searching the houses, were shooting every Communist they took with arms in his hands. And in addition to that, neither of them knew a soul in that portion of the city to whom they might apply for succor and refuge; not a place where they might hide their heads.

'The best thing to do would be to go home where I live,' said Maurice. 'The house is out of the way; no one will ever think of visiting it. But it is in the Rue des Orties, on the other side of the river.'

Jean gave vent to a muttered oath in his irresolution and despair.

'Nom de Dieu! What are we to do?'

It was useless to think of attempting to pass the Pont Royal, which could not have been more brilliantly illuminated if the noonday sun had been shining on it. At every moment shots were heard coming from either bank of the river. Besides that, the blazing Tuileries lay directly in their path, and the Louvre, guarded and barricaded, would be an insurmountable obstacle.

'That ends it, then; there's no way open,' said Jean, who had spent six months in Paris on his return from the Italian campaign.

An idea suddenly flashed across his brain. There had formerly been a place a little below the Pont Royal where small boats were kept for hire; if the boats were there still they would make the venture. The route was a long and dangerous one, but they had no choice, and, further, they must act with decision.

'See here, little one, we're going to clear out from here; the locality isn't healthy. I'll manufacture an excuse for my lieutenant; I'll tell him the communards took me prisoner and I got away.'

Taking his unhurt arm he sustained him for the short distance they had to traverse along the Rue du Bac, where the tall houses on either hand were now ablaze from cellar to garret, like huge torches. The burning cinders fell on them in showers, the heat was so intense that the hair on their head and face was singed, and when they came out on the quai they stood for a moment dazed and blinded by the terrific light of the conflagrations, rearing their tall crests heavenward, on either side the Seine.

'One wouldn't need a candle to go to bed by here,' grumbled Jean, with whose plans the illumination promised to interfere. And it was only when he had helped Maurice down the steps to the left and a little way down stream from the bridge that he felt somewhat easy in mind. There was a clump of tall trees standing on the bank of the stream, whose shadow gave them a measure of security. For near a quarter of an hour the dark forms moving to and fro on the opposite quai kept them in a fever of apprehension. There was firing, a scream was heard, succeeded by a loud splash, and the bosom of the river was disturbed. The bridge was evidently guarded.

'Suppose we pass the night in that shed?' suggested Maurice, pointing to the wooden structure that served the boatman as an office.

'Yes, and get pinched to-morrow morning!'

Jean was still harboring his idea. He had found quite a flotilla of small boats there, but they were all securely fastened with chains; how was he to get one loose and secure a pair of oars? At last he discovered two oars that had been thrown aside as useless; he succeeded in forcing a padlock, and when he had stowed Maurice away in the bow, shoved off and allowed the boat to drift with the current, cautiously hugging the shore and keeping in the shadow of the bathing-houses. Neither of them spoke a word, horror-stricken as they were by the baleful spectacle that presented itself to their vision. As they floated down the stream and their horizon widened the enormity of the terrible sight increased, and when they reached the bridge of Solferino a single glance sufficed to embrace both the blazing quais.

On their left the palace of the Tuileries was burning. It was not yet dark when the Communists had fired the two extremities of the structure, the Pavilion de Flore and the Pavilion de Marsan, and with rapid strides the flames had gained the Pavilion de l'Horloge in the central portion, beneath which, in the Salle des Marechaux, a mine had been prepared by stacking up casks of powder. At that moment the intervening buildings were belching from their shattered windows dense volumes of reddish smoke, streaked with long ribbons of blue flame. The roofs, yawning as does the earth in regions where volcanic agencies prevail, were seamed with great cracks through which the raging sea of fire beneath was visible. But the grandest, saddest spectacle of all was that afforded by the Pavilion de Flore, to which the torch had been earliest applied and which was ablaze from its foundation to its lofty summit, burning with a deep, fierce roar that could be heard far away. The petroleum with which the floors and hangings had been soaked gave the flames an intensity such that the ironwork of the balconies was seen to twist and writhe in the convolutions of a serpent, and the tall monumental chimneys, with their elaborate carvings, glowed with the fervor of live coals.

Then, still on their left, were, first, the Chancellerie of the Legion of Honor, which was fired at five o'clock in the afternoon and had been burning nearly seven hours, and next, the Palace of the Council of State, a huge rectangular structure of stone, which was spouting torrents of fire from every orifice in each of its two colonnaded stories. The four structures surrounding the great central court had all caught at the same moment, and the petroleum, which here also had been distributed by the barrelful, had poured down the four grand staircases at the four corners of the building in rivers of hellfire. On the facade that faced the river the black line of the mansard was profiled distinctly against the ruddy sky, amid the red tongues that rose to lick its base, while colonnades, entablatures, friezes, carvings, all stood out with startling vividness in the blinding, shimmering glow. So great was the energy of the fire, so terrible its propulsive force, that the colossal structure was in some sort raised bodily from the earth, trembling and rumbling on its foundations, preserving intact only its four massive walls, in the fierce eruption that hurled its heavy zinc roof high in air. Then, close at one side were the d'Orsay barracks, which burned with a flame that seemed to pierce the heavens, so purely white and so unwavering that it was like a tower of light. And finally, back from the river, were still other fires, the seven houses in the Rue du Bac, the twenty-two houses in the Rue de Lille, helping to tinge the sky a deeper crimson, profiling their flames on other flames, in a blood-red ocean that seemed to have no end.