The Downfall

barracks, where a platoon of soldiers that was kept there in constant attendance for the purpose mowed them down, almost at point-blank range. The scenes of slaughter there were most horrible: there were men and women who had been condemned to death on the flimsiest evidence: because they had a stain of powder on their hands, because their feet were shod with army shoes; there were innocent persons, the victims of private malice, who had been wrongfully denounced, shrieking forth their entreaties and explanations and finding no one to lend an ear to them; and all were driven pell-mell against a wall, facing the muzzles of the muskets, often so many poor wretches in the band at once that the bullets did not suffice for all and it became necessary to finish the wounded with the bayonet. From morning until night the place was streaming with blood; the tumbrils were kept busy bearing away the bodies of the dead. And throughout the length and breadth of the city, keeping pace with the revengeful clamors of the people, other executions were continually taking place, in front of barricades, against the walls in the deserted streets, on the steps of the public buildings. It was under such circumstances that Jean saw a woman and two men dragged by the residents of the quartier before the officer commanding the detachment that was guarding the Theatre Francais. The citizens showed themselves more bloodthirsty than the soldiery, and those among the newspapers that had resumed publication were howling for measures of extermination. A threatening crowd surrounded the prisoners and was particularly violent against the woman, in whom the excited bourgeois beheld one of those petroleuses who were the constant bugbear of terror-haunted imaginations, whom they accused of prowling by night, slinking along the darkened streets past the dwellings of the wealthy, to throw cans of lighted petroleum into unprotected cellars. This woman, was the cry, had been found bending over a coal-hole in the Rue Sainte-Anne. And notwithstanding her denials, accompanied by tears and supplications, she was hurled, together with the two men, to the bottom of the ditch in front of an abandoned barricade, and there, lying in the mud and slime, they were shot with as little pity as wolves caught in a trap. Some by-passers stopped and looked indifferently on the scene, among them a lady hanging on her husband's arm, while a baker's boy, who was carrying home a tart to someone in the neighborhood, whistled the refrain of a popular air.

As Jean, sick at heart, was hurrying along the street toward the house in the Rue des Orties, a sudden recollection flashed across his mind. Was not that Chouteau, the former member of his squad, whom he had seen, in the blouse of a respectable workman, watching the execution and testifying his approval of it in a loud-mouthed way? He was a proficient in his role of bandit, traitor, robber, and assassin! For a moment the corporal thought he would retrace his steps, denounce him, and send him to keep company with the other three. Ah, the sadness of the thought; the guilty ever escaping punishment, parading their unwhipped infamy in the bright light of day, while the innocent molder in the earth!

Henriette had come out upon the landing at the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs, where she welcomed Jean with a manner that indicated great alarm.

''Sh! he has been extremely violent all day long. The major was here, I am in despair-'

Bouroche, in fact, had shaken his head ominously, saying he could promise nothing as yet. Nevertheless the patient might pull through, in spite of all the evil consequences he feared; he had youth on his side.

'Ah, here you are at last,' Maurice said impatiently to Jean, as soon as he set eyes on him. 'I have been waiting for you. What is going on -how do matters stand?' And supported by the pillows at his back, his face to the window which he had forced his sister to open for him, he pointed with his finger to the city, where, on the gathering darkness, the lambent flames were beginning to rise anew. 'You see, it is breaking out again; Paris is burning. All Paris will burn this time!'

As soon as daylight began to fade, the distant quarters beyond the Seine had been lighted up by the burning of the Grenier d'Abondance. From time to time there was an outburst of flame, accompanied by a shower of sparks, from the smoking ruins of the Tuileries, as some wall or ceiling fell and set the smoldering timbers blazing afresh. Many houses, where the fire was supposed to be extinguished, flamed up anew; for the last three days, as soon as darkness descended on the city it seemed as if it were the signal for the conflagrations to break out again; as if the shades of night had breathed upon the still glowing embers, reanimating them, and scattering them to the four corners of the horizon. Ah, that city of the damned, that had harbored for a week within its bosom the demon of destruction, incarnadining the sky each evening as soon as twilight fell, illuminating with its infernal torches the nights of that week of slaughter! And when, that night, the docks at la Villette burned, the light they shed upon the huge city was so intense that it seemed to be on fire in every part at once, overwhelmed and drowned beneath the sea of flame.

'Ah, it is the end!' Maurice repeated. 'Paris is doomed!'

He reiterated the words again and again with apparent relish, actuated by a feverish desire to hear the sound of his voice once more, after the dull lethargy that had kept him tongue-tied for three days. But the sound of stifled sobs causes him to turn his head.

'What, sister, you, brave little woman that you are! You weep because I am about to die-'

She interrupted him, protesting:

'But you are not going to die!'

'Yes, yes; it is better it should be so; it must be so. Ah, I shall be no great loss to anyone. Up to the time the war broke out I was a source of anxiety to you, I cost you dearly in heart and purse. All the folly and the madness I was guilty of, and which would have landed me, who knows where? in prison, in the gutter-'

Again she took the words from his mouth, exclaiming hotly:

'Hush! be silent!-you have atoned for all.'

He reflected a moment. 'Yes, perhaps I shall have atoned, when I am dead. Ah, Jean, old fellow, you didn't know what a service you were rendering us all when you gave me that bayonet thrust.'

But the other protested, his eyes swimming with tears:

'Don't, I entreat you, say such things! do you wish to make me go and dash out my brains against a wall?'

Maurice pursued his train of thought, speaking in hurried, eager tones.

'Remember what you said to me the day after Sedan, that it was not such a bad thing, now and then, to receive a good drubbing. And you added that if a man had gangrene in his system, if he saw one of his limbs wasting from mortification, it would be better to take an ax and chop off that limb than to die from the contamination of the poison. I have many a time thought of those words since I have been here, without a friend, immured in this city of distress and madness. And I am the diseased limb, and it is you who have lopped it off-' He went on with increasing vehemence, regardless of the supplications of his terrified auditors, in a fervid tirade that abounded with symbols and striking images. It was the untainted, the reasoning, the substantial portion of France, the peasantry, the tillers of the soil, those who had always kept close contact with their mother Earth, that was suppressing the outbreak of the crazed, exasperated part, the part that had been vitiated by the Empire and led astray by vain illusions and empty dreams; and in the performance of its duty it had had to cut deep into the living flesh, without being fully aware of what it was doing. But the baptism of blood, French blood, was necessary; the abominable holocaust, the living sacrifice, in the midst of the purifying flames. Now they had mounted the steps of the Calvary and known their bitterest agony; the crucified nation had expiated its faults and would be born again. 'Jean, old friend, you and those like you are strong in your simplicity and honesty. Go, take up the spade and the trowel, turn the sod in the abandoned field, rebuild the house! As for me, you did well to lop me off, since I was the ulcer that was eating away your strength!'

After that his language became more and more incoherent; he insisted on rising and going to sit by the window. 'Paris burns, Paris burns; not a stone of it will be left standing. Ah! the fire that I invoked, it destroys, but it heals; yes, the work it does is good. Let me go down there; let me help to finish the work of humanity and liberty-'

Jean had the utmost difficulty in getting him back to bed, while Henriette tearfully recalled memories of their childhood, and entreated him, for the sake of the love they bore each other, to be calm. Over the immensity of Paris the fiery glow deepened and widened; the sea of flame seemed to be invading the remotest quarters of the horizon; the heavens were like the vaults of a colossal oven, heated to red heat. And athwart the red light of the conflagrations the dense black smoke-clouds from the Ministry of Finance, which had been burning three days and given forth no blaze, continued to pour in unbroken, slow procession.

The following, Saturday, morning brought with it a decided improvement in Maurice's condition: he was much calmer, the fever had subsided, and it afforded Jean inexpressible delight to behold a smile on Henriette's face once more, as the young woman fondly reverted to her cherished dream, a pact of reciprocal affection between the three of them, that should unite them in a future that might yet be one of happiness, under conditions that she did not