Remounting, Billet indeed got on. But it was only to run in among the Bercheny Hussars, swarming in La Villette. This time, as they were his own countrymen, he got along better.
"Please, what is the news from Paris?" he asked.
"Why, it's your crazy Parisians, who want their Necker, and fire their guns off at us, as if we had anything to do with the matter." So replied a hussar.
"What Necker? have they lost him?" questioned Billet.
"Certainly, the King has turned him out of office."
"That great man turned out?" said the farmer with the stupor of a priest who hears of a sacrilege."
"More than that, he is on the way to Brussels at present."
"Then it is a joke we shall hear some laughing over," cried Billet in a terrible voice, without thinking of the danger he ran in preaching insurrection amid twelve or fifteen thousand royalist sabres.
Remounting Maggie, he drove her with cruel digs of the heel up to the bars. As he advanced he saw the fire more plainly; a long column rose from the spot to the sky. It was the barrier that was burning. A howling and furious mob with women intermixed, yelling and capering as usual more excitedly than the men, fed the flames with pieces of the bars, the clerk's office and the custom-house officers' property.
On the road, Hungarian and German regiments looked on at the devastation, with their muskets grounded, without blinking.