“What does it mean?” cried Ned hoarsely.
One of the groping shapes snarled up at him—
“It is an instance of monseigneur’s paternal kindness to his people.”
There was nothing to be answered or done. The Englishman emptied his purse to the group and hurried on. His worst apprehensions were realised. This was but a sample of what was to follow—a vision to be repeated again and yet again, in indefinite forms. Rebellion had broken and suppurated away during his absence. There were some four or five hundred dead bodies, shot and stabbed, as earnest of its drastic treatment by the national physicians. There might have been more, but that the mob had finally given before M. Besenval’s Switzers with their grape-shotted cannon. Then it retired, pretty satisfied, however, to have justified democratic frenzy by so practical an illustration of the tyranny of class hatred; satisfied, also, as to the moral of its own retreat. M. Reveillon was become a self-constituted prisoner in the Bastille; his factory was a shapeless and clinkerous medley of rubbish. Ned, turning the corner of the Rue Beautreillis, saw the ruins, dusking and glowing fitfully, at a little distance. “And how,” he thought, with a shuddering emotion, “did he, that was so fascinated by the man Rozier’s fate, regard the burning of his own ark of security?”
The street—so it seemed in the expiring red glimmer and the small, dull radiance of bracketed lamps—was a very dismantled graveyard of broken stones and scattered corpses. Amongst the latter moved detached groups of searchers, languidly official, swinging ghostly lanterns. With a groan of lamentation, Ned turned about and beat frantically on the closed shutters of the fruiterer’s shop.
The door was opened, after a weary interval, by Madame Gamelle. The woman’s eyes were febrile. She dragged her lodger over the threshold and snapped the lock behind him. A couple of rushlights burned dimly on the counter. The pledge, in holiday antic, was stuffing a bloody cartouche-box with onions from a basket.
“They killed him at the street corner,” said madame gloatingly. “He shall never murder again—the accursed Garde Française. They had for knives only the sharp tiles from the roofs; but it was easy to willing arms.”
She was transfigured, this meek vendor of cabbages. Anywhere to scratch St Antoine was to find a devil.
“Madame,” said Ned wearily, “it is all quite right, without doubt; but to-morrow, I must tell you, I am to take my leave of Paris.”