“Ach, wunderschön!” cried Schubart. “Herr Tolstoi, I would take your wound twice over to have been in the midst of it.”
“Look!” Ivan suddenly exclaimed, pointing to the scene before them. While absorbed in their eager talk, they had been ascending an eminence, from the top of which they now caught their first sight of the magnificent capital of France. The sun had just set, but its parting beams still lingered upon the gilded dome of the Hôtel des Invalides and the stately summit of the Pantheon. “Paris! Paris!” was the exclamation that broke from every lip, and resounded far and wide in lengthened cries of fierce joy and exultation. “Paris! Paris!” was shouted again and yet again, as rank after rank of that gallant army beheld the goal of all their aspirations, the end of all their toils.
After the first involuntary cry Ivan was silent. At length he said quietly to his friend Tolstoi, “When I think of that terrible September, the last but one, and of the flames of Moscow, the wonder and the gladness seem too great, too awful for words.”
“Those flames are burning in many a heart now,” Tolstoi answered.—“I suppose they will hardly let us in yonder without a struggle,” he added in an altered tone. “What will to-morrow bring?”
CHAPTER XXV.
“FATHER PARIS FOR MOTHER MOSCOW.”
“Lay the sword on his breast; there’s no spot on its blade
In whose cankering breath his bright laurels will fade:
It was taken up first at humanity’s call;
It was sheathed with sweet mercy when glory was all.”
The passion and the tumult, the glory and the agony of the next day will live in History as long as History herself lives to depict the scenes of blood and violence which earth has witnessed. No battle in that terrible war was more hotly or more obstinately contested than the battle of Paris; although it ought to be remembered that it was not the men of Paris who contested every inch of ground with the Allies, but the corps of Marmont and Mortier, old soldiers of Napoleon, the National Guard, and the youths of the Ecole Polytechnique.