Then, in his turn, he gave utterance to his ideas, expressing himself laboriously in such words as he could think of. They had had a fearful licking; that was certain. But they were not all dead, yet; there were still some left, and these would suffice to build the house afresh, provided they were good fellows and hard-workers, and didn't drink all they earned. In a family, now, when its members take proper care and put a bit of money by, they always manage to pull through even the worst stretches of bad luck. And besides, a blow sometimes does a man good: it makes him reflect. And then, too, if it were true there was some rottenness somewhere, some putrid limbs or other, far better lop them off with an axe and have done with them, than keep them until they killed you, like the cholera. 'Exhausted, done for? No, no,' he repeated again and again. 'I'm not done for. I don't feel that way at all.'
And stiff and lame though he was, with his hair still matted together by the blood from his torn scalp, he drew himself up, full of a vivacious need of life, ready to take a tool, to drive a plough, to build the house afresh as he expressed it. He belonged to the old, stubborn, sober stratum, the sensible, hard-working, and thrifty France.
'All the same,' he resumed, 'I'm sorry for the Emperor. Trade seemed to be in a fair way, wheat sold well. But, sure enough, he has been very stupid. No sensible chap would get himself into such a mess as this.'
Maurice, who still remained quite overwhelmed, made another distressful gesture: 'Ah! the Emperor; I liked him at bottom in spite of my ideas of liberty and a Republic. Yes, I had it in my blood, on account of my grandfather, no doubt. And now you see everything's rotten, even in that direction. Ah! what will become of us?'
A wild look was glimmering in his eyes, and he raised so grievous a plaint that Jean felt anxious and was about to rise, when the door opened and Henriette came in. The sound of their voices had just awakened her in the adjoining bedchamber. A pale light was now brightening the room.
'You've come just in time to scold him,' said Jean, pretending to laugh. 'He's not behaving as he ought.'
However, the sight of his sister, so pale and afflicted, had induced a salutary crisis of sensibility. Maurice opened his arms, called her to his heart, and when she had flung her arms around his neck, a great appeasement penetrated him. She herself was weeping, and their tears mingled. 'Ah! my poor, poor darling. I'm angry with myself that I haven't more courage to console you! That good fellow Weiss—your husband who was so fond of you—what will become of you? You have always been the victim, and yet you never complained. What a deal of grief I, myself, have caused you already, and who knows whether I sha'n't cause you even more——'
She was silencing him, placing her hand before his mouth, when in came Delaherche half out of his senses. Again feeling frightfully hungry, with one of those nervous hungers which fatigue exasperates, he had at last come down from the terrace, and on going to the kitchen to get something warm to drink, he had there found the cook with one of her relatives, a carpenter of Bazeilles, to whom she was just serving some mulled wine. Thereupon, this man, one of the last to remain in the village amid the conflagration, had told him that his dyeworks were utterly destroyed, reduced to a heap of cinders.
'Ah! the brigands, would you believe it?' stammered the manufacturer, addressing Jean and Maurice. 'Everything is lost. They are going to burn down Sedan this morning as they burnt down Bazeilles yesterday—I am ruined, ruined!'
Struck all at once by the scar which he observed on Henriette's forehead, he remembered that he had not yet been able to speak with her. 'It's true, then,' he added, 'you went there, and got hurt like that? Ah! poor Weiss!' And then, understanding by the young woman's red eyes that she knew of her husband's death, he blurted out a fearful detail which he had just learnt from the carpenter: 'That poor Weiss! It appears they burned him! Yes, they threw the bodies of the inhabitants they had shot into the flames of a blazing house, which they had smeared with petroleum.'[34]