'There,' explained Otto, 'that black mass standing out against the red background is Montmartre. Nothing is burning as yet on the left, at La Villette and Belleville. It is the central quarters which must have been set alight, and the fire keeps on gaining ground. Look there, on the right! There's another conflagration breaking out! You can see the flames, a mass of seething flames from which a fiery smoke is rising. And see too, over there are other fires, and others, others still!'

He did not raise his voice or display any excitement, and the enormity of his quiet delight quite terrified Henriette. Ah! those Prussians who gazed upon that awful spectacle! She divined all the insulting significance of his calmness and his faint smile; they undoubtedly implied that he had long foreseen and been waiting for this unparalleled disaster.

At last Paris was burning; Paris, whose water-spouts the German shells had merely managed to chip off! All his rancour was satisfied now; he had his revenge for the inordinate duration of the siege, the bitter cold, the ever-recurring difficulties of the war, the memory of which still filled his countrymen with irritation. Whatever might be the glory of the triumph, with its conquered provinces and its indemnity of five milliards, all paled before this spectacle of the destruction of Paris—Paris seized with furious madness, burning itself down and flying away in flame and smoke during that clear spring-tide night.

'Ah! it was a certainty!' he added in a lower voice. 'A big business!'

At sight of the immensity of the catastrophe, increasing grief was oppressing Henriette almost to the point of suffocation. For a few minutes she forgot her personal misfortunes; what were they beside this expiation of an entire people? The thought of the human lives which would be destroyed by the devouring flames, the sight of the city blazing on the horizon, casting around it the hellish glow of accursed capitals doomed to destruction for their sins, wrung involuntary cries of anguish from her heart. Clasping her hands she asked: 'What can we have done, O God! to be punished thus?'

Otto immediately raised his arm with an apostrophic gesture. He was about to speak with all the vehemence of that stern, frigid, military Protestantism so prone to quoting the Scriptures. But on glancing at the young woman and meeting her beautiful, clear, reasoning eyes, he stayed his tongue. Besides, his gesture had sufficed; it had expressed all his racial hatred, his conviction that he was there in France as a justiciar sent by the God of Battles to chastise a perverted people. Paris was burning in punishment of its centuries of evil life, its long career of crime and lust. Once again would the Teutons save the world, sweeping away the final specks of Latin corruption.

He let his arm fall and simply said: 'It is the end of everything. Another district is lighting up, over there, on the left—you see it, don't you?—that long line spreading out like a stream of live embers.'

Then both ceased speaking; a terrified silence prevailed. Waves of flame were now incessantly rising, streaming and spurting high into the heavens. Not a moment went by but that sea of fire extended its limits—an incandescent tossing, billowy ocean it was, with smoke arising from its midst, and gathering over the city in a huge, dark coppery pall, which a faint wind wafted across the black night. And as it slowly travelled across the sky it barred the vault above with an abominable rain of soot and cinders.

All at once Henriette started as though awakening from a nightmare; and, again seized with anguish at the thought of her brother, she for the last time addressed the captain in a tone of entreaty: 'So you can do nothing for me; you refuse to help me to get into Paris?'

With another wave of his arm Otto swept the horizon. 'What would it avail you, since there will be nothing but ruins left there to-morrow morning?'