Excited by the delirium of fever, Maurice raised a wild laugh: 'A fine fête at the Council of State and the Tuileries! The façades have been illuminated, the chandeliers are sparkling, and the women dance. Ah! dance, dance in your smouldering skirts and your flaming chignons!' With a wave of his uninjured arm he evoked the gala gatherings of Sodom and Gomorrah, the music, the flowers, the monstrous pleasures, the palaces bursting with such lust and debauchery, illumining their abominations with such a wealth of tapers that they set themselves ablaze! All at once there was a frightful uproar. It was the fire, coming from either end of the Tuileries, which was at last reaching the Hall of the Marshals.[59] The barrels of gunpowder caught alight, and the Pavillon de l'Horloge blew up with the violence of a powder-mill. An immense sheaf of fire arose, a plume which waved and spread over the black sky—the flaming 'bouquet' of those frightful fireworks.
'Bravo, dancers!' cried Maurice, as at the end of a spectacular performance when all becomes dark on the stage again.
Once more, in distracted phrases, did Jean stammeringly beseech him not to talk like that. No, no! one should never wish for evil. If this were the end of everything, would not they themselves perish? And he was now all eagerness to land and escape the terrible spectacle. Still he prudently rowed on until they had passed the Concorde bridge, so as to put into shore below the Quai de la Conférence, beyond the bend of the Seine. And at that critical moment, instead of allowing the boat to drift away, he lost some minutes in mooring it, such was his instinctive respect for other people's property. His plan was to reach the Rue des Orties by way of the Place de la Concorde and the Rue St. Honoré. After making Maurice sit down on the shore, he climbed the steps of the quay to examine the surroundings, and was again seized with anxiety on realising the difficulty they would have to surmount all the obstacles assembled together on that point. Here indeed was the fortress which the Commune had deemed impregnable, the Tuileries terrace bristling with cannon, the Rue Royale, the Rue St. Florentin, and the Rue de Rivoli barred by lofty, massively built barricades. And the spectacle explained the tactics that had been adopted by the army of Versailles, whose lines that night formed an immense arc, having the Place de la Concorde for its vertex, and starting, on the right bank of the river, from the goods station of the Northern Railway Company, and on the left bank from a bastion of the ramparts near the Arcueil gate. Dawn, however, would now soon be rising, the Communists had evacuated the Tuileries and the barricades, and the troops had just taken possession of the district in the midst of other conflagrations—twelve more houses which had been burning ever since nine in the evening at the crossway of the Faubourg St. Honoré and the Rue Royale.
When Jean descended to the shore again he found Maurice drowsy, stupefied as it were by the reaction following upon his delirious outburst. 'It won't be easy,' said the corporal. 'Can you still walk, youngster?'
'Yes, yes, don't worry; I shall always get there, dead or alive.'
He had considerable difficulty, however, in climbing the stone steps; and once up above, on the quay, leaning on his companion's arm, he walked on slowly with the step of a somnambulist. Although the daylight was not yet breaking, a kind of livid dawn—the light cast by the neighbouring conflagrations—illumined the vast Place. It was silent, deserted, and they crossed it with their hearts oppressed by the mournful spectacle of havoc they beheld. Beyond the Concorde bridge, and at the farther end of the Rue Royale, they could dimly discern the phantom-like piles of the Palais Bourbon and the Madeleine, battered by the cannonade. A portion of the Tuileries terrace also had fallen, breached by the guns. On the Place itself the bronze tritons, naiads, and dolphins of the fountains had been riddled with bullets, the colossal trunk of the statue of Lille lay upon the pavement, cut in halves by a shell; whilst the crape-veiled statue of Strasburg, near at hand, seemed to be mourning the ruin which surrounded it And in a trench, near the uninjured obelisk, there was a broken gas pipe, which had accidentally caught fire, and whence a long jet of flame was spurting with a strident sound.
Jean was careful not to approach the barricade blocking the entry of the Rue Royale, between the Ministry of Marine and the Garde-Meuble,[60] both of which had been preserved from the fire. He could hear the gruff voices of soldiers behind the barrels of earth and the sandbags of which this barricade was constructed. Its front was defended by a ditch, full of stagnant water, on which the corpse of a Federal was floating, and through an embrasure one could perceive the houses of the St. Honoré crossway still burning in spite of the fire-pumps[61] which had come in from the suburbs, and whose snorting could be plainly heard. To right and left, the little trees and the kiosks of the news vendors were broken, riddled with bullets, and all at once loud cries of horror arose, for, on descending into a cellar, the firemen had there discovered the charred corpses of seven inmates of one of the burning houses.
Although the lofty, skilfully built barricade barring the Rue St. Florentin and the Rue de Rivoli appeared yet more formidable than the other one, Jean somehow instinctively divined that it would be less difficult for him and Maurice to pass that way. Indeed, the barricade was evacuated, although the troops had not yet dared to occupy it. Heavy guns were slumbering there in abandonment. There was not a living thing left behind that invincible rampart, save a stray dog, which ran off in alarm. However, whilst Jean was hastily walking up the Rue St. Florentin sustaining Maurice, who had become very weak, his fears were suddenly realised, for they came upon a company of the 88th of the Line which had turned the barricade.
'Sir,' said Jean to the captain, 'this is a comrade of mine whom those brigands have wounded. I'm taking him to the ambulance.'
The military great-coat thrown over Maurice's shoulders saved him, and Jean's heart was beating almost to the point of bursting as they at last turned into the Rue St. Honoré, along which they took their way. The dawn was scarcely breaking as yet, and the reports of fire-arms frequently resounded in the side streets, for fighting was still going on throughout the district. By a miracle, however, they managed to reach the corner of the Rue des Frondeurs without any other unpleasant meeting. And now they made way but slowly; those last three or four hundred yards seemed to be interminable. Whilst going up the Rue des Frondeurs they fell in with a band of Communards, who fortunately took to their heels in alarm, fancying that an entire regiment was at hand. And then they only had to take a few steps along the Rue d'Argenteuil to find themselves at last in the Rue des Orties.