But on perceiving Henriette, so intensely pale in her black dress, and with her lovely fair hair falling over her shoulders, he suddenly became calm again. 'It is my brother, sir,' said she; 'he was one of your soldiers at Sedan.'
Bouroche did not answer, but uncovered the wounds and examined them in silence; then, taking some phials from his pocket, he made a fresh dressing, explaining to the young woman what she would have to do. And then, in his gruff voice, he all at once asked the wounded man: 'Why were you on the side of those ruffians? Why did you do such an abominable thing?'
Maurice had been gazing at him with glittering eyes, but without pronouncing a word. And now, amid his fever, he answered in a burning voice: 'Because there is too much suffering in the world; too much iniquity and too much shame!'
Bouroche waved his arm as though to say that such ideas might carry a man very far indeed. Then he seemed to be on the point of speaking again, but decided to hold his peace. And as he went out he simply added: 'I will come back again.'
On the landing, however, he told Henriette plainly that he could answer for nothing. The lung was seriously injured, and hæmorrhage might supervene and kill the wounded man in a moment. When Henriette returned into the room she strove to smile, despite the blow which the doctor's words had dealt her in the heart. Would she not save him, would she not prevent that frightful thing, the eternal separation of all three of them, now gathered together in that chamber and ardently longing for life? Throughout the day she had not once left the little room, an old woman occupying a neighbouring attic having obligingly undertaken her errands. And now she came and resumed her seat on a chair beside the bed.
Giving way, however, to his feverish excitement, Maurice had begun to question Jean, anxious to learn what was happening. The corporal did not tell him everything; he avoided all allusion to the furious wrath which was rising up against the expiring Commune throughout delivered Paris. It was now Wednesday, and for two long days, since the Sunday evening, the inhabitants had been living in their cellars quaking with fear. And on the Wednesday morning, when they were at last able to venture out, the spectacle they beheld—the streets torn up, the remnants of barricades, the corpses, the pools of blood, and especially the awful conflagrations—inflamed them with vengeful fury. The chastisement was to prove a terrible one. The houses were searched, all suspicious characters of either sex were at once handed over to the firing parties to be summarily shot. By six o'clock on the evening of that day the army of Versailles was in possession of one half of the city, its lines running from the park of Montsouris to the Northern Railway station by way of the main thoroughfares. And the remaining members of the Commune, some twenty men or so, had now been compelled to take refuge at the municipal offices of the Eleventh Arrondissement, on the Boulevard Voltaire.
Silence fell, and at last, as Maurice gazed at the city through the open window, by which the warm night air streamed into the room, he muttered: 'At all events, the work goes on—Paris still burns!'
He spoke truly: the flames had shone out once more as soon as night had fallen, and a villainous glow was again tinging the sky with a purple hue. During the afternoon, the powder magazine near the Luxembourg palace had exploded with so frightful a crash, that a rumour had spread that it was the Panthéon crumbling into the Catacombs. Moreover, the fires of the previous night had continued burning throughout the day—the palace of the Council of State and the Tuileries were still flaming, whilst the Ministry of Finances still belched its wreathing clouds of smoke. Over and over again had it been necessary to close the window, in order to shut out a cloud of black butterflies, scraps upon scraps of charred paper, which the violence of the fire whirled upward into the sky, whence they fell again in a fine rain. All Paris was covered with these fragments,[62] some of which, carried off by the wind, were picked up even in Normandy, twenty leagues away. And now not merely were the western and southern quarters flaring—the houses of the Rue Royale, those of the Croix-Rouge crossway, and of the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs—but all the eastern side of the city also seemed to be in flames. The huge brazier of the Hôtel-de-Ville glowed on the horizon with a gigantic sacrificial pyre. And flaring like torches in the same direction there were the municipal offices of the Fourth Arrondissement, the Lyric theatre, and over thirty houses in adjacent streets; to say nothing of the Porte-St. Martin theatre, which on the north shone out all alone, ruddy with fire, like a rick standing out in the midst of dusky fields. Here and there private vengeance was busy at work, and desperate efforts were made to hasten the destruction of various buildings in order that certain records preserved in them might be annihilated. But among the majority of the insurgents there was no longer any question of defending themselves, or of arresting the advance of the troops by the fires. Madness reigned, conflagrations were kindled in haphazard fashion, for the mere sake of destroying; and the cathedral of Notre Dame, the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, and the Palais de Justice were only saved by a lucky chance.
'Ah! War! hateful War!' said Henriette in an undertone, as she gazed on that city of havoc, suffering, and agony.
Was not this indeed the inevitable last act of the tragedy—the outbreak of that madness which had germinated on those fatal fields of defeat around Sedan and Metz; the outbreak too of that epidemic of destructiveness engendered by the siege of Paris, the supreme convulsion of a nation threatened with dissolution amid butchery and ruin? Maurice, however, without taking his eyes off the burning districts over yonder, stammered with difficulty: 'No, no, don't curse War—War is good, it has its task——'