But Jean interrupted him with a cry of mingled hatred and remorse: 'Good God! you talk like that when I see you lying there, all through my fault. No, no, you mustn't defend War again; it is an abominable thing!'
The wounded man feebly waved his hand: 'What does it matter about me? There are plenty of others. This blood-letting was perhaps necessary. War is life, and there can be no life unless there be death also.'
Then Maurice closed his eyes, exhausted by the effort which these few words had cost him. Henriette signed to Jean not to continue arguing. Calm though her nature was, the nature of a feeble yet a valiant woman, with limpid eyes in which the heroic soul of her grandfather lived anew, she also was now upheaved by a feeling of protest, of anger with the suffering human race.
Two more days, Thursday and Friday, went by amid the same scenes of conflagration and massacre. The uproar of the cannonade was incessant. The batteries of Montmartre captured by the army of Versailles were now firing without a pause upon those which the Federals had established at Belleville and the Père-Lachaise cemetery; and the latter were on their side firing at random upon Paris. Shells had fallen both in the Rue de Richelieu and on the Place Vendôme. On the evening of the 25th the whole of the city on the left bank of the Seine was in the hands of the troops; but on the right bank the barricades on the Place du Château d'Eau and the Place de la Bastille were still holding out. There were, on these points, two veritable fortresses defended by a galling, incessant fire. At twilight, amid the disbanding of the last members of the Commune, Delescluze took his cane, and, like a promenader out for a stroll, came quietly to the barricade blocking the Boulevard Voltaire to fall and die there like a hero. At dawn on the morrow, May 20, the Château d'Eau and the Bastille positions were carried by the troops, and then only La Villette, Belleville, and Charonne remained in the power of the Communists, who were becoming less and less numerous, until there remained at last merely a handful of brave men resolved to die. And during two more days these prolonged their resistance, fighting with the fury of despair.
On the Friday evening, while Jean, having managed to get away from the Place du Carrousel, was on his way to the Rue des Orties, he witnessed, in the lower part of the Rue de Richelieu, a summary execution which filled him with horror. Two courts-martial had been sitting since the Wednesday, one at the Luxembourg palace, the other at the Châtelet theatre. The men condemned by the former tribunal were executed in the palace gardens, whilst those sentenced by the latter were dragged to the Lobau barracks, where firing parties, kept under arms throughout the day, shot them down almost at point-blank range, in the inner courtyard. And here especially did the butchery prove frightful: men, mere boys, condemned to death on the flimsiest evidence—because their hands were black with powder, or simply because they were wearing regulation shoes; innocent men, too, falsely denounced, victims of private malice shouting out explanations to which their military judges would not listen; droves of prisoners huddled together pell-mell in front of the gun-barrels, so many poor wretches brought in for execution at the same time, that the men of the firing-party had not bullets enough for all of them, and despatched those whom their discharge had merely wounded with the butt-ends of their guns. From morning till evening blood streamed and tumbrils carried away the corpses. And then, too, here and there through the conquered city, amid the frequent outbursts of vengeful fury, there were other executions in front of the barricades, against the blank walls of deserted streets, and on the steps of the public buildings.
It was under such circumstances that Jean saw some inhabitants of the neighbourhood dragging a woman and two men before the officers of a detachment of troops guarding the Théâtre Français. The civilian population indeed showed itself even more ferocious than the soldiers, and the newspapers that had resumed publication clamoured for extermination. The violent throng which Jean encountered was especially wrathful with the woman, a pétroleuse it was said, one of those creatures the fear of whom now haunted the public imagination, who were accused of prowling about in the evening, slinking along past the houses of well-to-do people and flinging canfuls of flaming petroleum into the cellars. This one, so the crowd shouted, had been surprised whilst crouching before a vent-hole in the Rue St. Anne. And despite her protests and her sobs she was flung with the two men into the ditch of a barricade, which had not yet been filled up; and there, in that black hole, all three of them were shot like wolves caught in a trap. Promenaders stood by looking on; among them a lady leaning on her husband's arm, whilst a pastry-cook's boy, who was carrying a pie to some house in the neighbourhood, lingered whistling a hunting refrain.[63]
As Jean, with his heart frozen, was hastening on towards the Rue des Orties a sudden recollection dawned upon him. Was not that Chouteau, formerly of his squad in the 106th, whom he had seen watching that execution—clad in the honest white blouse of a workman and waving his arm in an approving fashion? Jean knew what part that bandit, traitor, robber, and murderer had played! For a moment he felt inclined to retrace his steps, denounce the scoundrel, and have him shot upon the corpses of the three others. How sad to think that the most guilty should ever escape punishment, and air their impunity in the sunlight, whilst thousands of innocents lie rotting in the ground!
Hearing his steps upon the stairs, Henriette came to meet him on the landing: 'Be prudent, he is in a state of terrible excitement to-day,' said she; 'the major has been again and gives me but little hope.' Bouroche indeed had shaken his head ominously, declaring that he was as yet unable to promise anything. Still, perhaps the sufferer's youth would triumph over the complications which he feared.
'Ah! it's you,' said Maurice feverishly as soon as he caught sight of Jean. 'I was waiting for you to come. What is going on? How do matters stand?' And sitting up in bed, with his back resting on the pillow, in front of the window which he had compelled his sister to re-open, he pointed to the city, which another furnace-like glow was now illumining: 'It's beginning again, eh? Paris is burning, and this time it will all burn.'
Since sunset, indeed, all the distant districts up the Seine had been illumined by the conflagration of the Grenier d'Abondance.[64] At the Tuileries and the Council of State, the roofs and ceilings must have been falling in, imparting fresh vigour to the braziers of smouldering beams, for here and there the fires burst forth again, and flakes and sparks arose. In this way, too, many houses where it was thought the fires had gone out suddenly began flaming again once more. For three days past, the night had no sooner gathered in, than the city kindled afresh; it seemed as though the darkness breathed upon the paling embers, fanning them again into flames, which it scattered to the four corners of the horizon. Ah! that hellish city, which began to redden as soon as the twilight came, burning and burning for seven days, illumining with its monstrous torches the nights of the Bloody Week! And on that Friday night, when the magazines of La Villette burned down, so intense was the light thrown over the immense city, that one might have thought it fired upon every side, invaded and submerged by the flames. Under the ensanguined sky, the lurid districts rolled their waves of shimmering roofs as far as the eye could see.