'The end has come,' repeated Maurice. 'Paris is burning!'
He excited himself with these words, repeating them a score of times in the febrile longing to talk that had come over him after the heavy somnolence which for three days had kept him almost mute. However, the sound of stifled sobbing made him turn his head.
'What! Is it you, little sister, you so brave? You are crying because I am about to die?'
She interrupted him, protesting: 'No, no, you will not die.'
'Yes, it is better so, it is necessary! Ah! nothing of much account will be lost in me. Before the war I caused you so much worry. I cost you dearly both in heart and purse. All those senseless things I was guilty of—all those acts of folly I committed and which would have brought me to a bad end, perhaps—who knows?—to imprisonment, the gutter——'
Again did she violently interrupt him: 'Be quiet, be quiet! You have atoned for it all!'
He became silent and reflected for a moment: 'Well, yes, I shall have atoned, perhaps—when I am dead. Ah! my old Jean, you all the same rendered us a first-rate service when you gave me that bayonet thrust——'
But Jean, whose eyes were swollen with tears, also protested: 'Don't say that. Do you want me to go and batter my brains out against a wall?'
In a burning voice, Maurice continued: 'Do you remember what you said to me after Sedan, that it sometimes benefited one to receive a good blow? And you added, too, that when there was any rottenness anywhere, when one had a diseased limb past healing, it was far better to lop it off with an axe than to die of it as one dies of the cholera. I have often thought of those words since then, since I have been alone, shut up in this mad, miserable Paris. And you see, it's I that am the rotten limb that you have lopped off——'