His excitement was increasing; he no longer listened to the entreaties of Henriette and Jean, whom he altogether terrified. Amid his fever he continued talking almost deliriously, with a profusion of symbolical terms and vivid imagery. It was the healthy portion of France, that which was endowed with common-sense and a well-balanced mind, the peasant portion, which had remained nearest to the soil, which was now suppressing the crazed, exasperated portion—that which the Empire had corrupted, which had been driven mad by enjoyment and senseless fancies; and it had been necessary that France should thus carve into her own flesh, thus mutilate herself, scarce knowing what she was doing. Yes, that bath of blood, of French blood, had been necessary; it was the abominable holocaust, the living sacrifice offered up amidst purifying fire. And now the Calvary was ascended, the most awful of agonies had been reached, the crucified nation was expiating its sins and was about to be born again.
'And you, my old friend Jean, you are the one with the simple mind and the stout heart. Go, go; take your pick and take your trowel, go and turn the soil over in the fields, and build the house anew! But as for me, you have done well to lop me off, since I was the ulcer clinging to your bones!'
He was again delirious, and wished to rise and lean out of the window. 'Paris is burning,' he gasped once more; 'nothing of it will remain. Ah! I desired it, longed for it; that flame which carries everything away, which heals everything—it is doing good work. Let me go down; let me help finish the work of humanity and liberty!'
Jean had the greatest difficulty in getting him back into bed again, whilst Henriette in tears spoke to him of their childhood, and entreated him, in the name of their affection, to be calm. And meantime the fiery glow above the vast city had spread even farther; the sea of flames was now gaining the dark, distant limits of the horizon, and the sky looked like the vaulted roof of some giant, red-hot oven. Meantime, athwart the lurid light of the fires, the dense smoke rising from the Ministry of Finances, which since two days previously had been stubbornly burning without a flame, still slowly travelled by like a sombre pall of mourning.
On the morrow, which was Saturday, a sudden improvement took place in Maurice's condition; he was much calmer, the fever had subsided, and Jean was greatly delighted to find Henriette smiling, and again dreaming of their intimacy in the happy future, which seemed still possible. Was Destiny indeed about to pardon? She spent her nights in watching; she did not stir from that room where her active Cinderella-like gentleness, her nimble, silent ministrations were like a continuous caress. And, that evening, Jean lingered in the company of his friends, with a pleasure that astonished him and made him tremble. The troops had captured Belleville and the Buttes-Chaumont during the day, so that the Père-Lachaise cemetery, transformed into an entrenched camp, was now the only point where the resistance continued. It seemed to Jean that the whole terrible business was now over, and he even asserted that no more prisoners were being shot. He merely alluded to the flocks of captives who were being despatched to Versailles. Passing along the quay that morning, he had met one of those convoys—men in blouses, men in coats, and men in their shirt-sleeves, with women of every age, some with the wrinkled, scraggy visages of furies, and others in the flower of their youth, girls barely fifteen, but all blended in a great, long, rolling wave of wretchedness and revolt, which the soldiers urged along in the bright sunlight, and which the good folks of Versailles, it was said, greeted with jeering and hooting, and belaboured with sticks and parasols.
On the Sunday, however, Jean was terrified. It was the last day of that hateful week. Since the triumphal rising of the sun on that warm, clear holiday morning he had felt the thrill of the supreme convulsion passing through the city. It was only now that people learned of the repeated massacres of the hostages—the archbishop, the priest of the Madeleine, and the others who had been shot at La Roquette on the Wednesday; the Dominican monks of Arcueil, who had been picked off on the run like hares on the Thursday; the other priests and the gendarmes, who, to the number of forty-seven, had been despatched on the ramparts near the Rue Haxo on the Friday; and now the fury of the reprisals had burst forth once more, and the troops were executing en masse the last prisoners that they made. Throughout that beautiful Sunday, the sound of platoon firing rang out without cessation from the courtyard of the Lobau barracks, where all was blood and smoke and groaning. At La Roquette two hundred and twenty-seven poor wretches, captured here and there, were shot down in a heap. At the Père-Lachaise cemetery, bombarded for four days and at last conquered tomb by tomb, one hundred and forty-eight captives were flung against a wall, the plaster of which was bespattered with big tears of blood; and three of these men, who had been merely wounded by the discharge were promptly recaptured and finished off, when they endeavoured to escape. Among those twelve thousand unhappy beings who lost their lives through the Commune, how many innocents there were for each rogue who met his deserts! It was said that orders to stop the executions had come from Versailles; but the butchery still continued, and Thiers, amid all the pure glory he achieved by the Liberation of the Territory, was to become, for many, the legendary Assassin of Paris; whilst Marshal MacMahon, the beaten general of Frœschweiler, whose proclamation of victory was to be seen on every wall, was to pass into history as the Conqueror of Père-Lachaise. And Paris, strolling forth into the bright sunshine in its Sunday best, put on that day a festive air; dense crowds obstructed the reconquered streets, promenaders strolled cheerfully to view the smoking ruins, and mothers, holding their little children by the hand, stopped for a moment and listened with an expression of interest to the deadened reports of the firing at the Lobau barracks.
When, on the Sunday evening, just as daylight was waning, Jean climbed the dark staircase of the house in the Rue des Orties, a frightful presentiment was oppressing his heart.
He entered the room and at once saw that the inevitable end had come. Maurice lay dead upon the little bed, killed by hæmorrhage, as Major Bouroche had feared. The red farewell of the setting sun was stealing in by the open window, and two candles were already burning on the table near the head of the bed. And Henriette, on her knees, in her widow's robe which she had not quitted, was weeping there in silence.
Hearing the door open, she raised her head and shuddered as she saw Jean come in. He, in his despair, darted forward to take her hands that he might in a loving grasp mingle his own grief with hers. But he felt that the little hands were trembling, that all her quivering form was recoiling from him in revolt, that she was tearing herself away from him for ever. Was it not indeed all over between them now? Maurice's grave parted them like a bottomless abyss. And then he also could only fall upon his knees at the bedside, sobbing softly.
However, after a brief silence, Henriette spoke: 'I had turned my back,' she said, 'and was holding a bowl of broth, when all at once he gave a cry—I only had time to rush up to him and he died, calling me and calling you amid a stream of blood.'