At length I went to lay aside my musket, and hang my cartridge-box in the alcove. The children were laughing, and joy was in the house once more. And when I came back in my old beaver cap, and my large, warm woollen stockings, and sat down in the old arm-chair, in front of the little table set with porringers, in which Zeffen was pouring the soup; when I was again in the midst of all these happy faces, bright eyes, and outstretched hands, I could have sung like an old lark on his branch, over the nest where his little ones were opening their beaks and flapping their wings.
I blessed them in my heart a hundred times over. Sorlé, who saw in my eyes what I was thinking, said: "They are all together, Moses, just as they were yesterday; the Lord has preserved them."
"Yes, blessed be the name of the Lord, forever and ever!" I replied.
While we were at breakfast, Zeffen told me about their going to the large casemate at the barracks, how it was full of people stretched on their mattresses in every direction—the cries of some, the fright of others, the torment from the vermin, the water dropping from the arch, the crowds of children who could not sleep, and did nothing but cry, the lamentations of five or six old men who kept calling out, "Ah! our last hour has come! Ah! how cold it is! Ah! we shall never go home—it is all over!"
Then suddenly the deep silence of all, when they heard the cannon about ten o'clock—the reports, coming slowly at first, then like the roar of a tempest—the flashes, which could be seen even through the blindages of the gate, and old Christine Evig telling her beads as loud as if she were in a procession, and the other women responding together.
As she told me this, Zeffen clasped her little Esdras tightly, while I held David on my knees, embracing him as I thought to myself, "Yes, my poor children, you have been through a great deal!"
Notwithstanding the joy of seeing that we were all safe, the thought of the deserter in his dungeon at the town-house would come to me; he too had parents! And when you think of all the trouble which a father and mother have in bringing up a child, of the nights spent in soothing his cries, of their cares when he is sick, of their hopes in seeing him growing up; and then imagine to yourself some old soldiers sitting around a table to try him, and coolly send him to be shot behind the bastion, it makes you shudder, especially when you say to yourself: "But for me, this boy would have been at liberty; he would be on the road to his village; to-morrow perhaps he would have reached the poor old people's door, and have called out to them, 'Open! it is I!'"
Such thoughts are enough to make one wild.
I did not dare to speak to my wife and children of the poor fellow's arrest; I kept my thoughts to myself.
Without, the detachments from La Roulette, Trois-Maisons, and La Fontaine-du-Chateau, passed through the street, keeping step; groups of children ran about the city to find the pieces of shells; neighbors collected to talk about the events of the night—the roofs torn off, chimneys thrown down, the frights they had had. We heard their voices rising and falling, and their shouts of laughter. And I have since seen that it is always the same thing after a bombardment; the shower is forgotten as soon as it is over, and they exclaim: "Huzza! the enemy is routed!"