"To arms!" "Vengeance!"
Exclamations of horror kept chorus with the cries. Women, who, attracted by the noise, looked out of their windows, recoiled with horror as if anxious to escape the sight of some frightful vision.
Their hearts gripped with apprehension, and drops of sweat standing out upon their foreheads, the linendraper and his son realized that some horrible spectacle was approaching, and remained motionless upon their threshold.
Finally the procession hove in sight.
An innumerable mass of men in blouses, in bourgeois dress and also in the uniform of the National Guard, and brandishing guns, swords, knives and sticks, preceded a cart, that was slowly drawn by a horse, and that was surrounded by a number of men bearing torches.
In the cart lay heaped up a mass of corpses.
A tall man with a scarlet hat on his head, naked from the waist up, and his breast bleeding from a recent wound, stood erect in the front part of the cart, carrying aloft a burning flambeau, which he waved to right and left.
He might have been taken for the genius of Vengeance and of Revolution.
At each movement of his flambeau, he lighted with a ruddy glare to the left of him the bloodstained head of an old man, to the right the bust of a woman whose arms, like her bleeding head, half veiled by her disheveled hair, dangled down over the edge of the cart.
From time to time the man with the scarlet hat waved his torch and cried out in stentorian tones: