But a whirl of people swept across the Opera Square; there seemed to be a fight in progress: a heap of men, surrounding a group of police-constables and soldiers, in whose midst a madman wrestled with forcible gestures; a coarse clamour rose on high. At the lighted, open windows of the opera-house, above the perystile, still decked in its bright, festal illumination, face after face, appeared, actors still in costume looked on....
"Mamma, we shall never get through!" sobbed Eleonore, softly.
The duchess thought in despair of the great Empress Avenue in which their town-house stood; it was so far away: how would they ever reach it, how would they ever get home?...
"They're murdering him, they're murdering him, they shan't murder him!" bleated the people round them.
Then the duchess understood, then she saw and the girls also saw: the mob, furious, foaming at the mouth—avengers now, though at first malcontents, perhaps even anarchists: such were the Liparians!—the mob pressing against the soldiers and constables, in the midst of whom the emperor's murderer still made fight with his large, frenzied gestures. And the avengers stormed this circle of protecting police; they dragged the man out.... They dragged him right under the eyes of the duchess, of her daughters....
"Ugh, ugh, ugh!" they roared brutally, men and women alike.
They tore the clothes from his body, they beat him; and he howled back. They struck him to the ground with cudgels and trampled on him with coarse shoes; his blood flowed; his brains spattered from his crushed skull....
Then, at the sight of blood, they became like wild beasts; they grinned and smacked their lips with delight.
Eleonore fell back fainting against the duchess, but Alexa shook her by the arm:
"Keep up, keep up, for God's sake keep up, can't you?" she cried out aloud. "I can do nothing with you if you faint!"