When Berton came later in the day, he wanted to seek out Rigault at once and kill him. “The rat!” he kept declaring, “the rat!”
He did, in fact, visit the Préfecture with the idea of meeting Rigault and “calling him out,” but could not find him. Before the Communist could wreak his threatened vengeance on Sarah, the Commune was over and he was executed.
Immediately after the signature of peace, Sarah made a long and exceedingly hazardous voyage to Hamburg, via Holland, where she met her family and saw her baby boy again. She furiously abused her mother and her aunt for daring to take her son to Germany during that country’s war on France, and after their return to Paris she refused for some time to have anything to do with her Aunt Rosine, whom she regarded as responsible for the outrage. She brought her son back with her.
Among her acquaintances before the war had been a man named James O’Connor, a Frenchman of Irish descent. She had had little to do with him at this epoch, and had known him only as a frequenter of several literary salons which she had been in the habit of attending.
Just before the siege of Paris, Captain O’Connor—he had been given a commission in the cavalry—was brought to her hospital at the Odéon, suffering from a bullet wound in the hip. Though his recovery was rapid his convalescence was long.
Sarah tended him with her own hands, and their friendship ripened into a warm intimacy. With Berton more and more involved in politics, and passing nearly all his evenings at meetings in the home of Victor Hugo, Sarah saw a lot of the dashing Captain O’Connor, and it was he who, when the Communist rebellion broke out, arranged her escape from Paris with her son, and installed her in a cottage between St. Germain and Versailles.
Almost every day they took long gallops together and once, when riding through the Park of Versailles, they were shot at by a crazy communist who had hidden himself behind a tree. The bullet missed its mark and, turning in the saddle, Captain O’Connor mortally wounded the man. Then he made as if to ride coolly on.
“But you are not going to leave him like that?” asked Sarah, sick at heart, pointing to the man who lay dying on the grass.
“Why not,” asked O’Connor, coldly. “He would have worried himself precious little about you and me if he had succeeded in killing us. Every day friends in my regiment are killed in this way by some of these madmen in ambush.”
Sarah slipped off her horse and supported the man’s head in her arms, where a few seconds later he expired. Then, remounting with a stony face, she gave her hand to O’Connor.