“Is he then buried in the trench?” asked the Bishop. “He must be taken out this night and given Christian burial.”
A heavy silence had fallen over the quarter where lately there had been the shrieking of bullets and the thunder of guns. Still the city was burning and shrouded in smoke, but the Commune was throttled and dead.
In finding François, everything was done quite as informally as shooting him. The Bishop stood by the trench in the darkness, which was lighted only by the jailer’s lantern.
The trench was the last one dug by the Communards, and was so hastily filled that the dirt was easily thrown aside by a couple of soldiers hired to do the work, Jean helping with a spade. They lifted François out, looking strangely young and natural when the canvas in which his body was wrapped was removed.
Diane was a little way off,—it was no sight for a woman,—but at that moment she entered the garden in the dusk, carrying something in her hand.
“Here,” she said, “is something in which to wrap François. I went to the officer commanding at the jail, and told him that François was a soldier of France who had died bravely, and that he was entitled to have the tricolor laid upon him dead.”
It was a small flag, such as batteries of artillery carry in case they should lose or be separated from their colors.
Diane, kneeling on the ground, wrapped François’ body in it, and then leaned over and kissed his dead face.
There was a little half-wrecked church in the neighborhood, and there François was carried by the soldiers, with the jailer and Jean assisting, and followed by the Bishop. They laid him down on the pavement before the desecrated altar, and there Jean watched by him the whole night through.
The church was dark, although the windows were broken out and a shell had made a great gaping hole in the roof, but the light of the moon and the stars was quenched by the great pall of smoke that enveloped the vast city.