“He walked slowly down the street, stunned and dazed by what he had heard. He had known it might be so; he had heard plenty of the horrors taking place in this very Paris where he stood. But it had not come home to him till now, and he felt as if he could not believe it. Even to think of the Marquis and his wife coming to such an end—people he had known, whose faces he could remember—made him shiver; but for his own ladies! No, he could not believe it. ‘No one—not the hardest-hearted—could look in the Countess’s face and not see how gentle and good she was! And Mademoiselle Edmée, if it were true that they had taken her mother, she would have died of grief. No—I shall hope still!’ he said.”
Chapter Ten.
“Pierre had wandered down the whole length of the Rue de Lille before he quite came to himself, and then he started to see how far he had come. He had crossed two or three side streets without noticing their names.
”‘I may have passed the Rue de Poitiers,’ he said to himself, ‘where she said the wine-shop was,’ and he looked about him anxiously. A few steps further brought him out of the quiet Rue de Lille into a wider thoroughfare, the noise of which had already begun to reach him. Here there was life and movement enough—of a kind. Groups stood about talking, noisily laughing; some few passers-by, looking more serious, as if on their way to or from their daily work, were stopped and jeered at, and in some cases seemed to have difficulty in getting away.
”‘Stay five minutes—they are coming this way—hark! you can hear them already,’ Pierre heard said in a group of blouses to one of their fellows, who evidently wanted to get off.
”‘My wife’s ill,’ he said, ‘and the noise frightens her when she hears them pass. Let me go, good friends; I would stay, and gladly, but for that.’
“They let him go with a muttered oath. The man’s face was pale, and belied his words. Indeed, on many faces Pierre learnt to recognise the traces of misery and deadly fear, though these very ones sometimes laughed and shouted the loudest. But his attention was now caught by a strange sound coming nearer and nearer—a distant roar it had seemed at first, but by degrees it grew into the shouting and yelling, hardly to be called singing—though there was some tune and measure in it, and the time was marked by the beating of small drums, the clashing and clanging of tambourine;—of a multitude of human voices.