"Yes."
But they could not move. The scene enchained them.
The hunt consummated, the hunters flung themselves on the unresisting, and as though to stifle the smallest spark of pity, redoubled their fury and their cries.
In front of the two girls a Marseillais felled a priest with two strokes across the scalp, and drove his pike into the stomach with such ferocity that the point refused to move. The assassin, in rage jumping on the lifeless body, stamped and tugged, cursing the resistance of the corpse which sought to retain the weapon that had struck it down. Everywhere the butchers, not content with the death-dealing blow, flung themselves on the lifeless bodies, piercing them with infuriated stabs, as though the last insult was this mutilation of the dead.
Finally, despairing of satisfying their vengeance on this inert mass, the leaders forced those who remained into the church, some who still breathed being borne on the arms of those who but deferred their murder. Two by two they were led out and butchered.
From this moment the massacre, in its clock-like procession, abated its fury. The executioners themselves, exhausted and listless, struck mechanically.
The crowd, grumbling at the monotony, moved away. Nicole and Geneviève found themselves in the street, packed in the press, beside their late companions. The crowd, animated by the lust of curiosity, became that most fearful of the manifestations of humanity—a mob.
Geneviève and Nicole, no longer individuals, but atoms, became cold, pitiless, maddened with sensations, hungry for new; invaded by a fury which they did not understand, an anger and a hatred of which they knew not the cause.
Some one cried:
"On to St. Firmin. There are eighty priests there!" A hundred voices took up the cry, and the mass, set in motion, rolled toward the prison.