The fishwife, with streaming hair, bellowed:
"Cut the throats of every one. No priest must escape!"
Farther on in the press of bodies, Nicole saw the two apprentices, transformed with the frenzy.
The cobbler had armed himself with some weapon; even the tow-headed newsboy near them screamed hysterically:
"À la mort! À la mort!"
"I can go no farther!" Nicole protested.
"Yes, yes," Geneviève cried, seizing her arms and impelling her, but half resisting, into the rush of the multitude. "We must see it! We must see everything!"
She was a child no longer, but a savage akin in fury to the beast enraged by the red flash of blood.
At St. Firmin's the vanguard broke into the prison. The night was filled with shrieks of terror and of furious exultation. Body after body, dead or dying, was hurled from the window, to be pounced upon below and torn to pieces. More than eighty lay quivering in mounds.
Then at last the mob, by that strange organization by which it moves without commands, turned face and, sparkling with torches, inundated the narrow street that led down to the Boulevard St. Germain, and returned to the prison of the Abbaye. It was now deep into the night, and for hours a semblance of a trial had been going on within the court. The mob, thus balked by the routine of justice, softened and dissipated into a throng of spectators, bewildered and recovering slowly from their delirium.