The flaring lamps threw pale patches of light and black patches of shadow on his face, but there was no fear there. He snatched off the bullet-pierced shako and showed them the peak that had been partly shot away; tugged at the Staff epaulet hanging by a waxed thread or two; lifted the full skirt of the tight-waisted gray-blue field-frock and showed the bullet-holes in the cloth....
“What is it to me what you do?” he cried. “Death comes to all sooner or later. But upon the honor of a gentleman!—on the parole of an officer!—I gave no order to fire. The shot came from behind! The voice that cried ‘Fire!’ was not mine. I swear it upon the faith of a Catholic!”
This was not a popular asseveration. The voice of the speaker was drowned in execrations:
“Ah, malefactor! Assassin! Down with him! Down with the priests! Death to the Army! Long live Reform!”
His voice was no longer audible.... He made signs, entreating a hearing; the bellowing, hooting, yelling redoubled. Stones flew, banging on the shutters of the restaurant, denting its barred and bolted doors, smashing unshuttered upper windows. A man with a musket leaped on the steps, and leveled the loaded weapon; the unfortunate young officer looked at him with a smile. Death would have been so simple a way out of the cul-de-sac in which Dunoisse now found himself. For if the People would not believe, neither would the Army. He was, thanks to this cruel freak of Fate, a broken, ruined man. Perhaps his face conveyed his horrible despair, for the fury of the crowd abated; they ceased to threaten, but they would not listen, they turned sullenly away. And the bearded man who had carried the Red Flag, tapped him on the epaulet, made a significant gesture, and said contemptuously:
“Be off with you!”
Dunoisse, abandoned even by Death, looked at the speaker blankly. He was burnt out; the taste of ashes was bitter in his mouth. His head fell upon his breast and the world grew dim about him. There was a cloud of thick darkness within his brain, compared with which the frosty fog of that February night was clarity itself.
Then the fog lifted, and he was alone. The boulevard was deserted, the chairs and little marble-topped tables used by drinkers of absinthes and vermouths, lay tumbled all about upon the stones.... Shops and restaurants had their shutters up; windows that had no shutters had been blocked with mattresses and chests of drawers. A body of mounted Chausseurs galloped down the Rue Lafitte, posted a piquet at the corner of its junction with the Boulevard, and galloped away again into the fog. Out of which came back the clatter of iron-shod hoofs, and the ring and clink of steel on steel, and drifts of the Marseillaise and cries of vengeance.
Dunoisse went to his rooms in the paternal hotel in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, and sat in the dark, and saw a pair of cold blue eyes, and the thick-lipped supercilious smile he knew of old painted upon the shadowy blackness, and the ceaseless roaring of voices and rolling of wheels through the streets of Paris, mingled with the roaring of the blood in his ears.
He knew that this meant black ruin if the Monarchy stood, and ruin blacker still if Red Revolution swept the Monarchy into the gutter. Whose was the hand that had been guilty of the fatal pistol-shot?