Far away in the southwest the great heart of Paris throbbed in silence, for the beautiful, sinful city, confused by the din of the riffraff within her walls, blinded by lies and selfish counsels, crouched in mute agony, listening for the first ominous rumbling of a rotten, tottering Empire.
God alone knows why he gave to France, in the supreme moment of her need, the beings who filled heaven with the wind of their lungs and brought her to her knees in shame—not for brave men dead in vain, not for a wasted land, scourged and flame-shrunken from the Rhine to the Loire, not for provinces lost nor cities gone forever—but for the strange creatures that her agony brought forth, shapes simian and weird, all mouth and convulsive movement, little pigmy abortions mouthing and playing antics before high Heaven while the land ran blood in every furrow and the world was a hell of flame.
Gambetta, that incubus of bombastic flabbiness, roaring prophecy and platitude through the dismayed city, kept his eye on the balcony of the particular edifice where, later, he should pose as an animated Jericho trumpet. So, biding his time, he bellowed, but it was the Comédie Française that was the loser, not the people, when he sailed away in his balloon, posed, squatting majestically as the god of war above the clouds of battle. And little Thiers, furtive, timid, delighting in senile efforts to stir the ferment of chaos till it boiled, he, too, was there, owl-like, squeaky-voiced, a true "Bombyx à Lunettes." There, too, was Hugo—often ridiculous in his terrible moods, egotistical, sloppy, roaring. The Empire pinched Hugo, and he roared; and let the rest of the world judge whether, under such circumstances, there was majesty in the roar. The spectacle of Hugo, prancing on the ramparts and hurling bad names at the German armies, recalls the persistent but painful manœuvres of a lion with a flea. Both are terribly in earnest—neither is sublime.
Jack sat leaning on the window-ledge, his chin on both hands, watching the moonlight rippling across the sea of steel below. Lorraine, also silent, buried in an arm-chair, lay huddled somewhere in the shadows, looking up at the stars, scarcely visible in the radiance of the moon.
After a while she spoke in a low voice: "Do you remember in chapel a week ago—what—"
"Yes, I know what you mean. Can you say it—any of it?"
"Yes, all."
Presently he heard her voice in the darkness repeating the splendid lines:
"'In the days when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and they that look out of the windows be darkened.
"'And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and they shall rise up at the voice of a bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low.