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They were silent when he concluded his narration, and Maurice, his glance vaguely wandering over the city through the open window that let in the soft, warm air of evening, murmured:

“Well, the work goes on; Paris continues to burn!”

It was true: the flames were becoming visible again in the increasing darkness and the heavens were reddened once more with the ill-omened light. That afternoon the powder magazine at the Luxembourg had exploded with a frightful detonation, which gave rise to a report that the Pantheon had collapsed and sunk into the catacombs. All that day, moreover, the conflagrations of the night pursued their course unchecked; the Palace of the Council of State and the Tuileries were burning still, the Ministry of Finance continued to belch forth its billowing clouds of smoke. A dozen times Henriette was obliged to close the window against the shower of blackened, burning paper that the hot breath of the fire whirled upward into the sky, whence it descended to earth again in a fine rain of fragments; the streets of Paris were covered with them, and some were found in the fields of Normandy, thirty leagues away. And now it was not the western and southern districts alone which seemed devoted to destruction, the houses in the Rue Royale and those of the Croix-Rouge and the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs: the entire eastern portion of the city appeared to be in flames, the Hotel de Ville glowed on the horizon like a mighty furnace. And in that direction also, blazing like gigantic beacon-fires upon the mountain tops, were the Theatre-Lyrique, the mairie of the fourth arrondissement, and more than thirty houses in the adjacent streets, to say nothing of the theater of the Porte-Saint-Martin, further to the north, which illuminated the darkness of its locality as a stack of grain lights up the deserted, dusky fields at night. There is no doubt that in many cases the incendiaries were actuated by motives of personal revenge; perhaps, too, there were criminal records which the parties implicated had an object in destroying. It was no longer a question of self-defense with the Commune, of checking the advance of the victorious troops by fire; a delirium of destruction raged among its adherents: the Palace of Justice, the Hotel-Dieu and the cathedral of Notre-Dame escaped by the merest chance. They would destroy solely for the sake of destroying, would bury the effete, rotten humanity beneath the ruins of a world, in the hope that from the ashes might spring a new and innocent race that should realize the primitive legends of an earthly paradise. And all that night again did the sea of flame roll its waves over Paris.

“Ah; war, war, what a hateful thing it is!” said Henriette to herself, looking out on the sore-smitten city.

Was it not indeed the last act, the inevitable conclusion of the tragedy, the blood-madness for which the lost fields of Sedan and Metz were responsible, the epidemic of destruction born from the siege of Paris, the supreme struggle of a nation in peril of dissolution, in the midst of slaughter and universal ruin?

But Maurice, without taking his eyes from the fires that were raging in the distance, feebly, and with an effort, murmured:

“No, no; do not be unjust toward war. It is good; it has its appointed work to do–”

There were mingled hatred and remorse in the cry with which Jean interrupted him.

“Good God! When I see you lying there, and know it is through my fault–Do not say a word in defense of it; it is an accursed thing, is war!”

The wounded man smiled faintly.

“Oh, as for me, what matters it? There is many another in my condition. It may be that this blood-letting was necessary for us. War is life, which cannot exist without its sister, death.”

And Maurice closed his eyes, exhausted by the effort it had cost him to utter those few words. Henriette signaled Jean not to continue the discussion. It angered her; all her being rose in protest against such suffering and waste of human life, notwithstanding the calm bravery of her frail woman’s nature, with her clear, limpid eyes, in which lived again all the heroic spirit of the grandfather, the veteran of the Napoleonic wars.