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Hours passed, and still he fought on, but with a bitter feeling of distress, with no other wish than that he might die. If he had erred, let him at least atone for his error with his blood! The barricade across the Rue de Lille, near its intersection with the Rue du Bac, was a formidable one, composed of bags and casks filled with earth and faced by a deep ditch. He and a scant dozen of other federates were its only defenders, resting in a semi-recumbent position on the ground, infallibly causing every soldier who exposed himself to bite the dust. He lay there, without even changing his position, until nightfall, using up his cartridges in silence, in the dogged sullenness of his despair. The dense clouds of smoke from the Palace of the Legion of Honor were billowing upward in denser masses, the flames undistinguishable as yet in the dying daylight, and he watched the fantastic, changing forms they took as the wind whirled them downward to the street. Another fire had broken out in an hotel not far away. And all at once a comrade came running up to tell him that the enemy, not daring to advance along the street, were making a way for themselves through the houses and gardens, breaking down the walls with picks. The end was close at hand; they might come out in the rear of the barricade at any moment. A shot having been fired from an upper window of a house on the corner, he saw Chouteau and his gang, with their petroleum and their lighted torch, rush with frantic speed to the buildings on either side and climb the stairs, and half an hour later, in the increasing darkness, the entire square was in flames, while he, still prone on the ground behind his shelter, availed himself of the vivid light to pick off any venturesome soldier who stepped from his protecting doorway into the narrow street.

How long did Maurice keep on firing? He could not tell; he had lost all consciousness of time and place. It might be nine o’clock, or ten, perhaps. He continued to load and fire; his condition of hopelessness and gloom was pitiable; death seemed to him long in coming. The detestable work he was engaged in gave him now a sensation of nausea, as the fumes of the wine he has drunk rise and nauseate the drunkard. An intense heat began to beat on him from the houses that were burning on every side–an air that scorched and asphyxiated. The carrefour, with the barricades that closed it in, was become an intrenched camp, guarded by the roaring flames that rose on every side and sent down showers of sparks. Those were the orders, were they not? to fire the adjacent houses before they abandoned the barricades, arrest the progress of the troops by an impassable sea of flame, burn Paris in the face of the enemy advancing to take possession of it. And presently he became aware that the houses in the Rue du Bac were not the only ones that were devoted to destruction; looking behind him he beheld the whole sky suffused with a bright, ruddy glow; he heard an ominous roar in the distance, as if all Paris were bursting into conflagration. Chouteau was no longer to be seen; he had long since fled to save his skin from the bullets. His comrades, too, even those most zealous in the cause, had one by one stolen away, affrighted at the approaching prospect of being outflanked. At last he was left alone, stretched at length between two sand bags, his every faculty bent on defending the front of the barricade, when the soldiers, who had made their way through the gardens in the middle of the block, emerged from a house in the Rue du Bac and pounced on him from the rear.

For two whole days, in the fevered excitement of the supreme conflict, Maurice had not once thought of Jean, nor had Jean, since he entered Paris with his regiment, which had been assigned to Bruat’s division, for a single moment remembered Maurice. The day before his duties had kept him in the neighborhood of the Champ de Mars and the Esplanade of the Invalides, and on this day he had remained in the Place du Palais-Bourbon until nearly noon, when the troops were sent forward to clean out the barricades of the quartier, as far as the Rue des Saints-Peres. A feeling of deep exasperation against the rioters had gradually taken possession of him, usually so calm and self-contained, as it had of all his comrades, whose ardent wish it was to be allowed to go home and rest after so many months of fatigue. But of all the atrocities of the Commune that stirred his placid nature and made him forgetful even of his tenderest affections, there were none that angered him as did those conflagrations. What, burn houses, set fire to palaces, and simply because they had lost the battle! Only robbers and murderers were capable of such work as that. And he who but the day before had sorrowed over the summary executions of the insurgents was now like a madman, ready to rend and tear, yelling, shouting, his eyes starting from their sockets.