look for a place where they might wash the powder
grime from hands and face and exchange their uniform for a blouse. There
was a rumor that the enemy were making ready to attack the Croix-Rouge
and take their position in flank. By this time the barricades in the
Rues Martignac and Bellechasse had been carried, the red-legs were
beginning to make their appearance at the end of the Rue de Lille, and
soon all that remained was a little band of fanatics and men with
the courage of their opinions, Maurice and some fifty more, who were
resolved to sell their lives dearly, killing as many as they could of
those Versaillese, who treated the federates like thieves and murderers,
dragging away the prisoners they made and shooting them in the rear of
the line of battle. Their bitter animosity had broadened and deepened
since the days before; it was war to the knife between those rebels
dying for an idea and that army, inflamed with reactionary passions and
irritated that it was kept so long in the field.

About five o'clock, as Maurice and his companions were finally falling
back to seek the shelter of the barricades in the Rue du Bac, descending
the Rue de Lille and pausing at every moment to fire another shot, he
suddenly beheld volumes of dense black smoke pouring from an open window
in the Palace of the Legion of Honor. It was the first fire kindled
in Paris, and in the furious insanity that possessed him it gave him a
fierce delight. The hour had struck; let the whole city go up in flame,
let its people be cleansed by the fiery purification! But a sight that
he saw presently filled him with surprise: a band of five or six men
came hurrying out of the building, headed by a tall varlet in whom he
recognized Chouteau, his former comrade in the squad of the 106th. He
had seen him once before, after the 18th of March, wearing a gold-laced
_kepi_; he seemed by his bedizened uniform to have risen in rank, was
probably on the staff of some one of the many generals who were never
seen where there was fighting going on. He remembered the account
somebody had given him of that fellow Chouteau, of his quartering
himself in the Palace of the Legion of Honor and living there, guzzling
and swilling, in company with a mistress, wallowing with his boots on
in the great luxurious beds, smashing the plate-glass mirrors with shots
from his revolver, merely for the amusement there was in it. It was even
asserted that the woman left the building ev