mbankment.

"You see, Paris is burning."

It was in the neighborhood of ten o'clock. The fierce red glare that
lit the southern sky was ever mounting higher. The blood-red clouds had
disappeared from where they had floated in the east; the zenith was
like a great inverted bowl of inky blackness, across which ran the
reflections of the distant flames. The horizon was one unbroken line
of fire, but to the right they could distinguish spots where the
conflagration was raging with greater fury, sending up great spires
and pinnacles of flame, of the most vivid scarlet, to pierce the dense
opacity above, amid billowing clouds of smoke. It was like the burning
of some great forest, where the fire bridges intervening space, and
leaps from tree to tree; one would have said the very earth must be
calcined and reduced to ashes beneath the heat of Paris' gigantic
funeral pyre.

"Look," said Otto, "that eminence that you see profiled in black against
the red background is Montmartre. There on the left, at Belleville and
la Villette, there has not been a house burned yet; it must be they are
selecting the districts of the wealthy for their work; and it spreads,
it spreads. Look! there is another conflagration breaking out; watch the
flames there to the right, how they seethe and rise and fall; observe
the shifting tints of the vapors that rise from the blazing furnace. And
others, and others still; the heavens are on fire!"

He did not raise his voice or manifest any sign of feeling, and it froze
Henriette's blood that a human being could stand by and witness such a
spectacle unmoved. Ah, that those Prussians should be there to see that
sight! She saw an insult in his studied calmness, in the faint smile
that played upon his lips, as if he had long foreseen and been watching
for that unparalleled disaster. So, Paris was burning then at last,
Paris, upon whose monuments the German shells had scarce been able to
inflict more than a scratch! and he was there to see it burn, and in
the spectacle found compensation for all his grievances, the inordinate
length to which the siege had been protracted, the bitter, freezing
weather, the difficulties they had surmounted only to see them present
themselves anew under some other shape, the toil and trouble they had
had in mounting their heavy guns, while all the time Germany from behind
was reproaching them with their dilatoriness. Nothing in all the glory
of their victory, neither the ceded