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