ambent flames were beginning to rise anew. "You see, it is breaking out
again; Paris is burning. All Paris will burn this time!"

As soon as daylight began to fade, the distant quarters beyond the Seine
had been lighted up by the burning of the Grenier d'Abondance. From
time to time there was an outburst of flame, accompanied by a shower of
sparks, from the smoking ruins of the Tuileries, as some wall or ceiling
fell and set the smoldering timbers blazing afresh. Many houses, where
the fire was supposed to be extinguished, flamed up anew; for the last
three days, as soon as darkness descended on the city it seemed as if
it were the signal for the conflagrations to break out again; as if the
shades of night had breathed upon the still glowing embers, reanimating
them, and scattering them to the four corners of the horizon. Ah, that
city of the damned, that had harbored for a week within its bosom the
demon of destruction, incarnadining the sky each evening as soon as
twilight fell, illuminating with its infernal torches the nights of
that week of slaughter! And when, that night, the docks at la Villette
burned, the light they shed upon the huge city was so intense that it
seemed to be on fire in every part at once, overwhelmed and drowned
beneath the sea of flame.

"Ah, it is the end!" Maurice repeated. "Paris is doomed!"

He reiterated the words again and again with apparent relish, actuated
by a feverish desire to hear the sound of his voice once more, after
the dull lethargy that had kept him tongue-tied for three days. But the
sound of stifled sobs causes him to turn his head.

"What, sister, you, brave little woman that you are! You weep because I
am about to die--"

She interrupted him, protesting:

"But you are not going to die!"

"Yes, yes; it is better it should be so; it must be so. Ah, I shall be
no great loss to anyone. Up to the time the war broke out I was a source
of anxiety to you, I cost you dearly in heart and purse. All the folly
and the madness I was guilty of, and which would have landed me, who
knows where? in prison, in the gutter--"

Again she took the words from his mouth, exclaiming hotly:

"Hush! be silent!--you have atoned for all."

He reflected a moment. "Yes, perhaps I shall have atoned, when I am
dead. Ah, Jean, old fellow, you didn't know what a service you were
rendering us all when you gave me that bayonet thrust."

But the other protested, his eyes swimming with tears:

"