g with bitter anguish, Jean turned and looked out
on Paris. The setting sun lay on the edge of the horizon, and its level
rays bathed the city in a flood of vividly red light. The windows in
thousands of houses flamed as if lighted by fierce fires within; the
roofs glowed like beds of live coals; bits of gray wall and tall,
sober-hued monuments flashed in the evening air with the sparkle of a
brisk fire of brushwood. It was like the show-piece that is reserved for
the conclusion of a _fete_, the huge bouquet of gold and crimson, as if
Paris were burning like a forest of old oaks and soaring heavenward in
a rutilant cloud of sparks and flame. The fires were burning still;
volumes of reddish smoke continued to rise into the air; a confused
murmur in the distance sounded on the ear, perhaps the last groans of
the dying Communists at the Lobau barracks, or it may have been the
happy laughter of women and children, ending their pleasant afternoon by
dining in the open air at the doors of the wine-shops. And in the midst
of all the splendor of that royal sunset, while a large part of Paris
was crumbling away in ashes, from plundered houses and gutted palaces,
from the torn-up streets, from the depths of all that ruin and
suffering, came sounds of life.

Then Jean had a strange experience. It seemed to him that in the slowly
fading daylight, above the roofs of that flaming city, he beheld the
dawning of another day. And yet the situation might well be considered
irretrievable. Destiny appeared to have pursued them with her utmost
fury; the successive disasters they had sustained were such as no
nation in history had ever known before; defeat treading on the heels of
defeat, their provinces torn from them, an indemnity of milliards to be
raised, a most horrible civil war that had been quenched in blood, their
streets cumbered with ruins and unburied corpses, without money, their
honor gone, and order to be re-established out of chaos! His share of
the universal ruin was a heart lacerated by the loss of Maurice and
Henriette, the prospect of a happy future swept away in the furious
storm! And still, beyond the flames of that furnace whose fiery glow
had not subsided yet, Hope, the eternal, sat enthroned in the limpid
serenity of the tranquil heavens. It was the certain assurance of the
resurrection of perennial nature, of imperishable humanity; the harvest
that is promised to him who sows and waits; the tree throwing out a new
a