risk of breaking his
legs, if not his neck. Afterward it was some horses that blocked his
way, and he made himself lowly and stooped, creeping among the feet
and underneath the bellies of the sorry jades, who were ready to die of
inanition, like their masters. Then, when after a quarter of an hour's
laborious effort he reached the junction of the Rue Saint-Michel, he was
terrified at the prospect of the dangers and obstacles that he had still
to face, and which, instead of diminishing, seemed to be increasing, and
made up his mind to turn down the street above mentioned, which would
take him into the Rue des Laboureurs; he hoped that by taking these
usually quiet and deserted passages he should escape the crowd and reach
his home in safety. As luck would have it he almost directly came upon a
house of ill-fame to which a band of drunken soldiers were in process of
laying siege, and considering that a stray shot, should one reach him in
the fracas, would be equally as unpleasant as one intended for him,
he made haste to retrace his steps. Resolving to have done with it
he pushed on to the end of the Grande Rue, now gaining a few feet by
balancing himself, rope-walker fashion, along the pole of some vehicle,
now climbing over an army wagon that barred his way. At the Place du
College he was carried along--bodily on the shoulders of the throng for
a space of thirty paces; he fell to the ground, narrowly escaped a set
of fractured ribs, and saved himself only by the proximity of a friendly
iron railing, by the bars of which he pulled himself to his feet. And
when at last he reached the Rue Maqua, inundated with perspiration, his
clothing almost torn from his back, he found that he had been more than
an hour in coming from the Sous-Prefecture, a distance which in ordinary
times he was accustomed to accomplish in less than five minutes.

Major Bouroche, with the intention of keeping the ambulance and garden
from being overrun with intruders, had caused two sentries to be mounted
at the door. This measure was a source of great comfort to Delaherche,
who had begun to contemplate the possibilities of his house being
subjected to pillage. The sight of the ambulance in the garden, dimly
lighted by a few candles and exhaling its fetid, feverish emanations,
caused him a fresh constriction of the heart; then, stumbling over the
body of a soldier who was stretched in slumber on the stone pavement of
the walk, he supposed him to be one