olation in her grief
and distress. He could not have understood her, for he drew back a pace
or two, eying her with apprehension. Three comrades came running up and
relieved him of the fury, whom they led away screaming at the top of her
voice. Before the ruins of another house a man and two little girls, all
three so weary and miserable that they could not stand, lay on the bare
ground, sobbing as if their hearts would break; they had seen their
little all go up in smoke and flame, and had no place to go, no place to
lay their head. But just then a patrol went by, dispersing the knots of
idlers, and the street again assumed its deserted aspect, peopled only
by the stern, sullen sentries, vigilant to see that their iniquitous
instructions were enforced.

"The beasts! the pigs!" Prosper repeated in a stifled voice. "How I
should like, oh! how I should like to kill a few of them!"

Silvine again made him be silent. She shuddered. A dog, shut up in a
carriage-house that the flames had spared and forgotten there for the
last two days, kept up an incessant, continuous howling, in a key so
inexpressibly mournful that a brooding horror seemed to pervade the low,
leaden sky, from which a drizzling rain had now begun to fall. They were
then just abreast of the park of Montivilliers, and there they witnessed
a most horrible sight. Three great covered carts, those carts that pass
along the streets in the early morning before it is light and collect
the city's filth and garbage, stood there in a row, loaded with corpses;
and now, instead of refuse, they were being filled with dead, stopping
wherever there was a body to be loaded, then going on again with
the heavy rumbling of their wheels to make another stop further on,
threading Bazeilles in its every nook and corner until their hideous
cargo overflowed. They were waiting now upon the public road to be
driven to the place of their discharge, the neighboring potter's
field. Feet were seen projecting from the mass into the air. A head,
half-severed from its trunk, hung over the side of the vehicle. When
the three lumbering vans started again, swaying and jolting over the
inequalities of the road, a long, white hand was hanging outward from
one of them; the hand caught upon the wheel, and little by little the
iron tire destroyed it, eating through skin and flesh clean down to the
bones.

By the time they reached Balan the rain had ceased, and Prosper
prevailed on Silvine to eat a