ses where, as a hostage, I had dined, were battered
and broken; public buildings were shapeless masses, and dogs and thieves
prowled among the ruins. Drunken soldiers staggered past me; hags
begged for sous or bread at corners; and devoted priests and long-robed
Recollet monks, cowled and alert, hurried past, silent, and worn with
labours, watchings, and prayers. A number of officers in white uniforms
rode by, going towards the chateau, and a company of coureurs de bois
came up from Mountain Street, singing:

"Giron, giran! le canon grand--
Commencez-vous, commencez-vous!"

Here and there were fires lighted in the streets, though it was not
cold, and beside them peasants and soldiers drank and quarreled over
food--for starvation was abroad in the land.

By one of these fires, in a secluded street--for I had come a roundabout
way--were a number of soldiers of Languedoc's regiment (I knew them by
their trick of headgear and their stoutness), and with them reckless
girls, who, in their abandonment, seemed to me like those revellers in
Herculaneum, who danced their way into the Cimmerian darkness. I had no
thought of staying there to moralize upon the theme; but, as I looked, a
figure came out of the dusk ahead, and moved swiftly towards me.

It was Mathilde. She seemed bent on some errand, but the revellers at
the fire caught her attention, and she suddenly swerved towards
them, and came into the dull glow, her great black eyes shining with
bewildered brilliancy and vague keenness, her long fingers reaching
out with a sort of chafing motion. She did not speak till she was among
them. I drew into the shade of a broken wall, and watched. She looked
all round the circle, and then, without a word, took an iron crucifix
which hung upon her breast, and silently lifted it above their heads
for a moment. I myself felt a kind of thrill go through me, for her wild
beauty was almost tragical. Her madness was not grotesque, but
solemn and dramatic. There was something terribly deliberate in her
strangeness; it was full of awe to the beholder, more searching and
painfully pitiful than melancholy.

Coarse hands fell away from wanton waists; ribaldry hesitated; hot faces
drew apart; and all at once a girl with a crackling laugh threw a tin
cup of liquor into the fire. Even as she did it, a wretched dwarf
sprang into the circle without a word, and, snatching the cup out of
the flames, jumped back again into the darkness, peering