racted uncertainty; the populace, armed and unharmed, roll openly
delirious,--betrayed, sold to the Austrians, sold to the Aristocrats.
There are loaded cannon with lit matches among them, and Bouille's
vanguard is halted within thirty paces of the Gate. Command dwells not
in that mad inflammable mass; which smoulders and tumbles there, in
blind smoky rage; which will not open the Gate when summoned; says it
will open the cannon's throat sooner!--Cannonade not, O Friends, or be
it through my body! cries heroic young Desilles, young Captain of Roi,
clasping the murderous engine in his arms, and holding it. Chateau-Vieux
Swiss, by main force, with oaths and menaces, wrench off the heroic
youth; who undaunted, amid still louder oaths seats himself on the
touch-hole. Amid still louder oaths; with ever louder clangour,--and,
alas, with the loud crackle of first one, and then three other muskets;
which explode into his body; which roll it in the dust,--and do also,
in the loud madness of such moment, bring lit cannon-match to ready
priming; and so, with one thunderous belch of grapeshot, blast some
fifty of Bouille's vanguard into air!

Fatal! That sputter of the first musket-shot has kindled such a
cannon-shot, such a death-blaze; and all is now redhot madness,
conflagration as of Tophet. With demoniac rage, the Bouille vanguard
storms through that Gate Stanislaus; with fiery sweep, sweeps Mutiny
clear away, to death, or into shelters and cellars; from which latter,
again, Mutiny continues firing. The ranked Regiments hear it in their
meadow; they rush back again through the nearest Gates; Bouille gallops
in, distracted, inaudible;--and now has begun, in Nanci, as in that
doomed Hall of the Nibelungen, 'a murder grim and great.'

Miserable: such scene of dismal aimless madness as the anger of Heaven
but rarely permits among men! From cellar or from garret, from open
street in front, from successive corners of cross-streets on each hand,
Chateau-Vieux and Patriotism keep up the murderous rolling-fire, on
murderous not Unpatriotic fires. Your blue National Captain, riddled
with balls, one hardly knows on whose side fighting, requests to be
laid on the colours to die: the patriotic Woman (name not given, deed
surviving) screams to Chateau-Vieux that it must not fire the other
cannon; and even flings a pail of water on it, since screaming avails
not. (Deux Amis, v. 268.) Thou shalt fight; thou shalt not fight; and
with whom sha