hed this point: Hatred, absurd war,
fratricidal murder! Progress? Civilization? Mere words! No rest, no
peaceful repose, either in fraternity or love! The primitive brute always
reappears, the right of the stronger to hold in its clutches the pale
cadaver of justice! What is the use of so many religions, philosophies,
all the noble dreams, all the grand impulses of the thought toward the
ideal and good? This horrible doctrine of the pessimists was true then!
We are, then, like animals, eternally condemned to kill each other in
order to live? If that is so, one might as well renounce life, and give
up the ghost!

Meanwhile the cannonading now redoubled, and with its tragic grumbling
was mingled the dry crackling sound of the musketry; beyond a wooded
hillock, which restricted the view toward the southeast, a very thick
white smoke spread over the horizon, mounting up into the gray sky. The
fight had just been resumed there, and it was getting hot, for soon the
ambulances and army-wagons drawn by artillery men began to pass. They
were full of the wounded, whose plaintive moans were heard as they
passed. They had crowded the least seriously wounded ones into the
omnibus, which went at a foot pace, but the road had been broken up by
the bad weather, and it was pitiful to behold these heads shaken as they
passed over each rut. The sight of the dying extended upon bloody
mattresses was still more lugubrious to see. The frightful procession of
the slaughtered went slowly toward the city to the hospitals, but the
carriages sometimes stopped, only a hundred steps from the position
occupied by the National Guards, before a house where a provisionary
hospital had been established, and left their least transportable ones
there. The morbid but powerful attraction that horrible sights exert over
a man urged Amedee Violette to this spot. This house had been spared from
bombardment and protected from pillage and fire by the Geneva flag; it
was a small cottage which realized the dream of every shopkeeper after he
has made his fortune. Nothing was lacking, not even the earthen lions at
the steps, or the little garden with its glittering weather-vane, or the
rock-work basin for goldfish. On warm days the past summer passers-by
might have seen very often, under the green arbor, bourgeoisie in their
shirt-sleeves and women in light dresses eating melons together. The
poet's imagination fancied at once this picture of a Parisian's Sunday,
wh