“What, he?” she said.  “My dear, don’t you go fancying that he’ll come upstairs!  It’s a great wonder he’s escorted me as far as the door.  There are nearly a dozen of them smoking cigars.”

As a matter of fact, all the gentlemen were meeting downstairs.  They had come strolling thither in order to have a look at the boulevards, and they hailed one another and commented loudly on that poor girl’s death.  Then they began discussing politics and strategy.  Bordenave, Daguenet, Labordette, Prulliere and others, besides, had swollen the group, and now they were all listening to Fontan, who was explaining his plan for taking Berlin within a week.

Meanwhile Maria Blond was touched as she stood by the bedside and murmured, as the others had done before her: 

“Poor pet!  The last time I saw her was in the grotto at the Gaite.”

“Ah, she’s changed; she’s changed!” Rose Mignon repeated with a smile of gloomiest dejection.

Two more women arrived.  These were Tatan Nene and Louise Violaine.  They had been wandering about the Grand Hotel for twenty minutes past, bandied from waiter to waiter, and had ascended and descended more than thirty flights of stairs amid a perfect stampede of travelers who were hurrying to leave Paris amid the panic caused by the war and the excitement on the boulevards.  Accordingly they just dropped down on chairs when they came in, for they were too tired to think about the dead.  At that moment a loud noise came from the room next door, where people were pushing trunks about and striking against furniture to an accompaniment of strident, outlandish syllables.  It was a young Austrian couple, and Gaga told how during her agony the neighbors had played a game of catch as catch can and how, as only an unused door divided the two rooms, they had heard them laughing and kissing when one or the other was caught.

“Come, it’s time we were off,” said Clarisse.  “We shan’t bring her to life again.  Are you coming, Simonne?”

They all looked at the bed out of the corners of their eyes, but they did not budge an inch.  Nevertheless, they began getting ready and gave their skirts various little pats.  Lucy was again leaning out of window.  She was alone now, and a sorrowful feeling began little by little to overpower her, as though an intense wave of melancholy had mounted up from the howling mob.  Torches still kept passing, shaking out clouds of sparks, and far away in the distance the various bands stretched into the shadows, surging unquietly to and fro like flocks being driven to the slaughterhouse at night.  A dizzy feeling emanated from these confused masses as the human flood rolled them along—­a dizzy feeling, a sense of terror and all the pity of the massacres to come.  The people were going wild; their voices broke; they were drunk with a fever of excitement which sent them rushing toward the unknown “out there” beyond the dark wall of the horizon.