The sun was shining outside the walls when we re-entered Semur; but the first step we took was into a gloom as black as night, which did not re-assure us, it is unnecessary to say.  A chill was in the air, of night and mist.  We shivered, not with the nerves only but with the cold.  And as all was dark, so all was still.  I had expected to feel the presence of those who were there, as I had felt the crowd of the invisible before they entered the city.  But the air was vacant, there was nothing but darkness and cold.  We went on for a little way with a strange fervour of expectation.  At each moment, at each step, it seemed to me that some great call must be made upon my self-possession and courage, some event happen; but there was nothing.  All was calm, the houses on either side of the way were open, all but the office of the octroi which was black as night with its closed door.  M. le Cure has told me since that he believed Them to be there, though unseen.  This idea, however, was not in my mind.  I had felt the unseen multitude; but here the air was free, there was no one interposing between us, who breathed as men, and the walls that surrounded us.  Just within the gate a lamp was burning, hanging to its rope over our heads; and the lights were in the houses as if some one had left them there; they threw a strange glimmer into the darkness, flickering in the wind.  By and by as we went on the gloom lessened, and by the time we had reached the Grande Rue, there was a clear steady pale twilight by which we saw everything, as by the light of day.

We stood at the corner of the square and looked round.  Although still I heard the beating of my own pulses loudly working in my ears, yet it was less terrible than at first.  A city when asleep is wonderful to look on, but in all the closed doors and windows one feels the safety and repose sheltered there which no man can disturb; and the air has in it a sense of life, subdued, yet warm.  But here all was open, and all deserted.  The house of the miser Grosgain was exposed from the highest to the lowest, but nobody was there to search for what was hidden.  The hotel de Bois-Sombre, with its great porte-cochere, always so jealously closed; and my own house, which my mother and wife have always guarded so carefully, that no damp nor breath of night might enter, had every door and window wide open.  Desolation seemed seated in all these empty places.  I feared to go into my own dwelling.  It seemed to me as if the dead must be lying within. Bon Dieu! Not a soul, not a shadow; all vacant in this soft twilight; nothing moving, nothing visible.  The great doors of the Cathedral were wide open, and every little entry.  How spacious the city looked, how silent, how wonderful!  There was room for a squadron to wheel in the great square, but not so much as a bird, not a dog; all pale and empty.  We stood for a long time (or it seemed a long time) at the corner, looking right and left.  We were afraid to make a step farther.  We knew not what to do.  Nor could I speak; there was much I wished to say, but something stopped my voice.