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 shalt thou fight!  Could tumult awaken the old Dead, Burgundian Charles the Bold might stir from under that Rotunda of his:  never since he, raging, sank in the ditches, and lost Life and Diamond, was such a noise heard here.

Three thousand, as some count, lie mangled, gory; the half of Chateau-Vieux has been shot, without need of Court Martial.  Cavalry, of Mestre-de-Camp or their foes, can do little.  Regiment du Roi was persuaded to its barracks; stands there palpitating.  Bouille, armed with the terrors of the Law, and favoured of Fortune, finally triumphs.  In two murderous hours he has penetrated to the grand Squares, dauntless, though with loss of forty officers and five hundred men:  the shattered remnants of Chateau-Vieux are seeking covert.  Regiment du Roi, not effervescent now, alas no, but having effervesced, will offer to