Henriette had come out upon the landing at the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs, where she welcomed Jean with a manner that indicated great alarm.

“’Sh! he has been extremely violent all day long.  The major was here, I am in despair—­”

Bouroche, in fact, had shaken his head ominously, saying he could promise nothing as yet.  Nevertheless the patient might pull through, in spite of all the evil consequences he feared; he had youth on his side.

“Ah, here you are at last,” Maurice said impatiently to Jean, as soon as he set eyes on him.  “I have been waiting for you.  What is going on —­how do matters stand?” And supported by the pillows at his back, his face to the window which he had forced his sister to open for him, he pointed with his finger to the city, where, on the gathering darkness, the lambent flames were beginning to rise anew.  “You see, it is breaking out again; Paris is burning.  All Paris will burn this time!”

As soon as daylight began to fade, the distant quarters beyond the Seine had been lighted up by the burning of the Grenier d’Abondance.  From time to time there was an outburst of flame, accompanied by a shower of sparks, from the smoking ruins of the Tuileries, as some wall or ceiling fell and set the smoldering timbers blazing afresh.  Many houses, where the fire was supposed to be extinguished, flamed up anew; for the last three days, as soon as darkness descended on the city it seemed as if it were the signal for the conflagrations to break out again; as if the shades of night had breathed upon the still glowing embers, reanimating them, and scattering them to the four corners of the horizon.  Ah, that city of the damned, that had harbored for a week within its bosom the demon of destruction, incarnadining the sky each evening as soon as twilight fell, illuminating with its infernal torches the nights of that week of slaughter!  And when, that night, the docks at la Villette burned, the light they shed upon the huge city was so intense that it seemed to be on fire in every part at once, overwhelmed and drowned beneath the sea of flame.

“Ah, it is the end!” Maurice repeated.  “Paris is doomed!”

He reiterated the words again and again with apparent relish, actuated by a feverish desire to hear the sound of his voice once more, after the dull lethargy that had kept him tongue-tied for three days.  But the sound of stifled sobs causes him to turn his head.

“What, sister, you, brave little woman that you are!  You weep because I am about to die—­”

She interrupted him, protesting: 

“But you are not going to die!”

“Yes, yes; it is better it should be so; it must be so.  Ah, I shall be no great loss to anyone.  Up to the time the war broke out I was a source of anxiety to you, I cost you dearly in heart and purse.  All the folly and the madness I was guilty of, and which would have landed me, who knows where? in prison, in the gutter—­”