carried by a hand-to-hand conflict among the graves, a hundred and forty-eight of the insurgents were drawn up in line before a wall, and when the firing ceased the stones were weeping great tears of blood; and three of them, despite their wounds, having succeeded in making their escape, they were retaken and despatched.  Among the twelve thousand victims of the Commune, who shall say how many innocent people suffered for every malefactor who met his deserts!  An order to stop the executions had been issued from Versailles, so it was said, but none the less the slaughter still went on; Thiers, while hailed as the savior of his country, was to bear the stigma of having been the Jack Ketch of Paris, and Marshal MacMahon, the vanquished of Froeschwiller, whose proclamation announcing the triumph of law and order was to be seen on every wall, was to receive the credit of the victory of Pere-Lachaise.  And in the pleasant sunshine Paris, attired in holiday garb, appeared to be en fete; the reconquered streets were filled with an enormous crowd; men and women, glad to breathe the air of heaven once more, strolled leisurely from spot to spot to view the smoking ruins; mothers, holding their little children by the hand, stopped for a moment and listened with an air of interest to the deadened crash of musketry from the Lobau barracks.

When Jean ascended the dark staircase of the house in the Rue des Orties, in the gathering obscurity of that Sunday evening, his heart was oppressed by a chill sense of impending evil.  He entered the room, and saw at once that the inevitable end was come; Maurice lay dead on the little bed; the hemorrhage predicted by Bouroche had done its work.  The red light of the setting sun streamed through the open window and rested on the wall as if in a last farewell; two tapers were burning on a table beside the bed.  And Henriette, alone with her dead, in her widow’s weeds that she had not laid aside, was weeping silently.

At the noise of footsteps she raised her head, and shuddered on beholding Jean.  He, in his wild despair, was about to hurry toward her and seize her hands, mingle his grief with hers in a sympathetic clasp, but he saw the little hands were trembling, he felt as by instinct the repulsion that pervaded all her being and was to part them for evermore.  Was not all ended between them now?  Maurice’s grave would be there, a yawning chasm, to part them as long as they should live.  And he could only fall to his knees by the bedside of his dead friend, sobbing softly.  After the silence had lasted some moments, however, Henriette spoke: 

“I had turned my back and was preparing a cup of bouillon, when he gave a cry.  I hastened to his side, but had barely time to reach the bed before he expired, with my name upon his lips, and yours as well, amid an outgush of blood—­”

Her Maurice, her twin brother, whom she might almost be said to have loved in the prenatal state, her other self, whom she had watched over and saved! sole object of her affection since at Bazeilles she had seen her poor Weiss set against a wall and shot to death!  And now cruel war had done its worst by her, had crushed her bleeding heart; henceforth her way through life was to be a solitary one, widowed and forsaken as she was, with no one upon whom to bestow her love.