“Ah, bon sang!” cried Jean, amid his sobs, “behold my work!  My poor little one, for whom I would have laid down my life, and whom I murdered, brute that I am!  What is to become of us?  Can you ever forgive me?”

At that moment their glances met, and they were stricken with consternation at what they read in each other’s eyes.  The past rose before them, the secluded chamber at Remilly, where they had spent so many melancholy yet happy days.  His dream returned to him, that dream of which at first he had been barely conscious and which even at a later period could not be said to have assumed definite shape:  life down there in the pleasant country by the Meuse, marriage, a little house, a little field to till whose produce should suffice for the needs of two people whose ideas were not extravagant.  Now the dream was become an eager longing, a penetrating conviction that, with a wife as loving and industrious as she, existence would be a veritable earthly paradise.  And she, the tranquillity of whose mind had never in those days been ruffled by thoughts of that nature, in the chaste and unconscious bestowal of her heart, now saw clearly and understood the true condition of her feelings.  That marriage, of which she had not admitted to herself the possibility, had been, unknown to her, the object of her desire.  The seed that had germinated had pushed its way in silence and in darkness; it was love, not sisterly affection, that she bore toward that young man whose company had at first been to her nothing more than a source of comfort and consolation.  And that was what their eyes told each other, and the love thus openly expressed could have no other fruition than an eternal farewell.  It needed but that frightful sacrifice, the rending of their heart-strings by that supreme parting, the prospect of their life’s happiness wrecked amid all the other ruins, swept away by the crimson tide that ended their brother’s life.

With a slow and painful effort Jean rose from his knees.

“Farewell!”

Henriette stood motionless in her place.

“Farewell!”

But Jean could not tear himself away thus.  Advancing to the bedside he sorrowfully scanned the dead man’s face, with its lofty forehead that seemed loftier still in death, its wasted features, its dull eyes, whence the wild look that had occasionally been seen there in life had vanished.  He longed to give a parting kiss to his little one, as he had called him so many times, but dared not.  It seemed to him that his hands were stained with his friend’s blood; he shrank from the horror of the ordeal.  Ah, what a death to die, amid the crashing ruins of a sinking world!  On the last day, among the shattered fragments of the dying Commune, might not this last victim have been spared?  He had gone from life, hungering for justice, possessed by the dream that haunted him, the sublime and unattainable conception of the destruction of the old society, of Paris chastened by fire, of the field dug up anew, that from the soil thus renewed and purified might spring the idyl of another golden age.