“Isn’t he a joker, that officer!  One, two—­get out of the way,” cried a colossal grenadier.  “No, you won’t, hey!  Well, as you please, then.”

A woman’s cry rose higher than the report of the musket.  Philippe fortunately was not touched, but Bichette, mortally wounded, was struggling in the throes of death.  Three men darted forward and dispatched her with their bayonets.

“Cannibals!” cried Philippe, “let me at any rate take the horse-cloth and my pistols.”

“Pistols, yes,” replied the grenadier.  “But as for that horse-cloth, no! here’s a poor fellow afoot, with nothing in his stomach for two days, and shivering in his rags.  It is our general.”

Philippe kept silence as he looked at the man, whose boots were worn out, his trousers torn in a dozen places, while nothing but a ragged fatigue-cap covered with ice was on his head.  He hastened, however, to take his pistols.  Five men dragged the mare to the fire, and cut her up with the dexterity of a Parisian butcher.  The pieces were instantly seized and flung upon the embers.

The major went up to the young woman, who had uttered a cry on recognizing him.  He found her motionless, seated on a cushion beside the fire.  She looked at him silently, without smiling.  Philippe then saw the soldier to whom he had confided the carriage; the man was wounded.  Overcome by numbers, he had been forced to yield to the malingerers who attacked him; and, like the dog who defended to the last possible moment his master’s dinner, he had taken his share of the booty, and was now sitting beside the fire, wrapped in a white sheet by way of cloak, and turning carefully on the embers a slice of the mare.  Philippe saw upon his face the joy these preparations gave him.  The Comte de Vandieres, who, for the last few days, had fallen into a state of second childhood, was seated on a cushion beside his wife, looking fixedly at the fire, which was beginning to thaw his torpid limbs.  He had shown no emotion of any kind, either at Philippe’s danger, or at the fight which ended in the pillage of the carriage and their expulsion from it.

At first de Sucy took the hand of the young countess, as if to show her his affection, and the grief he felt at seeing her reduced to such utter misery; then he grew silent; seated beside her on a heap of snow which was turning into a rivulet as it melted, he yielded himself up to the happiness of being warm, forgetting their peril, forgetting all things.  His face assumed, in spite of himself, an expression of almost stupid joy, and he waited with impatience until the fragment of the mare given to his orderly was cooked.  The smell of the roasting flesh increased his hunger, and his hunger silenced his heart, his courage, and his love.  He looked, without anger, at the results of the pillage of his carriage.  All the men seated around the fire had shared his blankets, cushions, pelisses, robes, also the clothing of the Comte and Comtesse de Vandieres and his own.  Philippe looked about him to see if there was anything left in or near the vehicle that was worth saving.  By the light of the flames he saw gold and diamonds and plate scattered everywhere, no one having thought it worth his while to take any.