At that moment a hoarse sigh heaved his huge chest in an uneven rhythm, and Rouletabille, leaning in the doorway of the dressing-room, watched — but it was no longer the general that he watched, it was something else, lower down, beside the wall, near the door, and it was that which set him tiptoeing so lightly across the floor that it gave no sound.  There was no slightest sound in the chamber, except the heavy breathing lifting the rough chest.  Behind Rouletabille Matrena raised her arms, as though she wished to hold him back, because she did not know where he was going.  What was he doing?  Why did he stoop thus beside the door and why did he press his thumb all along the floor at the doorway?  He rose again and returned.  He passed again before the bed, where rumbled now, like the bellows of a forge, the respiration of the sleeper.  Matrena grasped Rouletabille by the hand.  And she had already hurried him into the dressing-room when a moan stopped them.

“The youth of Moscow is dead!”

It was the sleeper speaking.  The mouth which had given the stringent orders moaned.  And the lamentation was still a menace.  In the haunted sleep thrust upon that man by the inadequate narcotic the words Feodor Feodorovitch spoke were words of mourning and pity.  This perfect fiend of a soldier, whom neither bullets nor bombs could intimidate, had a way of saying words which transformed their meaning as they came from his terrible mouth.  The listeners could not but feel absorbed in the tones of the brutal victor.

Matrena Petrovna and Rouletabille had leant their two shadows, blended one into the other, against the open doorway just beyond the gleam of the night-lamp, and they heard with horror: 

“The youth of Moscow is dead!  They have cleared away the corpses.  There is nothing but ruin left.  The Kremlin itself has shut its gates — that it may not see.  The youth of Moscow is dead!”

Feodor Feodorovitch’s fist shook above his bed; it seemed that he was about to strike, to kill again, and Rouletabille felt Matrena trembling against him, while he trembled as well before the fearful vision of the killer in the Red Week!

Feodor heaved an immense sigh and his breast descended under the bed-clothes, the fist relaxed and fell, the great head lay over on its ear.  There was silence.  Had he repose at last?  No, no.  He sighed, he choked anew, he tossed on his couch like the damned in torment, and the words written by his daughter — by his daughter - blazed in his eyes, which now were wide open — words written on the wall, that he read on the wall, written in blood.

  “The youth of Moscow is dead!  They had gone so young into the
     fields and into the mines,
  And they had not found a single corner of the Russian land where
     there were not moanings. 
  Now the youth of Moscow is dead and no more moanings are heard,
  Because those for whom all youth died do not dare even to moan
     any more.