An old man, her nearest neighbour, rushed to the cottage of Reine Allix and seized her by the arm.  “They fire the Berceau,” he screamed.  “Quick! quick! or you will be burned alive!”

Reine Allix looked up with a smile.  “Be quiet!  Do you not see!  He sleeps.”

The old man shook her, implored her, strove to drag her away; in desperation pointed to the roof above, which was already in flames.

Reine Allix looked.  At that sight her mind cleared, and regained consciousness; she remembered all, she understood all; she knew that he was dead.  “Go in peace and save yourself,” she said, in the old, sweet, strong tone of an earlier day.  “As for me, I am very old.  I and my dead will stay together at home.”

The man fled, and left her to her choice.

The great curled flames and the livid vapours closed around her; she never moved.  The death was fierce, but swift, and even in death she and the one whom she had loved and reared were not divided.  The end soon came.  From hill to hill the Berceau de Dieu broke into flames.  The village was a lake of fire, into which the statue of the Christ, burning and reeling, fell.  Some few peasants, with their wives and children, fled to the woods, and there escaped one torture to perish more slowly of cold and famine.  All other things perished.  The rapid stream of the flame licked up all there was in its path.  The bare trees raised their leafless branches, on fire at a thousand points.  The stores of corn and fruit were lapped by millions of crimson tongues.  The pigeons flew screaming from their roosts, and sank into the smoke.  The dogs were suffocated on the thresholds they had guarded all their lives.  The sheep ran bleating with the wool burning on their living bodies.  The little caged birds fluttered helpless, and then dropped, scorched to cinders.  The aged and the sick were stifled in their beds.  All things perished.

The Berceau de Dieu was as one vast furnace, in which every living creature was caught and consumed and changed to ashes.  The tide of war has rolled on, and left it a blackened waste, a smoking ruin, wherein not so much as a mouse may creep or a bird may nestle.  It is gone, and its place can know it nevermore.

Nevermore.  But who is there to care?  It was but as a leaf which the great storm swept away as it passed.

THE TRAVELLER’S STORY OF A TERRIBLY STRANGE BED, By Wilkie Collins

PROLOGUE TO THE FIRST STORY

Before I begin, by the aid of my wife’s patient attention and ready pen, to relate any of the stories which I have heard at various times from persons whose likenesses I have been employed to take, it will not be amiss if I try to secure the reader’s interest in the following pages by briefly explaining how I became possessed of the narrative matter which they contain.