His voice was husky with emotion as he finished naming these men, who seemed to be borne away by a whirlwind as fast as he enumerated them.  Erect, with glowing countenance, he pointed out the several contingents with a nervous gesture.  Miette followed his movements.  The road below attracted her like the depths of a precipice.  To avoid slipping down the incline she clung to the young man’s neck.  A strange intoxication emanated from those men, who themselves were inebriated with clamour, courage, and confidence.  Those beings, seen athwart a moonbeam, those youths and those men in their prime, those old people brandishing strange weapons and dressed in the most diverse costumes, from working smock to middle class overcoat, those endless rows of heads, which the hour and the circumstances endowed with an expression of fanatical energy and enthusiasm, gradually appeared to the girl like a whirling, impetuous torrent.  At certain moments she fancied they were not of themselves moving, that they were really being carried away by the force of the “Marseillaise,” by that hoarse, sonorous chant.  She could not distinguish any conversation, she heard but a continuous volume of sound, alternating from bass to shrill notes, as piercing as nails driven into one’s flesh.  This roar of revolt, this call to combat, to death, with its outbursts of indignation, its burning thirst for liberty, its remarkable blending of bloodthirsty and sublime impulses, unceasingly smote her heart, penetrating more deeply at each fierce outburst, and filling her with the voluptuous pangs of a virgin martyr who stands erect and smiles under the lash.  And the crowd flowed on ever amidst the same sonorous wave of sound.  The march past, which did not really last more than a few minutes, seemed to the young people to be interminable.

Truly, Miette was but a child.  She had turned pale at the approach of the band, she had wept for the loss of love, but she was a brave child, whose ardent nature was easily fired by enthusiasm.  Thus ardent emotions had gradually got possession of her, and she became as courageous as a youth.  She would willingly have seized a weapon and followed the insurgents.  As the muskets and scythes filed past, her white teeth glistened longer and sharper between her red lips, like the fangs of a young wolf eager to bite and tear.  And as she listened to Silvere enumerating the contingents from the country-side with ever-increasing haste, the pace of the column seemed to her to accelerate still more.  She soon fancied it all a cloud of human dust swept along by a tempest.  Everything began to whirl before her.  Then she closed her eyes; big hot tears were rolling down her cheeks.

Silvere’s eyelashes were also moist.  “I don’t see the men who left Plassans this afternoon,” he murmured.

He tried to distinguish the end of the column, which was still hidden by the darkness.  Suddenly he cried with joyous exultation:  “Ah, here they are!  They’ve got the banner—­the banner has been entrusted to them!”