In a wooden hut at the end of the village, another band found a peasant woman washing her children in a tub near the fire.  Being old and very deaf, she did not hear them enter.  Two men took the tub and carried it away, and the stupefied woman followed with the clothes in which she was about to dress the children.  But when she saw traces of blood everywhere in the village, swords in the orchards, cradles overturned in the street, women on their knees, others who wrung their hands over the dead, she began to scream and beat the soldiers, who put down the tub to defend themselves.  The cure hastened up also, and with hands clasped over his chasuble, entreated the Spaniards before the naked little ones howling in the water.  Some soldiers came up, tied the mad peasant to a tree, and carried off the children.

The butcher, who had hidden his little girl, leaned against his shop, and looked on callously.  A lancer and one of the men in armor entered the house and found the child in a copper boiler.  Then the butcher in despair took one of his knives and rushed after them into the street, but soldiers who were passing disarmed him and hanged him by the hands to the hooks in the wall—­there, among the flayed animals, he kicked and struggled, blaspheming, until the evening.

Near the churchyard, there was a great gathering before a long, low house, painted green.  The owner, standing on his threshold, shed bitter tears; as he was very fat and jovial looking, he excited the pity of some soldiers who were seated in the sun against the wall, patting a dog.  The one, too, who dragged away his child by the hand, gesticulated as if to say:  “What can I do?  It’s not my fault!”

A peasant who was pursued, jumped into a boat, moored near the stone bridge, and with his wife and children moved away across the unfrozen part of the narrow lagoon.  Not daring to follow, the soldiers strode furiously through the reeds.  They climbed up into the willows on the banks to try to reach the fugitives with their lances—­as they did not succeed, they continued for a long time to threaten the terrified family adrift upon the black water.

The orchard was still full of people, for it was there, in front of the white-bearded man who directed the massacre, that most of the children were killed.  Little dots who could just walk alone stood side by side munching their slices of bread and jam, and stared curiously at the slaying of their helpless playmates, or collected round the village fool who played his flute on the grass.

Then suddenly there was a uniform movement in the village.  The peasants ran towards the castle which stood on the brown rising ground, at the end of the street.  They had seen their seigneur leaning on the battlements of his tower and watching the massacre.  Men, women, old people, with hands outstretched, supplicated to him, in his velvet mantle and his gold cap, as to a king in heaven.  But he raised his arms and shrugged his shoulders to show his helplessness, and when they implored him more and more persistently, kneeling in the snow, with bared heads, and uttering piteous cries, he turned slowly into the tower and the peasants’ last hope was gone.