Barabant, sickening at the sight of unnamable excesses, retraced his way down the strewn galleries, heaped with overturned furniture, and tapestries pulled from the wall, spattered with blood and dirt. Heedless of the shouts above him, he passed down the vestibule and over the mountain of slain, suffocated by the stench and the horror of wide-mouthed corpses. Now that the crisis was over, his inflammable nature recoiled before the ugliness of the triumph. * * * * * While Louison and Geneviève had been drawn into the frantic mob which swept the palace, Nicole had remained outside, joining the hundreds of women who visited the wounded or sought, in agony, among the dead. She also, with a new anxiety, sped among the slain with a sinking dread before each upturned face. All at once a familiar voice cried at her side: "Help! help!" The cry came from beneath the body of a Marseillais. With the aid of a fishwife she pulled away the corpse, discovering the shaken, limp form of the mountebank Cramoisin. "Ah, mon Dieu," she cried, forgetting the rancor of the woman in the patriot, "are you wounded?" "I--I think so." "Where?" "I don't know," he stammered, rising weakly to his feet. "Is it ended?" "In thy stomach, I guess, my brave fellow!" the fishwife cried with rough scorn. "It seems to have failed thee!" "You do not know him: he is a hero!" Nicole cried, ironically. "Wait a moment; we'll find the wound!" With a laugh, the two sought to seize him; but Cramoisin, having recovered the use of his legs, escaped in a ludicrous, snarling flight. Suddenly Nicole beheld Barabant stumbling forth from the vestibule. All coquetry forgot, she sprang to him with the cry: "Barabant, you are wounded!" He looked at his arm and saw it was covered with blood. He passed his hand over his face; a scalp-wound trickled a red stream down his forehead. He sat down while she hurriedly washed the wounds and bandaged them. When he essayed to rise, a dizziness made his step so unsteady that Nicole drew his arm over her shoulder, laughing at his feeble resistance. "Allons, this is the hour of the women. I'll bring you back. Don't be afraid to lean on me!" She put her arm about his waist and impelled him gently. He resisted no longer, and together slowly they moved homeward over the stricken field, amid the groaning and the silent. He had a misty recollection of a phantasmagoric passage, of rapidly moving figures hideous with blood, of heads dancing on pikes above him, of stretchers bearing inanimate things, of rushing, floating women, of the sudden rumbling of drums, of companies swinging past him, of interminable streets, and of cliffs, mountains high, that gave forth shrieks of triumph. Then in the city, delirious with joy and sorrow, delirium, too, rushed through his brain, his head fell heavily upon Nicole's bare shoulder, and the will deserting his limbs, he slipped from her arms heavily to the ground.