Dr. Duchesne gave him a glass of water with a little of the excellent cognac which the prefect had sent me. That was the only _tisane_ that my soldiers took. The Silesian said no more, but he put on the reserved, circumspect manner of people who know and will not speak. The bombardment continued, and the hospital flag certainly served as a target for our enemies, for they fired with surprising exactitude, and altered their firing directly a bomb fell a little away from the neighborhood of the Luxembourg. Thanks to this, we had more than twelve bombs one night. These dismal shells, when they burst in the air, were like the fireworks at a fête. The shining splinters then fell down black and deadly. George Boyer, who at that time was a young journalist, came to call on me at the hospital, and I told him about the terrifying splendors of the night. “Oh, how much I should like to see all that!” he said. “Come this evening, toward nine or ten o’clock, and you will see,” I replied. We spent several hours at the little round window of my dressing-room, which looked out toward Châtillon. It was from there that the Germans fired the most. We listened, in the silence of the night, to the muffled sounds coming from there, right over yonder, then there would be a light, a formidable noise in the distance, and the bomb arrived, falling in front of us or behind, bursting either in the air or on reaching its goal. Once we had only just time to draw back quickly, and even then the disturbance in the atmosphere affected us so violently that for a second we were under the impression we had been struck. The shell had fallen just underneath my dressing-room, grazing the cornice, which it dragged down in its fall to the ground, and bursting there feebly. But what was our amazement to see a little crowd of children swoop down on the burning pieces, just like a lot of sparrows on fresh manure when the carriage has passed! The little vagabonds were quarreling over the _débris_ of these engines of warfare. I wondered what they could possibly do with them. “Oh, there is not much mystery about it!” said Boyer; “these little starving urchins will sell them.” This proved to be true. One of the men attendants, whom I sent to find out, brought back with him a child of about ten years old. “What are you going to do with that, my little man?” I asked him, picking up the piece of shell, which was warm and still dangerous, by the edge where it had burst. “I am going to sell it,” he replied. “What for?” “To buy my turn in the _queue_, when the meat is being distributed.” “But you risk your life, my poor child. Sometimes the shells come quickly, one after the other. Where were you when this one fell?” “Lying down on the stone of the wall that supports the iron railings.” He pointed across to the Luxembourg gardens, opposite the _artistes’_ entrance to the Odéon.