Where two streets cross, there is a crowd before a house, the walls of which have been freshly scratched; a shell fell there, just now, without any useful result, as without any excuse. A mere brutal jest, to say: "You know, we are here!" A mere game, a question of killing a few people, choosing Sunday morning because there are more people in the streets. But, in truth, one would say that this city has completely made up its mind to being under the savage field-glasses ambushed on the neighboring hillsides; these passers-by stop a minute to look at the wall, the marks of the bits of iron, and then quietly continue their Sunday walk. This time it was some women, they tell us, and little girls that this neat jest laid low in pools of blood; they tell us that; and they think no more of it, as if it were a very small thing in days like these.... Now the district becomes deserted; closed houses, a silence, as of mourning. And at the end of a street, the great gray doors appear, the high pointed arches marvellously chiseled, the high towers. Not a sound, and not a living soul on the square where the phantom basilica still sits enthroned, and an icy wind blows there, under an opaque sky. It still keeps its place as by a miracle, the basilica of Rheims, but so riddled and torn that one divines that it is ready to founder at the slightest shock; it gives the impression of a great mummy, still upright and majestic, but which a mere nothing will turn to ashes. The ground is strewn with precious relics of it. It has been hurriedly surrounded with a solid barrier of white boards, within which its holy dust has formed heaps: fragments of rose-windows, broken piles of stained glass, heads of angels, the joined hands of saints. From the top of the tower to the base, the charred stone has taken on a strange color of cooked flesh, and the holy personages, still upright in rows on the cornices, have been peeled, as it were, by the fire; they no longer have faces or fingers, and, with their human forms, which still persist, they look like the dead drawn up in files, their contours vaguely indicated under a sort of reddish grave-clothes. We make the circuit of the square without meeting anyone, and the barrier which isolates the fragile and still admirable phantom is everywhere solidly closed. As for the old palace adjoining the basilica, the episcopal palace where the kings of France came to rest on the day of their consecration, it is no longer anything more than a ruin, without windows or roof, everywhere licked and blackened by the flame.