Again the guns were cocked and the barrels levelled. But the _Vengeurs de Lutèce_ had not much heart left; their leader had vanished; they were disorganized, they were running away; sobered and stupefied, they knew the game was up. They were quite willing all the same to shoot the bourgeois there at the wall, before bolting for covert, each to hide in his own hole. Jean tried to say: "Don't make me suffer more than need be!" but his voice stuck in his throat. One of the _Vengeurs_ cast a look in the direction of the _Pont-au-Change_ and saw that the _fédérés_ were losing ground. Shouldering his musket, he said: "Let's clear out of the bl--y place, by God!" The men hesitated; some began to slink away. At this the _cantinière_ shrieked: "Bl--sted hounds! Then _I'll_ have to do his business for him!" She threw herself on Jean Servien and spat in his face; she abandoned herself to a frantic orgy of obscenity in word and gesture and clapped the muzzle of her revolver to his temple. Then he felt all was over and waited. A thousand things flashed in a second before his eyes; he saw the avenues under the old trees where his aunt used to take him walking in old days; he saw himself a little child, happy and wondering; he remembered the castles he used to build with strips of plane-tree bark... The trigger was pulled. Jean beat the air with his arms and fell forward face to the ground. The men finished him with their bayonets; then the woman danced on the corpse with yells of joy. The fighting was coming closer. A well-sustained fire swept the _Quai_. The woman was the last to go. Jean Servien's body lay stretched in the empty roadway. His face wore a strange look of peacefulness; in the temple was a little hole, barely visible; blood and mire fouled the pretty hair a mother had kissed with such transports of fondness. THE END End of Project Gutenberg's The Aspirations of Jean Servien, by Anatole France