The furious hootings of the crowd drowned Brunhild's voice; her last effort, put forth in raising herself and speaking to Loysik exhausted her failing strength. She fell over backward, and her inert body jolted up and down over the camel's crupper. Loysik had long struggled against the horror of the shocking spectacle. Hardly had Brunhild's voice ceased to be heard than he felt his head swim and his knees sink under him. But for two poor women, who, struck with compassion for his old age, supported him, the monk would have fallen to the ground and been trampled to death. Loysik remained for a long time deprived of consciousness. When he recovered, night had come. He found himself lying in a hut upon a bed of straw. Beside him sat the young brother, who had succeeded in finding him. The two poor slave women had transported Loysik to their miserable hut. The first words pronounced by the monk, whose mind still labored under the effect of the horrible scene that he had witnessed, was the name of Brunhild. "Good father," said one of the women, "the hated Queen was taken down from the camel; she was then only a corpse; she was fastened with ropes by the hands to the tail of a fiery horse, and the animal was then let loose; but that part of the execution did not last long; at the very first bound given by the horse it shattered Brunhild's head; her skull broke like the shell of a nut, and her brains were scattered in all directions." Suddenly the young monk laborer said to Loysik, pointing in the direction of the glimmer that must have been produced by the reflection of a great but distant fire: "Do you hear those distant yells? Do you see that light?" "That light, my son, is the light cast by the pyre that Clotaire II ordered raised," said one of the two old women; "those yells are the yells of the people dancing around the fire." "What pyre?" asked Loysik with a shudder. "Of what pyre are you speaking?" "After the wild horse broke the head of Brunhild, the people who came to the village in order to see her die besought the King to have the accursed remains of the old she-wolf placed upon a pyre; the King gave his consent before his departure; he departed soon afterwards. The pyre was raised yonder at the square, and the light reaches us." The evening breeze carried to Loysik's ears the cries of frantic joy, uttered by the crowd, wild with the intoxication of vengeance: "Burn, burn, old bones of Brunhild, the accursed! Burn, burn, old accursed bones!" As Loysik caught these words he cried: "Oh, formidable contrast, formidable like the voice of history! The pyre of Brunhild--the pyre of Victoria!" EPILOGUE