Weiss rushed up furiously. He was stammering, and oaths alone could give expression to his feelings: 'Curse them! Curse them!' he shouted. Yes, she was indeed dead. He had stooped down and felt her hands. As he was rising again his eyes encountered the blotched face of little Auguste, who had raised his head to look at his mother. The lad said nothing, he did not shriek or cry, but his large eyes, full of fever, were quite dilated as they gazed upon that frightfully mangled body, which he could no longer recognise. 'Curse them!' shouted Weiss at last, 'so now they are killing women!' He had again drawn himself erect, and he shook his fist at the Bavarians, whose helmets were once more appearing to view in the direction of the church. Then the sight of the roof of his house, half broken in by the fallen chimney, put the finishing touch to his mad exasperation. 'You dirty blackguards!' he shouted, 'you kill women and you knock my house to pieces! No, no, it is impossible, I can't go off like that; I shall stay!' He darted into the courtyard of the dyeworks, and bounded back again, carrying the chassepot and cartridge pouch of the dead soldier. For use on important occasions, when he was desirous of seeing anything very distinctly, he always carried a pair of spectacles in his pocket, though he seldom wore them through a coquettish regard for the feelings of his young wife. Now, however, he promptly took off his folding glasses and put on his spectacles; and then this stout civilian, whose good-natured, full face was quite transfigured by anger, who looked almost comical yet superb in his heroism, began to fire, aiming at the detachment of Bavarians massed at the end of the street. It was in his blood, as he was wont to say; he had longed to stretch some of them on the ground ever since hearing the stories of 1814, related to him in his childish days, in his Alsatian home. 'Ah! the dirty blackguards, the dirty blackguards!' And still he kept on firing--so rapidly in fact that the barrel of his chassepot began to burn his fingers.