Then she began to question them, anxious to know what was taking place at Bazeilles, whether they had seen her husband there, and what had been the condition of her house at the time they came away. In their shivering fright, however, they gave contradictory answers. No, they had not seen Monsieur Weiss. But at this, one of the little girls declared that she _had_ seen him; he was lying on the footway, said she, with a big hole in his head. Her father thereupon gave her a smack to teach her not to tell such stories, for a story it was, undoubtedly. As for the house, that must have been standing when they came away; in fact, they now remembered noticing, as they passed it, that the door and the windows were all carefully closed, as if nobody were there. Besides, at that time, the Bavarians were only in possession of the Place de l'Eglise, and they had to conquer the village, street by street, house by house. Since then, however, they must have made no little progress, and at the present time, no doubt, all Bazeilles was on fire.[27] And the wretched couple continued talking of all these things with fumbling gestures of fear, evoking the whole frightful vision of flaming roofs, flowing blood, and corpses strewing the ground. 'And my husband?' repeated Henriette. They no longer answered her, however; they were sobbing, with their hands before their eyes. And she remained there consumed by atrocious anxiety, but erect and without weakening, merely a faint quiver causing her lips to tremble. What ought she to believe? In vain did she repeat that the child must have been mistaken; still and ever she seemed to see her husband lying across the road with a bullet in his head. Then, too, she was disquieted on thinking of the house where, so it seemed, every shutter was closed. Why was that? Was he no longer there? All at once a conviction that he was dead froze her heart to the core. Perhaps, though, he was only wounded, and at this thought her urgent longing to go there and be with him seized hold of her once more, and so imperiously that she would again have tried to make her way through the ranks of the soldiers had not the bugles at that moment sounded the advance.