Other houses were now blazing--all Bazeilles was becoming a furnace. Flames were beginning to stream through the lofty windows of the church. Some soldiers were driving an old lady out of her house after compelling her to give them some matches that they might set her bed and her curtains on fire. What with all the lighted wisps of straw flung here and there, and all the petroleum poured upon the walls, the conflagrations were spreading from street to street. It was warfare as waged by savages--savages infuriated by the duration of the struggle, and avenging their dead, their heaps of dead over whom they had to march. Bands of men were yelling amid the smoke and the sparks, amid all the fearful uproar compounded of dying groans and shrieks, falling walls, and discharges of musketry. They could scarcely see one another; large clouds of livid dust, impregnated with an insufferable stench of fat and blood, as though laden indeed with all the abominations of the massacre, flew up, obscuring the sun. And they were still killing, still destroying in every corner; the human beast was let loose, all the idiotic anger, all the furious madness of man preying upon man. And, at last, in front of him, Weiss could see his own house burning. Soldiers had hurried up with torches, and others were feeding the flames with the remnants of the furniture. The ground floor speedily blazed, and the smoke poured forth from all the gaping wounds of the roof and the front. The adjacent dyeworks, too, were already catching fire; and--oh, the pity of it!--little Auguste, lying in bed, delirious with fever, could still be heard calling for his mother, whose skirts were beginning to burn as her corpse, with its head pounded to pieces, lay there across the threshold. 'Mother, I'm so thirsty; mother, give me some water.' But the flames roared, the plaint ceased, and then nothing could be distinguished save the deafening hurrahs of the conquerors! All at once, however, above every noise, above all the shouting, there arose a terrible cry. It was Henriette arriving--Henriette, who had just espied her husband standing with his back to a wall, in front of a platoon which was loading its weapons. She sprang upon his neck: 'My God! what is it? They are not going to kill you!' Weiss gazed at her in stupefaction. 'Twas she, his wife whom he had so long desired, whom he had adored with such idolising tenderness. And with a shudder he awoke, distracted, to the awful reality. Why had he tarried there firing upon the foe instead of returning to her, as he had sworn to do? His lost happiness flashed before his dizzy eyes; they were to be torn asunder, parted for evermore. Then he was struck by the sight of the blood upon her forehead, and in a mechanical voice he stammered, 'Are you wounded? It was madness for you to come----' With a wild gesture, however, she interrupted him. 'Oh! me; it's nothing, a mere scratch--but you, why are they keeping you? I won't have them shoot you!'