The linendraper's words--stray bullets, fighting, firing--completely plunged Gildas into a vertigo that is easily imaginable. He had not expected to find in the St. Denis quarter a stronghold of belligerency. Other events soon crowded upon each other, all conspiring to increase the terror of Gildas. Fresh clamors, at first distant, drew perceptibly nearer and nearer, and finally seemed to explode with such fury that not only Lebrenn and his son, but Gildas also, ran to the shop door in order to ascertain what was happening on the street. CHAPTER IX. POPULAR JUSTICE. When, attracted by the growing tumult, Monsieur Lebrenn, his son and Gildas reached the door of the shop, the street was already filled with a large crowd. Windows were flying open and inquisitive heads appeared at them. Presently a flickering reddish glare lighted the house fronts. A vast and swelling flood of people was rushing by. Some preceded, others accompanied the sinister illumination. The uproar grew more and more violent. Now and then, rising above the din, the angry cries could be heard: "To arms!" "Vengeance!" Exclamations of horror kept chorus with the cries. Women, who, attracted by the noise, looked out of their windows, recoiled with horror as if anxious to escape the sight of some frightful vision. Their hearts gripped with apprehension, and drops of sweat standing out upon their foreheads, the linendraper and his son realized that some horrible spectacle was approaching, and remained motionless upon their threshold. Finally the procession hove in sight. An innumerable mass of men in blouses, in bourgeois dress and also in the uniform of the National Guard, and brandishing guns, swords, knives and sticks, preceded a cart, that was slowly drawn by a horse, and that was surrounded by a number of men bearing torches. In the cart lay heaped up a mass of corpses. A tall man with a scarlet hat on his head, naked from the waist up, and his breast bleeding from a recent wound, stood erect in the front part of the cart, carrying aloft a burning flambeau, which he waved to right and left. He might have been taken for the genius of Vengeance and of Revolution. At each movement of his flambeau, he lighted with a ruddy glare to the left of him the bloodstained head of an old man, to the right the bust of a woman whose arms, like her bleeding head, half veiled by her disheveled hair, dangled down over the edge of the cart. From time to time the man with the scarlet hat waved his torch and cried out in stentorian tones: "They are butchering our brothers! Vengeance! To the barricades! To arms!" And thousands of voices, trembling with indignation and rage, repeated: "Vengeance! To the barricades! To arms!" Whereupon thousands of arms, some equipped with weapons, others not, rose up toward the somber and threatening sky as if to take it to witness of the vengeful pledges.