It was now twelve o’clock, all fighting had ceased, and the first Prussians who had arrived were masters of the town. Others were arriving from various directions; a heavy silence reigned over the town. The mayor, M. Lefort, led by a Prussian officer who covered him with a revolver whenever he addressed him, was treated as a hostage responsible for absolute submission. Every door in the small Town Hall was opened in succession in order to see that there were no arms hidden. The mayor was each time made to pass first, so that he should receive the shot in case of a surprise. In the library, three flags, which General Delort had brought back from the Rhine campaign when he was a captain in the cavalry and given to his native town, were torn down and the general’s bust overturned. The sergeant, violently entering the suspected house with his men, found a whole family peacefully sitting down to their dinner--the husband, wife, a son of nineteen, and two young daughters. The invaders made no search nor asked any questions of those poor people, who had probably done nothing worse than to offer a few glasses of wine to French soldiers as they passed. The sergeant did not even ask the name of the master of the house (Antoine Ducret, aged fifty-nine), but seized him by his coat and ordered his men to seize the son too. The woman, who rushed to the door in her endeavour to prevent her husband and her son from being thus taken from her, was violently flung to the end of the room, her trembling daughters crouching around her as they listened to the heavy Prussian boots going down the wooden stairs. There is a public drinking fountain not far from the house; Ducret was taken there and placed against a wall. He understood, and cried out, “Spare my son!!” “What do you say?” said the sergeant to the boy. “I will stay with my father,” he answered simply. The father, struck by two bullets at close range, fell at the feet of his son, who was shot down immediately afterwards. The two corpses, afterwards mutilated with bayonets, remained lying by the water side; the neighbours succeeded in preventing the mother and her two daughters from leaving their house until the bodies had been placed in a coffin. On the tombs of Antoine and Charles Ducret the equivocal inscription was placed “Fell at Arbois, January 25, 1871, under Prussian fire.” For the honour of humanity, a German officer, having heard these details, offered the life of the sergeant to Ducret’s widow; but she entertained no thoughts of revenge. “His death would not give them back to me,” she said.