In the morning the house was filled with savage yells. People were heard
rushing up the stairs, and the door was burst in. She jumped up at the
crash and flung herself down on her knees in a corner with her face to
the wall. There was a murderous uproar, she heard two shots fired, then
somebody seized her by the arm and pulled her up to her feet. It was
Scevola. He dragged her to the door. The bodies of her father and mother
were lying across the doorway. The room was full of gunpowder smoke. She
wanted to fling herself on the bodies and cling to them, but Scevola
took her under the arms and lifted her over them. He seized her hand and
made her run with him, or rather dragged her downstairs. Outside on the
pavement some dreadful men and many fierce women with knives joined
them. They ran along the streets brandishing pikes and sabres, pursuing
other groups of unarmed people, who fled round corners with loud
shrieks.
“I ran in the midst of them, Monsieur l’Abbé,” Arlette went on in a
breathless murmur. “Whenever I saw any water I wanted to throw myself
into it, but I was surrounded on all sides, I was jostled and pushed and
most of the time Scevola held my hand very tight. When they stopped at a
wine shop they would offer me some wine. My tongue stuck to the roof of
my mouth and I drank. The wine, the pavements, the arms and faces,
everything was red. I had red splashes all over me. I had to run with
them all day, and all the time I felt as if I were falling down, and
down, and down. The houses were nodding at me. The sun would go out at
times. And suddenly I heard myself yelling exactly like the others. Do
you understand, Monsieur l’Abbé? The very same words!”
The eyes of the priest in their deep orbits glided towards her and then
resumed their far-away fixity. Between his fatalism and his faith he was
not very far from the belief of Satan taking possession of rebellious
mankind, exposing the nakedness of hearts like flint and of the
homicidal souls of the Revolution.
“I have heard something of that,” he whispered stealthily.
She affirmed with quiet earnestness: “Yet at that time I resisted with
all my might.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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