Angèle fancied her husband was joking. He had at times a taste for immense and disquieting jokes. She laughed, but with a vague fear, at seeing the little man tower above the giant crouched at his feet, and shake his fist at him while ironically pursing his lips. "It's already begun," continued he; "but nothing to speak of as yet. Look over there, beside the Halles, Paris has been cut into four." And with his extended hand, open and sharp edged like a cutlass, he made a motion as though separating the city into four portions. "You're alluding to the Rue de Rivoli and the new Boulevard they are making aren't you?" asked his wife. "Yes, the great window of Paris as it's called. They're clearing away the buildings that hide the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville. But that's mere child's play! It's only good to rouse the public's appetite. When the first improvements are completed the grand work will begin. The city will be pierced in every direction to unite the suburbs to the main artery. The houses will fall amidst clouds of plaster. Look, follow the direction of my hand a minute. From the Boulevard du Temple to the Barrière du Trône will be one gap; then, more this way, from the Madeleine to the Plaine Monceaux will be another; and a third in this direction, another along here, another over there, and still another farther away, in fact gaps everywhere, Paris hacked about as with a sabre, its veins opened, feeding a hundred thousand navvies and masons, traversed right and left by splendid strategical ways which will bring the very forts right into the heart of the old quarters of the city." Night was coming on. His dry and nervous hand kept hacking about in space. Angèle slightly shuddered before this living knife, these iron fingers mercilessly chopping up the boundless mass of dusky roofs. For some little while past the haze of the horizon had been slowly descending from the heights, and she fancied she could hear, beneath the gloom that was gathering in the hollows, a distant and prolonged sound of cracking, as though her husband's hand had really made the openings he had been speaking of, opening up Paris from one end to the other, severing beams, crushing masonry, leaving in its wake long and frightful wounds of demolished walls. The diminutiveness of this hand, implacably hovering over a giant prey, ended by becoming alarming, and whilst it tore open the entrails of the enormous city without an effort, it seemed to assume a strange shimmer of steel in the bluey twilight. "There will be a third artery," continued Saccard, at the end of a pause, as though speaking to himself; "but that one is too distant, I see it less plainly. I have come across only a few signs of it. But it will be pure madness, the infernal gallop of millions, Paris intoxicated and overwhelmed!"