September 2, about eleven in the morning, I heard the sound of a signal gun, to which were quickly added the rapid clanging of the tocsin and the roll of drums. The news of the taking of Longwy by the Prussians had spread through Paris the previous night, and had thrown the people into consternation. I left my ironsmithy and hastily donned my uniform of the National Guard, in order to assemble with my Section of the Pikes. I was about to go to Victoria's room, where I supposed she was, as usual, busy sewing, when I saw her come in from out-of-doors. "I was about to go in and tell you that I was bound for my Section," I said to her. "What is forward in Paris?" "The great day of reprisals has dawned at last," replied my sister shrilly; "O, age-long martyrs of the Kings, the nobles, and the clergy! O, shades of our fathers, of our mothers! Daughters and sons of Joel, rejoice. The hour of vengeance has sounded! Ah, for centuries your sweat, your tears, your blood have flowed! Martyrs of the Kings, priests and nobles, the tyrant issue of a conquering race, at last upon your torturers has descended the day of expiation, the day of retribution!" "Sister," I cried, shuddering for very fear, "what mean you?" But Victoria, the victim of a sort of ecstatic hallucination, continued without seeming to hear me: "Does not the blood of slaves, of serfs, of vassals, despoiled, exploited, tortured, immolated by thousands, by seigniory and nobility since the Frankish conquest, cry 'Vengeance!'? Does not the blood of the Arians, massacred by thousands by Clovis's hordes at the word of the priests of Rome, cry 'Vengeance!'? Does not the blood of the Vaudois, of the Albigensians, massacred by thousands by Simon of Montfort's bandits, at the voice of the priests of Rome, cry 'Vengeance!'? Does not the blood of the Reformers, massacred by thousands by the Valois and the Guises, cry 'Vengeance!'? And the Protestants hanged, broken on the wheel, drawn and quartered by the soldiers of Louis XIV, the Grand Monarch? Just God! if all that blood had flowed in a single day, the land of the Gauls would have become one crimson sea! If they should heap together the bones of our fathers, our mothers, the victims of royalty, nobility and clergy, the charnel-pile would graze the heavens!" Victoria's savage eloquence, the light in her glowing eyes, her darksome beauty, which at the moment gave her the aspect of the goddess of Vengeance, wove over me a sort of fascination. The frightful enumeration of the victims of the Kings, the nobles, and the Romish Church, the memory of the martyrs whom we wept in our own family for so many centuries, the general exasperation, which in that moment I shared, against the murderous plots of our eternal enemies, carried away my reason, and while the spell lasted, I, too, believed in the justice of reprisal, and answered: