It may well be that similar phenomena occur sometimes without attracting our attention; yet, on that day, to three persons occupying neighboring rooms in a hotel, to others also, who had spoken of it at dinner or in the evening, that sunset appeared utterly unusual, and such as might justify all gossiping conjectures as to the relations of the earth with the marvellous changes, stupendous in their nature, which take place in the vault of heaven. Above the quiet sea the whole horizon was a fiery furnace, blazing with intense fervency, across which were spread, like fragments of slashed flesh, long clouds of a livid bluish red. Before long the intense fire died down, as if all the combustible matter had been devoured by the fury of the flames. Then the disk of the sun appeared in outline, like a gigantic blood-blister, like a crystal bowl so overful that the viscous liquid was escaping by some fissure and spreading to right and left into a marsh, a lake, an ocean of human serum, flowing in every direction toward rivers with contracted banks, which upheaved against it a formidable tide. Suddenly the sinister blister burst of itself and was absorbed in the mass of burning matter, or of thick waters, heavy and foul, and became thin streams like those that trickle from a slaughter-house. No, truly, it was no vertigo of the imagination, no hallucination of the vision, no compliant romance; it was a real picture, symbolic of aspect, preceding, like an inadequate vignette, the flaming pages of the great book of history that had just been opened. In Odette's soul it had been like a curtain that falls before a new act; once the curtain is raised, one's expectation is fixed; no more light comedy, no more pleasant extravaganzas, no more ballet! The tragedy is about to begin. With a bound her fevered memory overleaped several months of war. They had entered an atmosphere of fire; it was hard, but they endured it. Alsace: a breath of wild hope, penultimate moment of Old France; Belgium: enthusiasm first, horror afterward; alliances: prognostications, so-called assured, as to the "final result"; invasion: a march to the scaffold in which the condemned cling to a hope of the improbable; the Marne: the improbable realized, for which no one had dared to hope; the enemy grappled with and hurled back; the fall of Antwerp, of which so many folk, who will appear again in the end, insist that "it has not the least importance."