“And now,” Rose added, “the Emperor is back in his cabinet again, where he is having a conference with two generals who have just come in from the battlefield.”  She checked herself, casting a glance at the main entrance of the building.  “See! there is one of them, now—­and there comes the other.”

He hurried from the room, and in the two generals recognized Ducrot and Douay, whose horses were standing before the door.  He watched them climb into their saddles and gallop away.  They had hastened into the city, each independently of the other, after the plateau of Illy had been captured by the enemy, to notify the Emperor that the battle was lost.  They placed the entire situation distinctly before him; the army and Sedan were even then surrounded on every side; the result could not help but be disastrous.

For some minutes the Emperor continued silently to pace the floor of his cabinet, with the feeble, uncertain step of an invalid.  There was none with him save an aide-de-camp, who stood by the door, erect and mute.  And ever, to and fro, from the window to the fireplace, from the fireplace to the window, the sovereign tramped wearily, the inscrutable face now drawn and twitching spasmodically with a nervous tic.  The back was bent, the shoulders bowed, as if the weight of his falling empire pressed on them more heavily, and the lifeless eyes, veiled by their heavy lids, told of the anguish of the fatalist who has played his last card against destiny and lost.  Each time, however, that his walk brought him to the half-open window he gave a start and lingered there a second.  And during one of those brief stoppages he faltered with trembling lips: 

“Oh! those guns, those guns, that have been going since the morning!”

The thunder of the batteries on la Marfee and at Frenois seemed, indeed, to resound with more terrific violence there than elsewhere.  It was one continuous, uninterrupted crash, that shook the windows, nay, the very walls themselves; an incessant uproar that exasperated the nerves by its persistency.  And he could not banish the reflection from his mind that, as the struggle was now hopeless, further resistance would be criminal.  What would avail more bloodshed, more maiming and mangling; why add more corpses to the dead that were already piled high upon that bloody field?  They were vanquished, it was all ended; then why not stop the slaughter?  The abomination of desolation raised its voice to heaven:  let it cease.

The Emperor, again before the window, trembled and raised his hands to his ears, as if to shut out those reproachful voices.

“Oh, those guns, those guns!  Will they never be silent!”