let the whole city go up in flame, let its people be cleansed by the fiery purification!  But a sight that he saw presently filled him with surprise:  a band of five or six men came hurrying out of the building, headed by a tall varlet in whom he recognized Chouteau, his former comrade in the squad of the 106th.  He had seen him once before, after the 18th of March, wearing a gold-laced kepi; he seemed by his bedizened uniform to have risen in rank, was probably on the staff of some one of the many generals who were never seen where there was fighting going on.  He remembered the account somebody had given him of that fellow Chouteau, of his quartering himself in the Palace of the Legion of Honor and living there, guzzling and swilling, in company with a mistress, wallowing with his boots on in the great luxurious beds, smashing the plate-glass mirrors with shots from his revolver, merely for the amusement there was in it.  It was even asserted that the woman left the building every morning in one of the state carriages, under pretense of going to the Halles for her day’s marketing, carrying off with her great bundles of linen, clocks, and even articles of furniture, the fruit of their thieveries.  And Maurice, as he watched him running away with his men, carrying a bucket of petroleum on his arm, experienced a sickening sensation of doubt and felt his faith beginning to waver.  How could the terrible work they were engaged in be good, when men like that were the workmen?

Hours passed, and still he fought on, but with a bitter feeling of distress, with no other wish than that he might die.  If he had erred, let him at least atone for his error with his blood!  The barricade across the Rue de Lille, near its intersection with the Rue du Bac, was a formidable one, composed of bags and casks filled with earth and faced by a deep ditch.  He and a scant dozen of other federates were its only defenders, resting in a semi-recumbent position on the ground, infallibly causing every soldier who exposed himself to bite the dust.  He lay there, without even changing his position, until nightfall, using up his cartridges in silence, in the dogged sullenness of his despair.  The dense clouds of smoke from the Palace of the Legion of Honor were billowing upward in denser masses, the flames undistinguishable as yet in the dying daylight, and he watched the fantastic, changing forms they took as the wind whirled them downward to the street.  Another fire had broken out in an hotel not far away.  And all at once a comrade came running up to tell him that the enemy, not daring to advance along the street, were making a way for themselves through the houses and gardens, breaking down the walls with picks.  The end was close at hand; they might come out in the rear of the barricade at any moment.  A shot having been fired from an upper window of a house on the corner, he saw Chouteau and his gang, with their petroleum and their lighted torch, rush with frantic speed to the buildings on either side and climb the stairs, and half an hour later, in the increasing darkness, the entire square was in flames, while he, still prone on the ground behind his shelter, availed himself of the vivid light to pick off any venturesome soldier who stepped from his protecting doorway into the narrow street.