“At all events,” continued Henriette, “you know what is going on in the city; you won’t refuse to tell me that much.”

He gave a smile, so faint as scarce to be perceptible.  “Paris is burning.  Look! come this way, you can see more clearly.”

Leaving the station, he preceded her along the track for a hundred steps or so until they came to an iron foot-bridge that spanned the road.  When they had climbed the narrow stairs and reached the floor of the structure, resting their elbows on the railing, they beheld the broad level plain outstretched before them, at the foot of the slope of the embankment.

“You see, Paris is burning.”

It was in the neighborhood of ten o’clock.  The fierce red glare that lit the southern sky was ever mounting higher.  The blood-red clouds had disappeared from where they had floated in the east; the zenith was like a great inverted bowl of inky blackness, across which ran the reflections of the distant flames.  The horizon was one unbroken line of fire, but to the right they could distinguish spots where the conflagration was raging with greater fury, sending up great spires and pinnacles of flame, of the most vivid scarlet, to pierce the dense opacity above, amid billowing clouds of smoke.  It was like the burning of some great forest, where the fire bridges intervening space, and leaps from tree to tree; one would have said the very earth must be calcined and reduced to ashes beneath the heat of Paris’ gigantic funeral pyre.

“Look,” said Otto, “that eminence that you see profiled in black against the red background is Montmartre.  There on the left, at Belleville and la Villette, there has not been a house burned yet; it must be they are selecting the districts of the wealthy for their work; and it spreads, it spreads.  Look! there is another conflagration breaking out; watch the flames there to the right, how they seethe and rise and fall; observe the shifting tints of the vapors that rise from the blazing furnace.  And others, and others still; the heavens are on fire!”

He did not raise his voice or manifest any sign of feeling, and it froze Henriette’s blood that a human being could stand by and witness such a spectacle unmoved.  Ah, that those Prussians should be there to see that sight!  She saw an insult in his studied calmness, in the faint smile that played upon his lips, as if he had long foreseen and been watching for that unparalleled disaster.  So, Paris was burning then at last, Paris, upon whose monuments the German shells had scarce been able to inflict more than a scratch! and he was there to see it burn, and in the spectacle found compensation for all his grievances, the inordinate length to which the siege had been protracted, the bitter, freezing weather, the difficulties they had surmounted only to see them present themselves anew under some other shape, the toil and trouble they had had in mounting their heavy guns, while all the time Germany from behind was reproaching them with their dilatoriness.  Nothing in all the glory of their victory, neither the ceded provinces nor the indemnity of five milliards, appealed to him so strongly as did that sight of Paris, in a fit of furious madness, immolating herself and going up in smoke and flame on that beautiful spring night.