distinctly against the ruddy sky, amid the red tongues that rose to lick its base, while colonnades, entablatures, friezes, carvings, all stood out with startling vividness in the blinding, shimmering glow.  So great was the energy of the fire, so terrible its propulsive force, that the colossal structure was in some sort raised bodily from the earth, trembling and rumbling on its foundations, preserving intact only its four massive walls, in the fierce eruption that hurled its heavy zinc roof high in air.  Then, close at one side were the d’Orsay barracks, which burned with a flame that seemed to pierce the heavens, so purely white and so unwavering that it was like a tower of light.  And finally, back from the river, were still other fires, the seven houses in the Rue du Bac, the twenty-two houses in the Rue de Lille, helping to tinge the sky a deeper crimson, profiling their flames on other flames, in a blood-red ocean that seemed to have no end.

Jean murmured in awed tone: 

“Did ever mortal man look on the like of this! the very river is on fire.”

Their boat seemed to be sailing on the bosom of an incandescent stream.  As the dancing lights of the mighty conflagrations were caught by the ripples of the current the Seine seemed to be pouring down torrents of living coals; flashes of intensest crimson played fitfully across its surface, the blazing brands fell in showers into the water and were extinguished with a hiss.  And ever they floated downward with the tide on the bosom of that blood-red stream, between the blazing palaces on either hand, like wayfarers in some accursed city, doomed to destruction and burning on the banks of a river of molten lava.

“Ah!” exclaimed Maurice, with a fresh access of madness at the sight of the havoc he had longed for, “let it burn, let it all go up in smoke!”

But Jean silenced him with a terrified gesture, as if he feared such blasphemy might bring them evil.  Where could a young man whom he loved so fondly, so delicately nurtured, so well informed, have picked up such ideas?  And he applied himself more vigorously to the oars, for they had now passed the bridge of Solferino and were come out into a wide open space of water.  The light was so intense that the river was illuminated as by the noonday sun when it stands vertically above men’s heads and casts no shadow.  The most minute objects, such as the eddies in the stream, the stones piled on the banks, the small trees along the quais, stood out before their vision with wonderful distinctness.  The bridges, too, were particularly noticeable in their dazzling whiteness, and so clearly defined that they could have counted every stone; they had the appearance of narrow gangways thrown across the fiery stream to connect one conflagration with the other.  Amid the roar of the flames and the general clamor a loud crash occasionally announced the fall of some stately edifice.  Dense clouds of soot hung in the air and settled everywhere, the