He was in the Rue St. Honore now, and speeding westward.  But the flood still rose with him, and roared abreast of him.  Nay, it outstripped him.  When he came, panting, within sight of his goal, and lacked but a hundred paces of it, he found his passage barred by a dense mass of people moving slowly to meet him.  In the heart of the press the light of a dozen torches shone on half as many riders mailed and armed; whose eyes, as they moved on, and the furious gleaming eyes of the rabble about them, never left the gabled roofs on their right.  On these from time to time a white-clad figure showed itself, and passed from chimney-stack to chimney-stack, or, stooping low, ran along the parapet.  Every time that this happened, the men on horseback pointed upwards and the mob foamed with rage.

Tignonville groaned, but he could not help.  Unable to go forward, he turned, and with others hurrying, shouting, and brandishing weapons, he pressed into the Rue du Roule, passed through it, and gained the Bethizy.  But here, as he might have foreseen, all passage was barred at the Hotel Ponthieu by a horde of savages, who danced and yelled and sang songs round the Admiral’s body, which lay in the middle of the way; while to right and left men were bursting into houses and forcing new victims into the street.  The worst had happened there, and he turned panting, regained the Rue St. Honore, and, crossing it and turning left-handed, darted through side streets until he came again into the main thoroughfare a little beyond the Croix du Tiroir, that marked the corner of Mademoiselle’s house.

Here his last hope left him.  The street swarmed with bands of men hurrying to and fro as in a sacked city.  The scum of the Halles, the rabble of the quarter poured this way and that, here at random, there swayed and directed by a few knots of men-at-arms, whose corselets reflected the glare of a hundred torches.  At one time and within sight, three or four houses were being stormed.  On every side rose heart-rending cries, mingled with brutal laughter, with savage jests, with cries of “To the river!” The most cruel of cities had burst its bounds and was not to be stayed; nor would be stayed until the Seine ran red to the sea, and leagues below, in pleasant Normandy hamlets, men, for fear of the pestilence, pushed the corpses from the bridges with poles and boat-hooks.

All this Tignonville saw, though his eyes, leaping the turmoil, looked only to the door at which he had left Mademoiselle a few hours earlier.  There a crowd of men pressed and struggled; but from the spot where he stood he could see no more.  That was enough, however.  Rage nerved him, and despair; his world was dying round him.  If he could not save her he would avenge her.  Recklessly he plunged into the tumult; blade in hand, with vigorous blows he thrust his way through, his white sleeve and the white cross in his hat gaining him passage until he reached the fringe of the band who beset the door.