was to be seen upon the trottoir.  A brooding silence hung over the little town, a silence so deep as to be almost menacing.  As we entered the main street I encountered a spectacle which froze my heart.  Far as the eye could see along the diminishing perspective of the road were burnt-out homes, houses which once were gay with clematis and wisteria, gardens which had blossomed with the rose.  And now all that remained were trampled flower-beds, tangled creepers, blackened walls, calcined rafters, twisted ironwork, and fallen masonry.  And this was Senlis!  Senlis which had been to the department of the Oise as the apple of its eye, a little town of quality, beautiful as porcelain, fragrant as a rose, and as a rose as sweet.  As I looked upon these desecrated homes it seemed to me that the very stones cried out.

In all this desolation we looked in vain for any signs of life.  It was not until we sought out the house of a captain of dragoons, a friend of my companion the Comte, that we found a human being in these solitudes.  The house was, indeed, a melancholy ruin, but by the gate was a lodge, and in the lodge a concierge.  He was a small man and middle-aged, and as he spoke he trembled with a continual agitation of body as though he were afflicted with ague.  He led us into his little house, the walls of which were blackened as with fire and pierced in many places with the impact of bullets.  And this was his tale.

One afternoon early in September—­it was the second day of the month, he remembered it because there had been an untimely frost over night—­he heard the crackle of musketry on the outskirts of the town, and a column of grey-coated men suddenly appeared in the street.  An officer blew a whistle, and, as some of them broke through the gates of the mansion, the concierge fled across the lawn with bullets buzzing about his ears and shouts of laughter pursuing him as he ran.  In and out among the elms he doubled like a frightened hare, the bullets zip-zipping against the tree-trunks, till he crawled into a disused culvert and lay there panting and exhausted.  From his hiding-place he heard the crash of furniture, more shots, and the loud, ribald laughter of the soldiers.  And then a crackle of flame and a thick smell of smoke.  And after that silence.  At dusk he crawled forth from his culvert, trembling, his hands and face all mottled with stinging-nettles and scratched with thistles; he found his master’s house a smouldering ruin, and a thick pall of smoke lay over the town of Senlis like a fog.  Somewhere a woman shrieked and then was still.  About the hour of nine in the evening the concierge heard voices in disputation outside the lodge-gates, and as he hid himself among the shrubberies more men entered, and, being dissatisfied with their work, threw hand-grenades into the mansion and applied a lighted torch to the concierge’s humble dwelling.  They were very merry and sang lustily—­the concierge thought they had been drinking; they sang thus, “comme ca!” and the concierge mournfully hummed a tune, a tune he had never heard before, but which he would remember all his life.  I recognised it.  It was Luther’s hymn: