The Downfall Part 64

His heart overflowing with bitter anguish, Jean turned and looked out on Paris. The setting sun lay on the edge of the horizon, and its level rays bathed the city in a flood of vividly red light. The windows in thousands of houses flamed as if lighted by fierce fires within; the roofs glowed like beds of live coals; bits of gray wall and tall, sober-hued monuments flashed in the evening air with the sparkle of a brisk fire of brushwood. It was like the show-piece that is reserved for the conclusion of a _fete_, the huge bouquet of gold and crimson, as if Paris were burning like a forest of old oaks and soaring heavenward in a rutilant cloud of sparks and flame. The fires were burning still; volumes of reddish smoke continued to rise into the air; a confused murmur in the distance sounded on the ear, perhaps the last groans of the dying Communists at the Lobau barracks, or it may have been the happy laughter of women and children, ending their pleasant afternoon by dining in the open air at the doors of the wine-shops. And in the midst of all the splendor of that royal sunset, while a large part of Paris was crumbling away in ashes, from plundered houses and gutted palaces, from the torn-up streets, from the depths of all that ruin and suffering, came sounds of life.

Then Jean had a strange experience. It seemed to him that in the slowly fading daylight, above the roofs of that flaming city, he beheld the dawning of another day. And yet the situation might well be considered irretrievable. Destiny appeared to have pursued them with her utmost fury; the successive disasters they had sustained were such as no nation in history had ever known before; defeat treading on the heels of defeat, their provinces torn from them, an indemnity of milliards to be raised, a most horrible civil war that had been quenched in blood, their streets c.u.mbered with ruins and unburied corpses, without money, their honor gone, and order to be re-established out of chaos! His share of the universal ruin was a heart lacerated by the loss of Maurice and Henriette, the prospect of a happy future swept away in the furious storm! And still, beyond the flames of that furnace whose fiery glow had not subsided yet, Hope, the eternal, sat enthroned in the limpid serenity of the tranquil heavens. It was the certain a.s.surance of the resurrection of perennial nature, of imperishable humanity; the harvest that is promised to him who sows and waits; the tree throwing out a new and vigorous shoot to replace the rotten limb that has been lopped away, which was blighting the young leaves with its vitiated sap.

"Farewell!" Jean repeated with a sob.

"Farewell!" murmured Henriette, her bowed face hidden in her hands.

The neglected field was overgrown with brambles, the roof-tree of the ruined house lay on the ground; and Jean, bearing his heavy burden of affliction with humble resignation, went his way, his face set resolutely toward the future, toward the glorious and arduous task that lay before him and his countrymen, to create a new France.

THE END.