The Debacle - Emile Zola [278]
Hearing steps on the stairs, Henriette had come out on to the landing.
‘Do be careful, today he is in a terribly worked-up state… The doctor has been back and he has upset me!’
Indeed Bouroche had shaken his head and been unable to make any promise as yet. It was still possible that the patient’s youth would bring him through the complications he was afraid of.
‘Ah, it’s you!’ Maurice said feverishly as soon as he saw Jean. ‘I was waiting for you, what’s going on, where have they got to now?’
Propped against his pillow, facing the window he had forced his sister to open, he pointed to the city, now in darkness again but lit up by a new glow from a fire:
‘Look, it’s starting again, Paris is burning. The whole lot of it is burning this time!’
As soon as the sun set, the fire at the Grenier d’Abondance had lit up the districts far away up the Seine. In the Tuileries and the Conseil d’Etat ceilings must have been falling in and reviving the glowing timbers, for small fires had started again and flakes of flame and sparks shot up now and again. Many of the buildings thought to be burnt out flared up again like this. For three days it no sooner got dark than the city seemed to burn up again, as though the darkness itself had blown on the red embers and revived them and scattered them to every point on the horizon. What a hellish city it was, that glowed red when dusk came and illumined with monstrous torches the nights of all that bloody week! On that particular night, when the warehouses of La Villette were burned, the light was so bright all over the great city that this time it was really possible to think it was on fire everywhere, overwhelmed and submerged by the flames… Under a bloody sky the districts of Paris, red as far as the eye could see, were like a rolling sea of fiery roofs.
‘It’s all over!’ Maurice said again. ‘Paris is burning.’
He was intoxicating himself with these words, repeated a score of times in a feverish urge to go on talking after the heavy sleepiness that had kept him silent for three days. But a sound of stifled sobs made him look round.
‘What, little sister, you, so brave!… Crying because I’m going to die?’
She protested, cutting him short.
‘But you aren’t going to die!’
‘Oh yes, I am, and it’s better I should, I must… You know, nothing of any value will go with me. Before the war I gave you so much trouble and cost your heart and your purse so much… All the silly things, all the mad things I’ve done, who knows, they might have brought me to a bad end, prison, the gutter…’
She stopped him again, this time angrily.
‘Shut up, shut up! You’ve paid for it all!’
He fell silent and thoughtful for a moment.
‘When I am dead, perhaps… Oh, dear old Jean, you really did us all a damn good turn when you ran me through with that bayonet.’
But Jean, in tears too, protested.
‘Don’t talk like that! Do you want me to go and bash my brains out against a wall?’
But Maurice went on passionately:
‘Remember what you said the day after Sedan when you maintained that it did no harm sometimes to get a good bashing. And you said, too, that if something had gone rotten somewhere, like a poisoned limb, it was better to see it hacked off and lying on the ground than to die of it like the cholera… I’ve often thought about that since I’ve been on my own and shut up in this crazy, starving Paris… Well, I’m the rotten limb you have lopped off…’
He was growing more delirious