One brilliant afternoon in July, five years later, all Paris went crazy. Vast multitudes surged through the streets cheering, laughing, shouting, singing, for were not the days of glory to be repeated? War was declared on Prussia, and, after more than fifty years, the eagles of France were to take their majestic course across the Rhine; again the soldiers of France were to bivouac in every capital in Europe, for once started upon the path of conquest, France has ever been impossible to stop, so thought everybody in Paris that July day.

The streets were like great rivers of humanity, with wild whirlpools and clamoring cataracts, all drifting toward the ocean, and that ocean was the Palace of the Tuilleries. Bands rent the air with the Marseillaise, the great battle hymn of liberty. Often wrested to unworthy purposes, often sung and played by those who hate liberty and love anarchy, the mighty hymn ever remained the battle-cry of those who would be free. Troops were marching along, splendid hussars and chasseurs trotting gayly through the sunlit streets, steady, red-legged infantry swinging along to their barracks, Zouaves in baggy trousers and hanging caps sauntered and swaggered. Officers clattered along joyously as they made a brilliant streak of color in the great river of men and women. Everywhere a uniform was seen a ringing cheer went up from men and women, young and old, palpitating with pride and joy in these men called to repeat the glories of their ancestors. As the Emperor had said, whatever road they took across the frontier they would find glorious traces of their fathers. Wherever the French had crossed in days past, they had left a trail of glory behind them.

Many groups of soldiers loitered along the streets, or stopped to laugh and joke on the street comers. Men clapped them on the back, and handsome young women smiled and waved their hands at them, and gray-haired grandmothers blessed them. Great ladies in their carriages stopped and laughed and talked with private soldiers; even the beggars forgot to beg, and hobnobbed with everybody. A beggar was as good as the best, provided only he were French.

All was sunshine, a splendor of hope, magnificence, joy. Once more France would “gird her beauteous limbs with steel,” and smite with her mailed hand those who would oppress her.

What were her resources? Every man who could carry a musket. What was her matÉriel? All the iron, all the steel, all the lead, all the gunpowder in France. What were her soldiers? Heroes, backed up by all her old men, her children, her maidens, and her matrons.

The crowd was most dense in the splendid open space before the Tuilleries gardens, and extended for a long distance on either side of the palace. The air was drenched with perfume from the gardens; the river ran red like wine, in the old Homeric phrase; the windows of the palace blazed in the afternoon light. On a balcony occasionally appeared the Emperor, who bore the magic name of Napoleon, the Empress, a dream of smiling beauty, and the Prince Imperial, a mere lad, but who was to go out on the firing line along with the veterans.

All the gorgeous carriages and all the graceful horsemen and horsewomen that were usually found at that hour on the Bois de Boulogne formed a great procession moving at a snail’s pace, and often stopped by the congestion in the broad Rue de Rivoli and all the fine streets adjacent.

From many points could be seen the Place VendÔme with the great column made from captured Prussian guns surmounted by the statue of the immortal man who made Europe tremble at his nod.

The police were good-natured, the crowd was amiable; there was tremendous excitement, but no disorder. At the slightest incident, multitudes burst into cheering. The ladies sitting back in their victorias clapped their delicate, gloved hands and waved their filmy handkerchiefs, laughing at the soldiers who paid them bold compliments ten inches away from their faces. The cavaliers and ladies on horseback exchanged patriotic chaff with those who surged about them.

Among the crowd directly in front of the Tuilleries was Jean Leroux, not the Jean Leroux of that winter in Bienville five years before, but another Jean, well dressed, well mannered, successful, but modest withal.

As the carriages moved slowly past, going a few feet and then stopping, blockaded by the crowd, a pretty victoria, well horsed, came directly abreast of Jean Leroux. In it sat Diane, whom he had often seen on the stage in those five years, but to whom he had never had the courage to speak; for if Jean was successful, Diane was a hundred times more so. She was on that day the most popular music-hall artist in Paris. Like Jean, she was Diane and yet not Diane. Her beautiful, mysterious dark eyes were unchanged, her frank, sweet smile was the same, but she was Mademoiselle Dorian, not merely Diane, or worse still, Skinny; that expressed it all. She had eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; she knew the great, ugly, beautiful, laughing, weeping, snarling, generous, wicked, pious world; she was able to take care of herself; she could stand upon her feet and look the ferocious human race in the eye as Una faced the lion.She wore a charming white gown and a lovely flower-crowned hat, and carried a tiny white lace parasol as if she were accustomed to lace parasols. Her white kid gloves were dainty, and a great bunch of white and crimson roses combined with the blue cornflower made a tricolor in her lap, while on her breast was pinned a tricolor rosette.

As her carriage stopped, the crowd recognized her, and a huge shout went up:

“La Dorian! La Dorian!”

Diane was used to this cry. She bowed and smiled prettily, like the experienced actress she was, but that was not what the crowd wanted.

“Sing us La Marseillaise!” they shouted; “you can sing it as no one else can! Sing it, sing it to us!”

Diane stood up in the carriage holding her tricolor bouquet, and a great roar of cheering a thousand times greater than she had ever heard before, stormed the air. Diane stood erect, with her head thrown back.

At last there was silence, and Diane, pointing with her white gloved hand straight at Jean not ten feet away, cried in her clear, practised, penetrating voice:

“There is a man who can sing La Marseillaise better than I can. Bring him here, and make him sing it, too.”

The crowd, cheering and laughing, immediately seized Jean, and, in spite of his modest protests, hurled him into the carriage, where he sat down protesting and embarrassed. While the multitude was quieting down, Diane and he exchanged a few words.

“Why haven’t you been to see me in all these years?” said Diane.

“Because you were too grand,” said Jean. “I didn’t want to thrust myself upon a great artist. You might have thought that I wanted you to do something for me, or to get me an engagement. But I have often gone to the music-halls to hear you.”

“You were always a goose about some things, Jean Leroux!” was Diane’s reply.

And then the silence was complete, and the multitudes that packed the streets a mile on either hand waited to hear the first word of the hymn of battle.As Diane stood up in the carriage, her slim figure grew taller, and her blood turned to fire in her veins; her voice cleft the air like a silver trumpet, sweet and penetrating, and vibrant with patriotic passion. When she proclaimed,

“The day of glory has arrived!”

the effect was like Jeanne d’Arc striking her spear upon her shield. Then came the great refrain,

“Aux armes! Aux armes!”

One voice arose—the voices of tens of thousands, united in one vast ringing call to victory, one great demand for the rights of man, one last appeal to the God of Battles. The mighty echo rose from earth to heaven; it seemed for a time to fill the universe, and then to leave the universe listening for it.

The chorus ceased—a chorus greater than ever mortal ear had heard since first the men of Marseilles marched to the thunder of their battle hymn—and Jean Leroux stood up and sang the second verse. His was the voice of a man ready to march and to fight. The artist’s soul within Diane quivered as she heard Jean’s splendid basso like the tones of the organ of Notre Dame pealing out. Again the refrain was thundered from the multitudes that filled miles of streets, and the sound seemed to shake the towers of the Tuilleries palace. Then it was Diane’s turn to sing the third verse. The nation that produced Jeanne d’Arc respects the patriotism of its women; they are as ready to die for their country as are the men. At the lines,

Diane lifted her eyes to Heaven, and raised her clasped hands above her head. It was like Charlotte Corday demanding God’s blessing, while she armed to do Him service by killing the enemy of His children. Again did the voice of the people make the splendid refrain sound like a great Amen. Men were weeping and clasping each other in their arms. Women with upraised hands prayed for France. The meanest and lowest among them were made respectable by love of country. Never again were any of those who heard the song of the nation sung on that July afternoon, to hear it so sung. They knew it not, but it was for them the last triumphant singing of the hymn of triumph.Diane and Jean sang the hymn through to the end. Then Jean, looking at Diane, saw that she was as pale as death, and she was trembling like an aspen leaf, while floods of tears ran down her cheeks. He spoke to a policeman at the carriage wheel.

“Get us out of here as quickly as you can. This has been too much for Mademoiselle Dorian.”

A couple of brawny policemen, recovering their senses a little, got the horses out of the line, forced back the crowd, and the carriage rattled down one of the small streets leading toward the Champs-ElysÉes.

“Home,” said Jean to the coachman.

He thought the sooner Diane was in some quiet spot the better. He had no idea where she lived.

The horses trotted briskly along, the coachman avoiding the great, thronged thoroughfares. As they drove along, Diane’s composure gradually returned. The color came back to her lips and cheeks, and her tremors stopped.

“It was enough to shake anybody,” said Jean; “I, myself, felt as weak as a cat when I sat down. We have never in our lives heard anything like that. It has not been heard since before Waterloo.”

Diane said little except some murmured reproaches to Jean for not coming to see her.

“All of you forgot me,” she said. “I suppose it was because that tall, red-cheeked, awkward creature who took my place, absorbed you so there was no place even in your memories for me.”

Jean smiled. This was the same Diane.

“No,” he said, “your going seemed to finish up everything. Mademoiselle Rose was not a success. The public did not like her.”

Diane gave a little gasp of vindictive joy.

“That was bad, of course, for the Grandins,” continued Jean, “particularly as they lost FranÇois the same night they lost you.”

“How?”

“God knows. After the performance, when FranÇois acted miserably, and was hissed and hit on the head by a cabbage thrown at him—and he deserved it for his bad acting, and nearly breaking Madame Grandin’s neck in his acrobatic turn—he disappeared. Grandin owed him some money, too. All we could ever find out was, that FranÇois was seen during the night on board the old boat, tied up on the riverside. The police saw a man with a lantern moving about the boat. They went on board, and found it was FranÇois, and they drove him off. Oddly enough, not two hours later, there was a fire on the dock, and the wind blew the sparks to the boat, and it was burned to the water’s edge. You may imagine, with you and FranÇois gone, and Mademoiselle Rose a flat failure, and the boat burned up, it was pretty serious for Grandin. They had a little money, you know, and so they gave up the show business and went to a little town in the French Alps and took to raising chickens. It was as if, with your going, the old life and everything melted away like a dream.”

“And then, what did you do?”

“Oh, I got an engagement in the Bienville theatre that took me through the season. I got on very well, and in two years I came to Paris.”

“And how about that scamp, the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel?” asked Diane in a perfectly natural voice.

“I didn’t like to mention him,” answered Jean; “I thought you might—perhaps—well, I—”

“You needn’t mind,” promptly responded Diane; “I was a great fool, of course, but no more so than any other inexperienced girl in my position. I thought I loved him. I know now that he was nothing more than a peg to hang my emotions on. It sounded so grand to be a marquise!”

She laughed so naturally and unaffectedly, that a great load was lifted from Jean’s heart. The Marquis was rightly appraised by Diane, and she had no regrets for such a scoundrel. Then she kept on, still laughing:

“I should have been perfectly ridiculous as a marquise!”

“He was kicked out of the army,” said Jean.

“Served him right,” replied Diane, vigorously. “One thing rejoices me—that awful whack I let him have in the face, and I shall always love you, Jean, for the beating you gave him. He deserved it all for his treatment of his wife and child. What became of the poor lady?”

“She went to the Marquis’ colonel and told him the whole story. The Marquis made a stiff fight because he had powerful family connections, but they got rid of him. It was really true, though, that he meant to marry you and commit bigamy.”

“Oh, Jean,” cried Diane with the deepest feeling, “how often have I though of poor FranÇois’ saying, that God takes care of women and fools and drunken people! If I had married the Marquis, I should have killed him, certainly.”

“But tell me,” said Jean, “how did you get up in the world so quickly?”

“Because I am a woman and a fool,” answered Diane with great simplicity. “I had a hundred and fifty-two francs—”

“After you had given half you had to the other woman,” interjected Jean.

“And I travelled third class to Paris. On the train I bought a newspaper and looked out for all the advertisements of singing teachers whose terms were reasonable. I found one in a musician and his wife. They took me to live in their house for what board I could pay. The singing master said at once that I had a better voice than I supposed, and he got me into the chorus at the Opera. That paid me something, and I worked, I can tell you, at my singing. The first engagement I had was at a cheap place on the other side of the river, but I went on steadily, earning more money and more people knowing me. I didn’t visit Bohemia, nor go out to supper, nor do any of those crazy things that ruin the voice. I think my singing teacher valued my voice above my soul, but at all events, the time came when I was able to pay him well for his trouble, and began to lay up something comfortable for myself. And here I am.”

“And buy diamonds,” suggested Jean. “I saw you blazing with them.”

Diane laughed scornfully.

“No you didn’t,” she said. “They were pure paste. I am not half such a fool in some ways as you think. But why, why didn’t you come to see me? How could you look at me when I was singing and not think enough of the old days to seek me out?”

“Because you were too grand,” replied Jean. “I took the paste things for real diamonds.”

Presently they reached in a quiet street a small, pretty house with a charming little garden. Jean was surprised; he expected to find something much grander, and plainly said so.

“No indeed,” answered Diane, dismissing the coachman and showing Jean the way through the drawing-room by glass doors down the steps into the pretty garden. “I think I am of a saving turn. I know what very few singers do, and that is, one day my voice will be gone, so I am saving my money now, that I may be able to live here always, and have you to tea with me in the summer afternoons. I always knew I would see you, Jean, and tell you this.”

Jean scowled fiercely at Diane. She was making fun of him and his honest and modest love, but he did not think she ought to say such things to any man. So he declined to notice Diane’s speech. When they took their seats on the iron chairs in the garden before the little tea-table, Diane continued her confidences:

“When the foolish men would send me diamonds, I would coolly exchange them for paste and pocket the difference. No indeed, I have heard of music-hall artists with a great many diamonds who were sold out by their creditors.”

Jean looked at Diane with admiration.“I didn’t think you had so much sense, Diane,” he said.

Then the maid brought the tea, and they sat in the sunny garden until the purple dusk came and a new moon smiled at them from a sky half ruby and half sapphire.

They talked much of the coming war. Jean, who was a capital shot, was to join the franc-tierurs.

“I could not keep on singing, you know, when I could be potting the Prussians.”

“As for me,” replied Diane, “I shall keep on singing as a patriotic duty. These Parisians look upon their theatres and operas and music-halls as a barometer. As long as these are open and we sing and dance and play for this great tyrant, Paris, so long will she believe that all is going well, but let us once stop, and she will become panic-stricken. However, I expect to sing before our Emperor in Berlin next season.”

This seemed quite natural and reasonable to Jean, and Diane, laughing, but wholly in earnest, promised him an engagement to sing with her.

“For you know, Jean, you would have been just as high up as I am, except that I had more impudence. Now that you have had your tea, come into the drawing-room and let us sing together some of the old songs and do some of the old tricks. I have a companion who can thump the piano a little for us.”

Diane ran into the drawing-room, called for her companion, a decorous and withered person, Madame Dupin, who sat down to the piano and managed the accompaniment while Diane and Jean sang some of the old songs together with immense spirit. Then Diane proposed to do their singing act together, which meant a love scene and a quarrel that had always brought down the house in the cheap music-hall in Bienville. Jean remembered it well enough—only too well. The memory of the pangs he suffered when Diane, after she met the Marquis, would hold away from him and would not throw herself into his arms as a real actress should, was vivid and painful. But in the pretty drawing-room with Madame Dupin playing away at the piano, Diane hurled herself into Jean’s arms and acted as if inspired. When the quarrel came, it was acted so naturally that Diane’s man-servant, who was peeping through the door, suddenly rushed in and, seizing Jean by the collar, shouted:

“I will report you to the police for abusing and insulting my lady!”

This amused Diane so much that she threw herself on the sofa convulsed with laughter, and Jean laughed as he had not done since he last saw Diane, while the man-servant, when the circumstances were explained, ran away sheepishly, to be the laughing-stock of his fellow-servants.

It was all so merry and free, and like a last look at a happy past, when before one lies victory, but with it, war and guns and wounds and death.

Jean gave himself barely time to hurry back in a cab to his music-hall, while Diane rushed upstairs to make ready for her own performance.

Great as had been Diane’s fame before, it grew greater in those days when France marched forth to conquer Europe again, and was smitten on every hand.

In August and September, when disaster followed disaster, and the universe seemed tumbling to pieces, Diane still sang La Marseillaise every night at the music-hall. It seemed to comfort and put new courage into the hearts of her listeners, mostly striplings and weaklings and old men who could not go to fight the Prussians, and could only hate them from afar. The music-hall did a rushing business; many persons skimped their daily bread to save a couple of francs that would take them into the music-hall where Diane with her glorious singing would reanimate their fainting souls. Not even when the siege began did Diane cease her singing. The prices were then put down, and the hall was not so full, but all came who could.

Jean was gone. He was in the armies that were defeated, or that melted away, or that never existed except on paper. But he was never captured. Two or three times in those frightful months, Diane got a brief line from him. Once he wrote:

“Whom do you think I have seen? FranÇois! And FranÇois decorated on the field, too! But the next day, he was found dead drunk—he had sold his boots for liquor—so he disappeared. We had some talk, however. He asked about you, and said he always knew Skinny would come into her own. I inquired what he had been doing for a living in the last five years, and he said he had been picking flowers off century plants for his living. You see, he is the same FranÇois, but as brave as if he were honest.”

One morning in January, every door and window in Paris was closed and barred. The Prussians were marching in through the Arc de Triomphe, and the gayest city in the world lay as if dead in her grave-clothes on that winter morning. Not a wheel turned in Paris that day; even the dead remained unburied. No theatre or music-hall opened that evening, nor was there a note of music heard in the whole city. Paris was indeed the city of Dreadful Night. Then, after a little breathing spell like that given a man when shackles are put on his feet and handcuffs on his wrists, Paris, the conquered city, sat in her sackcloth bewailing herself for her lost glory. And presently, in her wretchedness and despair, some of her children were turned to devils and fought and mocked her and lacerated her and dragged her shrieking and blood-covered in the mire of disgrace. The frightful orgie of the Commune was an episode in hell for the great, beautiful, miserable, burning, starving, shrieking city.

Through it all Diane sang, not with the rich, full voice of a well-fed, well-sleeping woman, but with diminished volume and a little off the key; for in those days it was remarked that all voices were raised a semitone higher.

How the months passed when the Commune, that concentration of wickedness, that collection of fiends who sought to murder their country in her hour of misery, few who lived through it could describe; certainly Diane could not. Food and money were scarce enough, though there was not actual starvation as during the siege, but the guns from Montmartre thundered incessantly, and those who were to rescue Paris had to surround her and fight their way inch by inch.

It was in the springtime, and the horse chestnuts in the Champs-ElysÉes were pushing out their green leaves through their pale pink sheaths, and the insensate sky was blue and gold by day and black and silver by night. From the beginning it was bad enough, but as the sun grew warmer and the days more halcyon in their beauty, the hell made by men grew worse, the roaring of the guns more constant. The frightful disorders in the streets, murders and horrible orgies, were more frequent. The Commune died hard, as wild boars do. The great city had no defenders within her lines, and lay at the mercy of fiends. The few men who had crept back from the battle-fields could do nothing, and when the Communards in their dirty National Guard uniforms began to be pressed hard and caught in their traps like rats, they began to throw barricades across the streets and fight behind them, wildly and foolishly.

Diane still lived in her small house, although the neighborhood was daily growing more dangerous; the tide of fighting was pouring that way, and the quiet street resounded with the rattle of ammunition wagons and the yells and shouts of drunken National Guards, who were yet not too drunk to fight. The small house remained closed, and the two women within it—Diane and old Marie, a faithful creature whom Diane had picked up some years before—lived in two cellar rooms. There, they were reasonably safe. They dwelt in darkness, because they had few candles, and would have been afraid to show lights if they could. When the one dim candle was lighted, all windows, doors, cracks, and crannies were tightly closed to give the idea of an uninhabited house. The upstairs had long been dismantled, and there was little there to steal.

In those terrible spring days, neither Diane nor the old woman ever so much as showed themselves in the garden, and only stole forth by night to buy such meagre supplies as they could afford. For Diane was no longer well off. She had given freely of her store to her country, and unless she could once more sing to crowded audiences, she would die as poor as when she first set foot in Paris with her hundred and fifty-two francs in her pocket.

One afternoon in the last of May when the fighting had grown fiercer, the incessant booming of the guns nearer, and the sharp crack of the mitrailleuse louder and more frequent, a great crash resounded in the street before Diane’s house. The mob of National Guards had upset a cart-load of stones, and were beginning to tear up the pavement to make one of those simple but effective barricades that were sometimes better than a good many fortifications. It only took a couple of hours to build this fort in the street, and it was one of the best barricades so built in Paris, because it was directed by a man trained as a soldier, who had once been called the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel. Diane’s first view of him after she had slapped his face was as he stood or walked about the narrow street, now crowded and noisy with disorderly National Guards.

The Marquis had changed considerably for the worse in his appearance. Six years before he had been of superb figure and handsome face, and dressed with military elegance. Now, he was red and bloated and slouchy and dirty. His voice had once been sweet and persuasive. Now, it was a bellow of rage and drink, but enough sense was left amid his degradation yet to do some harm to his fellow-men, and the barricade would have been a credit to an engineer.

Many persons had warned Diane to leave her house and seek refuge somewhere else, but this she refused. Now it was too late. For any woman to show herself was to court death and horrors unspeakable.

Against a house on the opposite side of the street was piled wood enough to start a fire when the Communards were ready, for, if they could no longer defend a point, they set fire to the surrounding buildings. Meanwhile, the real French soldiers rigidly carried out their plan to surround and overwhelm the Communards without destroying the city, and ever the cordon tightened. On this May morning it drew closer around the barricaded spot, and there was fighting in the near-by street. But seeing the danger of fire, the French commander in that quarter played a waiting game.

In the afternoon the day grew dark, and in the evening came a small, fine rain with the darkness. An adventurous young officer tried to carry the barricade under the cover of night, but Colonel Egmont, as the Marquis now called himself, had enough of the devil’s wit left in him to drive off the attacking party.

Diane, peering through the chinks of a closed jalousie, saw in the darkness the red-legged soldiers retiring, carrying off with them a couple of dead men and some wounded ones. In the dense shadows, however, two French soldiers remained who were not missed. One was a small man lying flat on his face with a bullet wound through his leg and another in his shoulder. The other was a big man with blood dripping from the back of his neck, who scrambled to his feet and knelt over the little man whose head rested against the tall iron door that led into Diane’s garden. In a minute or two the door was softly opened and Diane whispered:

“Come in quickly before you are seen. There is a cellar to the house where you can be safe for a little while, at least.”

The big man picked the small man up in his arms and slipped within the garden, Diane softly locking and barring the iron door behind him, and, running around to the back of the house, lifted the lid of a cellar door, showing some narrow stone steps that led down into the black cave of the cellars. As she did this, she recognized Jean in the big man, and FranÇois in the small man he was carrying, and Jean recognized her.FranÇois’ soul was not in this world at that moment, although it was shortly to return to his body.

Jean and Diane wasted no time in polite inquiries after each other’s health.

“Can you carry his legs?” asked Jean in a whisper.

“Yes,” replied Diane, slipping down the stairs and taking hold of FranÇois’ legs, for she could step backward, knowing the stairs well.

The next minute they found themselves in the cellars. There were two small rooms. The windows were tightly closed so that no gleam of light should betray that the place was inhabited. A handful of charcoal burned in a little brazier, for the spring night was sharp and the cellar was cold, and one solitary candle in the outer room merely revealed the gulf of darkness. Huddled over the brazier was the figure of old Marie, the cook; in all cataclysms of one’s life, some one is found who is faithful.

There was something like comfort in the place. A carpet was spread upon the stone floor, and a couple of pallets in the inner room accommodated the mistress and the maid. On one of these they laid FranÇois, breathing heavily. Jean stripped off FranÇois’ shoes, and Diane, producing a pair of scissors, cut away the clothing from his leg below the knee. A horrid wound was spurting blood. Marie ran and fetched some water from a barrel in the corner, and Diane unceremoniously, in the presence of Jean, divested herself of her white cambric petticoat, a thing of filmy ruffles and lace, and tore it into strips to bind up FranÇois’ wounds. Again, with her deft scissors she cut away a part of his coat and shirt. Old Marie washed the wound in his shoulder, and Jean, with his rude surgery, bound it up with a part of Diane’s petticoat. When this was over, FranÇois opened his eyes, and looking about him whispered in a weak voice, and with a weak grin:

“I think I must be out of my head still, because I see the face of Diane. Give me something to drink.”

Old Marie gave him water which he drank as men do out of whose veins much blood has run, and who are parched with that terrible thirst. Diane, going to a wine rack where there were many long-necked bottles lying head downward, picked up one and gouged out the cork with her scissors.

Then she poured out in a tin cup some bubbling champagne.

“Is this good for him, do you think?” she asked Jean.

“In the name of God, I do not know,” replied Jean, shaking his head.

“But I know,” responded the patient in a somewhat stronger voice. “Good champagne will put life into the ribs of death.”

Diane kneeled down by FranÇois and tremblingly gave him the champagne, which he drank, smacking his lips meanwhile.

“I feel like another man,” he said, “and that other man wants another swig at the champagne.”

But Diane shook her head.

“You can’t have any more,” she answered.

“And now,” said FranÇois in a much stronger voice, “I know that I am not wool-gathering, but it is really you, Diane Dorian, otherwise Skinny, because you are so obstinate, just as in the old days.”

While Diane was speaking, she noticed that Jean had sunk on a low bench from which he slipped softly to the floor, his eyes closed and his face gray. Diane ran to him, and catching his head to keep it from striking the floor, found blood upon her hand. Jean’s neck was bleeding—FranÇois was not the only wounded man.

Diane, with her lately gained experience and assisted by old Marie, turned back Jean’s collar and shirt and found there a wound almost as bad as FranÇois’. That, too, was washed and bound with strips of Diane’s white petticoat, and then Jean came to himself, and asked, as all wounded men do, for water.

“Give him some champagne,” said FranÇois, feebly, from his pallet.

This Diane did, and then, with Marie’s help, laid Jean upon her own pallet.

Then began for the two women a silent vigil that lasted more than a week. They took turns in watching and sleeping. By extreme good fortune both of their patients progressed wonderfully, the wounds healing with the first intention. At the end of the week Jean was able to walk about the inner room, while FranÇois, though unable to walk, could sit up in the one chair which the cellars possessed.

Still were darkness and silence maintained within the cellars, although there was noise enough outside. The barricade had become almost a fortress, and as the Communards were hemmed in closer and closer, the barricade was extended. The sound of fighting grew nearer and fiercer, the shouts and cries of men, the rattle of ammunition wagons over the stones, the cracking of the mitrailleuse, the crash of bullets; the beating of the rappel, sounded by night as well as by day.

After night had fallen, old Marie would creep out, and by devious and winding streets would find her way to places where for much money a little coarse food could be bought. There was, however, champagne in plenty, and FranÇois had no hesitation in declaring in a whisper that his recovery and that of Jean depended upon the quantity of champagne they drank, and that Diane was delaying their convalescence by not letting them have all they wished.

The hours, instead of being long, were extraordinarily short because there was no sunrise or sunset, no day nor night, only a vivid darkness pierced with the light of a single candle. There was nothing to read by the light of the single candle that burned night and day; there was no conversation above a whisper. Familiarity with danger and long immunity made them all forget their fears, but not their prudence.

Old Marie, who had the tireless industry of her class, managed to keep employed by incessant knitting, after she had done the work of the two cellars. Diane, a worker by nature and habit, put strong compulsion on herself to sit still for hours and hours, her hands in her lap. Jean and FranÇois, conquered by their weakness, also remained still and quiet. Through the open door Diane could not see their eyes constantly fixed upon her in the little circle of light made by the one candle. She took them their food, and helped them with all the natural helpfulness of a tender and capable woman. That was her sole employment. She often wished in that strange procession of time which could not be called days or weeks, that she had fifty wounded men to attend to instead of two.

At last, one night, Jean said to Diane:

“It’s time for me to be going. I feel strong enough to carry a musket, and I shall feel stronger still when I get into the fresh air.”

Diane said no word; she was the last woman on earth to detain a man from his duty.

FranÇois, who was then able to walk about with a stick made from a broom handle, protested in a whisper:

“Who is to chaperon Diane and me,” he asked, “when old Marie goes out at night?”

As he spoke, Jean slipped cautiously to the stone steps and lifted up the cellar door about an inch, showing the black night without. A great wave of smoke and an odor of flame rushed in, and through the crack thus made was seen a sky on fire with the luridness of miles of burning buildings. Paris had been set on fire by the Communards.

As Diane, leaning over Jean’s shoulder, caught a glimpse of the blazing sky, there was a crash of doors and windows overhead, a trampling of feet, drunken men and women shouting, laughing, swearing, fighting. In the midst of the uproar they could hear the grand piano, the only piece of furniture left in the house, dragged across the drawing-room floor, and the crash of music as it was pounded to accompany ribald songs. Jean quickly dropped the cellar door. They had no arms except each a pistol out of which their bullets had been fired, and there were no more bullets to be had.

As the drunken crew overhead grew more noisy and numerous, they overflowed into the garden, trampling the neglected flower beds and laughing like demons. Presently they rushed to the cellar door and lifted it up wide. They saw no light within, but a woman’s voice shrieked:

“If there is any champagne, it’s in the cellar!”

Then a torch was brought, and a man seizing it jumped down the steps holding the torch above his head, and came face to face with Diane. Half a dozen men and women followed him, and, catching sight of the wine bin, flew toward it with shouts of devilish joy, and began to hand out the bottles to those above them.The man with the torch stuck it into an empty bottle, and the light revealed, not only Diane, but old Marie and Jean and FranÇois. The invader wore the uniform of a colonel of the National Guard, and was he who had once been known as the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel.