Below-stairs, at early daybreak, Maurice awoke upon his sofa. He was sore and stiff as if he had been racked; he did not stir, but lay looking listlessly at the windows, which gradually grew white under the light of a cloudy dawn. The hateful memories of the day before all came back to him with that distinctness that characterizes the impressions of our first waking, how they had fought, fled, surrendered. It all rose before his vision, down to the very least detail, and he brooded with horrible anguish on the defeat, whose reproachful echoes seemed to penetrate to the inmost fibers of his being, as if he felt that all the responsibility of it was his. And he went on to reason on the cause of the evil, analyzing himself, reverting to his old habit of bitter and unavailing self-reproach. He would have felt so brave, so glorious had victory remained with them! And now, in defeat, weak and nervous as a woman, he once again gave way to one of those overwhelming fits of despair in which the entire world, seemed to him to be foundering. Nothing was left them; the end of France was come. His frame was shaken by a storm of sobs, he wept hot tears, and joining his hands, the prayers of his childhood rose to his lips in stammering accents.
"O God! take me unto Thee! O God! take unto Thyself all those who are weary and heavy-laden!"
Jean, lying on the floor wrapped in his bed-quilt, began to show some signs of life. Finally, astonished at what he heard, he arose to a sitting posture.
"What is the matter, youngster? Are you ill?" Then, with a glimmering perception of how matters stood, he adopted a more paternal tone. "Come, tell me what the matter is. You must not let yourself be worried by such a little thing as this, you know."
"Ah!" exclaimed Maurice, "it is all up with us, va! we are Prussians now, and we may as well make up our mind to it."
As the peasant, with the hard-headedness of the uneducated, expressed surprise to hear him talk thus, he endeavored to make it clear to him that, the race being degenerate and exhausted, it must disappear and make room for a newer and more vigorous strain. But the other, with an obstinate shake of the head, would not listen to the explanation.
"What! would you try to make me believe that my bit of land is no longer mine? that I would permit the Prussians to take it from me while I am alive and my two arms are left to me? Come, come!"
Then painfully, in such terms as he could command, he went on to tell how affairs looked to him. They had received an all-fired good basting, that was sure as sure could be! but they were not all dead yet, he didn't believe; there were some left, and those would suffice to rebuild the house if they only behaved themselves, working hard and not drinking up what they earned. When a family has trouble, if its members work and put by a little something, they will pull through, in spite of all the bad luck in the world. And further, it is not such a bad thing to get a good cuffing once in a way; it sets one thinking. And, great heavens! if a man has something rotten about him, if he has gangrene in his arms or legs that is spreading all the time, isn't it better to take a hatchet and lop them off rather than die as he would from cholera?
"All up, all up! Ah, no, no! no, no!" he repeated several times. "It is not all up with me, I know very well it is not."
And notwithstanding his seedy condition and demoralized appearance, his hair all matted and pasted to his head by the blood that had flowed from his wound, he drew himself up defiantly, animated by a keen desire to live, to take up the tools of his trade or put his hand to the plow, in order, to use his own expression, to "rebuild the house." He was of the old soil where reason and obstinacy grow side by side, of the land of toil and thrift.
"All the same, though," he continued, "I am sorry for the Emperor. Affairs seemed to be going on well; the farmers were getting a good price for their grain. But surely it was bad judgment on his part to allow himself to become involved in this business!"
Maurice, who was still in "the blues," spoke regretfully: "Ah, the Emperor! I always liked him in my heart, in spite of my republican ideas. Yes, I had it in the blood, on account of my grandfather, I suppose. And now that that limb is rotten and we shall have to lop it off, what is going to become of us?"
His eyes began to wander, and his voice and manner evinced such distress that Jean became alarmed and was about to rise and go to him, when Henriette came into the room. She had just awakened on hearing the sound of voices in the room adjoining hers. The pale light of a cloudy morning now illuminated the apartment.
"You come just in time to give him a scolding," he said, with an affectation of liveliness. "He is not a good boy this morning."
But the sight of his sister's pale, sad face and the recollection of her affliction had had a salutary effect on Maurice by determining a sudden crisis of tenderness. He opened his arms and took her to his bosom, and when she rested her head upon his shoulder, when he held her locked in a close embrace, a feeling of great gentleness pervaded him and they mingled their tears.
"Ah, my poor, poor darling, why have I not more strength and courage to console you! for my sorrows are as nothing compared with yours. That good, faithful Weiss, the husband who loved you so fondly! What will become of you? You have always been the victim; always, and never a murmur from your lips. Think of the sorrow I have already caused you, and who can say that I shall not cause you still more in the future!"
She was silencing him, placing her hand upon his mouth, when Delaherche came into the room, beside himself with indignation. While still on the terrace he had been seized by one of those uncontrollable nervous fits of hunger that are aggravated by fatigue, and had descended to the kitchen in quest of something warm to drink, where he had found, keeping company with his cook, a relative of hers, a carpenter of Bazeilles, whom she was in the act of treating to a bowl of hot wine. This person, who had been one of the last to leave the place while the conflagrations were at their height, had told him that his dyehouse was utterly destroyed, nothing left of it but a heap of ruins.
"The robbers, the thieves! Would you have believed it, hein?" he stammered, addressing Jean and Maurice. "There is no hope left; they mean to burn Sedan this morning as they burned Bazeilles yesterday. I'm ruined, I'm ruined!" The scar that Henriette bore on her forehead attracted his attention, and he remembered that he had not spoken to her yet. "It is true, you went there, after all; you got that wound-Ah! poor Weiss!"