five peasants to slay them for the dire offence. The men struggled, and would not go as the sheep to the shambles. They were shot down in the street before the eyes of their children. Then the order was given to fire the place in punishment, and leave it to its fate.
The torches were flung with a laugh on the dry thatched roofs—brands snatched from the house-fires on the hearths were tossed amongst the dwelling-houses and the barns. The straw and timber flared alight like tow.
An old man, her nearest neighbor, rushed to the cottage of Reine Allix and seized her by the arm. "They fire the Berceau," he screamed. "Quick! quick! or you will be burned alive!"
Reine Allix looked up with a smile: "Be quiet! Do you not see? He sleeps."
The old man shook her, implored her, strove to drag her away—in desperation pointed to the roof above, which was already in flames.
Reine Allix looked: at that sight her mind cleared and regained consciousness: she remembered all, she understood all: she knew that he was dead. "Go in peace and save yourself," she said in the old sweet, strong tone of an earlier day. "As for me, I am very old. I and my dead will stay together at home."
The man fled, and left her to her choice.
The great curled flames and the livid vapors closed around her: she never moved. The death was fierce but swift, and even in death she and the one whom she had loved and reared were not divided. The end soon came. From hill to hill the Berceau de Dieu broke into flames. The village was a lake of fire, into which the statue of the Christ, burning and reeling, fell. Some few peasants, with their wives and children, fled to the woods, and there escaped one torture to perish more slowly of cold and famine. All other things perished. The rapid stream of the flame licked up all there was in its path. The bare trees raised their leafless branches on fire at a thousand points. The stores of corn and fruit were lapped by millions of crimson tongues. The pigeons flew screaming from their roosts and sank into the smoke. The dogs were suffocated on the thresholds they had guarded all their lives. The calf was stifled in the byre. The sheep ran bleating with the wool burning on their living bodies. The little caged birds fluttered helpless, and then dropped, scorched to cinders. The aged and the sick were stifled in their beds. All things perished.
The Berceau de Dieu was as one vast furnace, in which every living creature was caught and consumed and changed to ashes. The tide of war has rolled on and left it a blackened waste, a smoking ruin, wherein not so much as a mouse may creep or a bird may nestle. It is gone, and its place can know it never more.
Never more. But who is there to care? It was but as a leaf which the great storm swept away as it passed.
