In all this desolation we looked in vain for any signs of life. It was
not until we sought out the house of a captain of dragoons, a friend of
my companion the Comte, that we found a human being in these solitudes.
The house was, indeed, a melancholy ruin, but by the gate was a lodge,
and in the lodge a concierge. He was a small man and middle-aged, and as
he spoke he trembled with a continual agitation of body as though he
were afflicted with ague. He led us into his little house, the walls of
which were blackened as with fire and pierced in many places with the
impact of bullets. And this was his tale.

One afternoon early in September--it was the second day of the month, he
remembered it because there had been an untimely frost over night--he
heard the crackle of musketry on the outskirts of the town, and a column
of grey-coated men suddenly appeared in the street. An officer blew a
whistle, and, as some of them broke through the gates of the mansion,
the concierge fled across the lawn with bullets buzzing about his ears
and shouts of laughter pursuing him as he ran. In and out among the elms
he doubled like a frightened hare, the bullets zip-zipping against the
tree-trunks, till he crawled into a disused culvert and lay there
panting and exhausted. From his hiding-place he heard the crash of
furniture, more shots, and the loud, ribald laughter of the soldiers.
And then a crackle of flame and a thick smell of smoke. And after that
silence. At dusk he crawled forth from his culvert, trembling, his hands
and face all mottled with stinging-nettles and scratched with thistles;
he found his master's house a smouldering ruin, and a thick pall of
smoke lay over the town of Senlis like a fog. Somewhere a woman shrieked
and then was still. About the hour of nine in the evening the concierge
heard voices in disputation outside the lodge-gates, and as he hid
himself among the shrubberies more men entered, and, being dissatisfied
with their work, threw hand-grenades into the mansion and applied a