true then! We are, then, like animals, eternally condemned to kill each
other in order to live? If that is so, one might as well renounce life,
and give up the ghost!

Meanwhile the cannonading now redoubled, and with its tragic grumbling
was mingled the dry crackling sound of the musketry; beyond a wooded
hillock, which restricted the view toward the southeast, a very thick
white smoke spread over the horizon, mounting up into the gray sky. The
fight had just been resumed there, and it was getting hot, for soon the
ambulances and army-wagons drawn by artillery men began to pass. They
were full of the wounded, whose plaintive moans were heard as they
passed. They had crowded the least seriously wounded ones into the
omnibus, which went at a foot pace, but the road had been broken up by
the bad weather, and it was pitiful to behold these heads shaken as they
passed over each rut. The sight of the dying extended upon bloody
mattresses was still more lugubrious to see. The frightful procession of
the slaughtered went slowly toward the city to the hospitals, but the
carriages sometimes stopped, only a hundred steps from the position
occupied by the National Guards, before a house where a provisionary
hospital had been established, and left their least transportable ones
there. The morbid but powerful attraction that horrible sights exert
over a man urged Amedee Violette to this spot. This house had been
spared from bombardment and protected from pillage and fire by the Geneva
flag; it was a small cottage which realized the dream of every shopkeeper
after he has made his fortune. Nothing was lacking, not even the earthen
lions at the steps, or the little garden with its glittering weather-
vane, or the rock-work basin for goldfish. On warm days the past summer
passers-by might have seen very often, under the green arbor, bourgeoisie
in their shirt-sleeves and women in light dresses eating melons together.
The poet's imagination fancied at once this picture of a Parisian's