rolling with living waves which seemed inexhaustible. At the bend in the
road fresh masses ever appeared, whose songs ever helped to swell the
roar of this human tempest. When the last battalions came in sight the
uproar was deafening. The "Marseillaise" filled the atmosphere as
if blown through enormous trumpets by giant mouths, which cast it,
vibrating with a brazen clang, into every corner of the valley. The
slumbering country-side awoke with a start--quivering like a beaten drum
resonant to its very entrails, and repeating with each and every echo
the passionate notes of the national song. And then the singing was
no longer confined to the men. From the very horizon, from the distant
rocks, the ploughed land, the meadows, the copses, the smallest bits
of brushwood, human voices seemed to come. The great amphitheatre,
extending from the river to Plassans, the gigantic cascade over which
the bluish moonlight flowed, was as if filled with innumerable invisible
people cheering the insurgents; and in the depths of the Viorne, along
the waters streaked with mysterious metallic reflections, there was not
a dark nook but seemed to conceal human beings, who took up each refrain
with yet greater passion. With air and earth alike quivering, the whole
country-side cried for vengeance and liberty. So long as the little army
was descending the slope, the roar of the populace thus rolled on in
sonorous waves broken by abrupt outbursts which shook the very stones in
the roadway.

Silvere, pale with emotion, still listened and looked on. The insurgents
who led the van of that swarming, roaring stream, so vague and monstrous
in the darkness, were rapidly approaching the bridge.

"I thought," murmured Miette, "that you would not pass through
Plassans?"