streets, where these scenes were being enacted, and entered the houses,
they beheld the piteous grief of the peasants. The wife of a market-
gardener, who occupied a red brick cottage near the church, pursued with
a wooden stool the two men who carried off her children in a
wheelbarrow. When she saw them die, a horrible sickness came upon her,
and they thrust her down on the stool under a tree by the roadside.

Other soldiers swarmed up the lime trees in front of a farmstead with
its blank walls tinted mauve, and entered the house by removing the
tiles. When they came back on to the roof, the father and mother, with
outstretched arms, tried to follow them through the opening, but the
soldiers repeatedly pushed them back, and had at last to strike them on
the head with their swords, before they could disengage themselves and
regain the street.

One family shut up in the cellar of a large cottage lamented near the
grating, through which the father wildly brandished a pitchfork. Outside
on a heap of manure, a bald old man sobbed all alone; in the square, a
woman in a yellow dress had swooned, and her weeping husband now
supported her under the arms, against a pear tree; another woman in red
fondled her little girl, bereft of her hands, and lifted now one tiny
arm, now the other, to see if the child would not move. Yet another
woman fled towards the country; but the soldiers pursued her among the
hayricks, which stood out in black relief against the fields of snow.

Beneath the inn of the Four Sons of Aymon a surging tumult reigned. The
inhabitants had formed a barricade, and the soldiers went round and
round the house without being able to enter. Then they were attempting
to climb up to the signboard by the creepers, when they noticed a ladder
behind the garden door. This they raised against the wall, and went up