He could not
escape me in this walled town. I passed on for a time without
direction, for I seemed not to know where I might find the barber.
Our sentries already patrolled the streets, and our bugles were
calling on the heights, with answering calls from the fleet in
the basin. Night came down quickly, the stars shone out in the
perfect blue, and, as I walked along, broken walls, shattered
houses, solitary pillars, looked mystically strange. It was
painfully quiet, as if a beaten people had crawled away into the
holes our shot and shell had made, to hide their misery. Now and
again a gaunt face looked out from a hiding-place, and drew back
again in fear at sight of me. Once a drunken woman spat at me and
cursed me; once I was fired at; and many times from dark corners
I heard voices crying, "Sauvez-moi--ah, sauvez-moi, bon Dieu!"
Once I stood for many minutes and watched our soldiers giving
biscuits and their own share of rum to homeless French peasants
hovering round the smouldering ruins of a house which carcasses had
destroyed.
And now my wits came back to me, my purposes, the power to act,
which for a couple of hours had seemed to be in abeyance. I
hurried through narrow streets to the cathedral. There it stood,
a shattered mass, its sides all broken, its roof gone, its tall
octagonal tower alone substantial and unchanged. Coming to its
rear, I found Babette's little house, with open door, and I went
in.
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