ears; but indeed, I would rather lose that than anything else, for it was only an ornament. You scratched my shoulder too, but that is nothing. Die, clown, I forgive you."
He listened, the tumult in the lower hall was frightful. The fight was more furious than ever.
"They are getting on well down there. Never mind, they are howling 'Long live the king.' They are dying nobly,"
His feet hit against his sword on the floor. He picked it up, and said to Chante-en-hiver who no longer stirred and was perhaps dead,—
"You see, woodsman, this is what I wanted, my sword or 'zut,' it is the same. I will take it out of friendship. But I must have my pistols. Devil take you, savage! Now what shall I do? I am no good here."
He groped along through the hall, trying to see and to get his bearings. Suddenly in the darkness, behind the central column, he made out a long table, and on this table something which shone indistinctly. He felt of it. They were blunderbusses, pistols, carbines, a row of firearms laid in order and seeming to be waiting for hands to lay hold of them; it was the reserve of weapons prepared by the besieged for the second phase of the assault; a perfect arsenal.
"A refreshment table!" exclaimed Radoub, and he pounced on them wildly.
Then he became terrible.
The door leading to the staircase communicating with the upper and lower stories was seen to be wide open beside the table loaded with arms. Radoub dropped his sword, seized a pistol in each hand and fired them together at random through the door into the stairway, then he seized a blunderbuss and discharged that, then he seized a musketoon loaded to the muzzle with buckshot, and discharged that. The musketoon, pouring forth fifteen bullets, seemed like a volley of grapeshot. Then Radoub, getting his breath, cried into the stairway in a thundering voice,—
"Long live Paris."
And seizing another musketoon larger than the first, he aimed it under the archway of the Saint-Gilles's staircase and waited.
