"Yes, it is a house a-fire. See the sparks fly," added the younger man.
Maggie stopped; the rider jumped off upon the pavement and going up to a group of soldiers in blue and yellow uniforms, bivouacking under the roadside trees, asked:
"Comrades, can you tell me what is the matter in Paris?"
The soldiers merely replied with some German oaths.
"What the deuce do they say?" queried Billet of his brother peasant.
"All I can tell is that it is not Latin," replied the youth, trembling greatly.
"I was a fool to apply to the _Kaiserlicks_ (_Kaiserlich_, Imperial Austrian grenadiers)?" muttered Billet, in his curiosity still standing in the middle of the road.
"Bass on mit your vay," said an officer, stepping up; "Und bass bretty tam queeck, doo!"
"Excuse me, captain," said the farmer, "but I want to go into Paris."
"As I see you are between me and the turnpike bars, I feared I would not be let go by."
Remounting, Billet indeed got on. But it was only to run in among the Bercheny Hussars, swarming in La Villette. This time, as they were his own countrymen, he got along better.
"Please, what is the news from Paris?" he asked.
"Why, it's your crazy Parisians, who want their Necker, and fire their guns off at us, as if we had anything to do with the matter." So replied a hussar.
"What Necker? have they lost him?" questioned Billet.
"Certainly, the King has turned him out of office."
"That great man turned out?" said the farmer with the stupor of a priest who hears of a sacrilege.
"More than that, he is on the way to Brussels at present."
"Then it is a joke we shall hear some laughing over," cried Billet in a terrible voice, without thinking of the danger he ran in preaching insurrection amid twelve or fifteen thousand royalist sabres.
Remounting Maggie, he drove her with cruel digs of the heel up to the bars. As he advanced he saw the fire more plainly; a long column rose from the spot to the sky. It was the barrier that was burning. A howling and furious mob with women intermixed, yelling and capering as usual more excitedly than the men, fed the flames with pieces of the bars, the clerk's office and the custom-house officers' property.
On the road, Hungarian and German regiments looked on at the devastation, with their muskets grounded, without blinking.