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Updated: May 8, 2025
With her usual calmness Amelie had undone his clothes and dressed his wound. Manousse Heimann was there, fortunately, with his inseparable Canet. Like Christophe they had come out of curiosity to see the demonstration: they had been present at the affray and seen Olivier fall. Canet was blubbering like a child: and at the same time he was thinking: "What on earth am I doing here?"
Christophe was dazed by the noise and the wave of madness that had rushed through him, could not understand what he had done and what he was being asked to do, and let himself be dragged away. Manousse took his arm, and with his other hand caught hold of Canet, who was not at all pleased with the part allotted to him in the affair: and he packed the two of them into the car.
Manousse examined Olivier: at once he saw that it was all over. He had a great feeling for Olivier: but he was not a man to worry about what can't be helped: and he turned his thoughts to Christophe. He admired Christophe though he regarded him as a pathological case.
Manousse stuck to it, climbed up again, and shouted: "Jeannin...." In the uproar the rest of the sentence was lost. Christophe stopped short, dropped his revolver, and, slipping down from his scaffolding, he rejoined Manousse, who started pulling him away. "You must clear out," said Manousse. "Where is Olivier?" "You must clear out," repeated Manousse. "Why?" said Christophe.
I'll try and take him away." "How?" "In Canet's motor. It's over there at the corner of the street." "Please, please...." gulped Canet. "You must take him to Laroche," Manousse went on. "You will get there in time to catch the Pontarlier express. You must pack him off to Switzerland." "He won't go." "He will. I'll tell him that Jeannin will follow him, or has already gone."
We'll write to each other to-morrow." The train started. They watched it disappear. "Poor devil!" said Manousse. They got back into the car. They were silent. After a short time Canet said to Manousse: "Bah! the dead are dead. We must help the living." As night fell Christophe's excitement subsided altogether. He sat huddled in a corner of the carriage, and pondered. He was sobered and icy cold.
Without paying any attention to Canet's objections Manousse set out to find Christophe on the barricade. He did not stop, but went through with it. When he reached the barricade he found Christophe, perched on a wheel of the overturned omnibus, amusing himself by firing pistol-shots into the air.
The worthy Canet would have been bitterly sorry if Christophe had been caught, but he would have much preferred some one else to help him to escape. Manousse knew his man. And as he had some qualms about Canet's cowardice, he changed his mind just as he was leaving them and the car was getting into its stride and climbed up and sat with them. Olivier did not recover consciousness.
Canet submitted to it all: he tried to persuade himself that he thought like Manousse. He knew perfectly well that this was not the case: such ideas scared him: they were shocking to his common sense. And he had no love for the people. And, in addition, he had no courage.
This Frenchman, French, burgess and provincial to his very soul, had become the fidus Achates of a young Jewish doctor named Manousse Heimann, a Russian refugee, who, like so many of his fellow-countrymen, had the twofold gift of settling at once among strangers and making himself at home, and of being so much at his ease in any sort of revolution as to rouse wonder as to what it was that most interested him in it: the game or the cause.
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