He turned around, and went out.
The tumult of Paris surprised and stunned him.

After spending a year in the peaceful solitudes of Africa, to find himself amid the cries of street-sellers, the rolling of carriages, and the incessant movement of the great city, was too great a contrast to him.

Pierre was overcome by languor; his head seemed too heavy for his body to carry; he mechanically entered a cab which conveyed him to the Hotel du Louvre.
Through the window, against the glass of which he tried to cool his heated forehead, he saw pass in procession before his eyes, the Column of July, the church of St.Paul, the Hotel de Ville in ruins, and the colonnade of the Louvre.
An absurd idea took possession of him.

He remembered that during the Commune he was nearly killed in the Rue Saint-Antoine by the explosion of a shell, thrown by the insurgents from the heights of Pere-Lachaise.
He thought that had he died then, Micheline would have wept for him.
Then, as in a nightmare, it seemed to him that this hypothesis was realized.

He saw the church hung with black, he heard the funeral chants.