Then his fury rose to a strange pitch.

He, an old soldier, a Marshal of France in expectancy, trained in the school of the greatest generals, accustomed, during many years, to scientific war, to be baffled by a mob of country gentlemen, farmers, shopkeepers, who were protected only by a wall which any good engineer would at once have pronounced untenable! He raved, he blasphemed, in a language of his own, made up of all the dialects spoken from the Baltic to the Atlantic.

He would raze the city to the ground: he would spare no living thing; no, not the young girls; not the babies at the breast.

As to the leaders, death was too light a punishment for them: he would rack them: he would roast them alive.

In his rage he ordered a shell to be flung into the town with a letter containing a horrible menace.