or they were reduced to silence and were
afraid. Even Rachel did not say a word, as she had no reply to make.
Then the little marquis put his champagne glass, which had just been
refilled, on the head of the Jewess and exclaimed: "All the women in
France belong to us also!"

At that she got up so quickly that the glass upset, spilling the
amber-colored wine on her black hair as if to baptize her, and broke
into a hundred fragments, as it fell to the floor. Her lips trembling,
she defied the looks of the officer, who was still laughing, and
stammered out in a voice choked with rage:

"That--that--that--is not true--for you shall not have the women of
France!"

He sat down again so as to laugh at his ease; and, trying to speak with
the Parisian accent, he said: "She is good, very good! Then why did
you come here, my dear?" She was thunderstruck and made no reply for a
moment, for in her agitation she did not understand him at first, but
as soon as she grasped his meaning she said to him indignantly and
vehemently: "I! I! I am not a woman, I am only a strumpet, and that is
all that Prussians want."

Almost before she had finished he slapped her full in the face; but as
he was raising his hand again, as if to strike her, she seized a small
dessert knife with a silver blade from the table and, almost mad with
rage, stabbed him right in the hollow of his neck. Something that he
was going to say was cut short in his throat, and he sat there with his
mouth half open and a terrible look in his eyes.

All the officers shouted in horror and leaped up tumultuously; but,
throwing her chair between the legs of Lieutenant Otto, who fell down
at full length, she ran to the window, opened it before they could seize
her and jumped out into the night and the pouring rain.

In two minutes Mademoiselle Fifi was dead, and Fritz and Otto drew their
swords and wanted to kill the women, who threw themselves at their feet
and clung to their knees. With some difficulty the major stopped the
slaughter and had the four terrified girls locked up in a room under the
care of two soldiers, and then he organized the pursuit of the fugitive
as carefully as if he were about to engage in a skirmish, feeling quite
sure that she would be caught.

The table, which had been cleared immediately, now served as a bed on
which to lay out the lieutenant, and the four officers stood at the
windows, rigid and sobered with the stern faces of soldiers on duty,