Sadi the fiddler, carrying the little black case under his arm, locked
the door of his garret as carefully as though it had contained the
wealth of the Cæsars. It was the night of Monday, the twenty-first day
of September, in the year 1870. Sadi had not tasted food for twenty
hours, and, though he well understood that there was very little to eat
in the town of Strasburg, he went forth bravely in quest of it. After
all, someone might throw him a bone, even though he were nothing more
than a poor, crazy fiddler.
"Heaven knows they have music enough here," he said to himself, as he
descended the narrow staircase and came out beneath the eaves of the old
houses. This was the thirty-second night since the hated Prussians had
come swarming down from Wörth and had invested the city like an army of
human locusts. There was scarcely a minute by day or night when the
great guns ceased to thunder, or the shots to play havoc with the
ancient streets of gallant Strasburg. Even as the fiddler walked away
from his own house that night a great shell, thrown from one of the
batteries to the north-west, came singing and sighing above him, and
then fell with a mighty crash upon the roof next to his own. It was an
incendiary shell, Sadi hazarded, and presently a tongue of flame leaping
up from the doomed building told him that he had guessed aright. He knew
that his worldly possessions, such as they were, would soon be engulfed
in that raging furnace of smoke and fire; and he reflected with a sigh,
odd fellow that he was, on a picture which he would have given much to
save. Sadi wondered now that he had not brought the picture with him.
Standing there upon the narrow pavement, while the flames licked about
the window of his attic, he remembered the day when Lucy, the daughter
of Ludenmayer, the artist from Bad Nauheim, had given the portrait to
him and had written the words "In grateful remembrance" upon one corner
of it. "We shall never return to Strasburg--never meet again, dear
friend," she had said. He knew that it was true, admitted that she could
be nothing to him--and yet his eyes were dim when he turned from the
burning house and set off to wander aimlessly through the terrible
streets.
He had never been a rich man, but the outbreak of the war between France
and Prussia robbed him in a day of his employment and left him a beggar.
Nero had fiddled while Rome was burning, but no one in Strasburg desired
to emulate that incomparable artist; and while there had been days when
Sadi might have earned a good dinner by playing the Marseillaise to
patriotic hosts, his pride forbade him and his violin was silent. The
same sense of the dignity of his art kept him from the public
distribution of food ordered by the Mayor and the brave General Uhrich.
He, Sadi Descourcelles, had the blood of kings in his veins. A
philosophic observer might have remarked that it ran thin and sluggish
upon that twenty-first day of September, for he, Sadi, was famishing,
ravenous, desperate with the gnawing hunger as of youth and strenuous
life. He felt that he could commit any crime for bread. He searched the
very gutters with his eyes for any scrap of food that fortune might have
cast there. Such lighted windows as showed to him the tables spread for
dinner or supper moved him to frenzies of desire. Why should some eat
when others were starving? And the Prussians killed all
indiscriminately, he said, rich or poor, old and young, mothers and
children. What folly resisted the right of Bismarck and the Red Prince?
Sadi prayed that the city might fall and bread be given to him; but with
the next breath he was cursing the blue-coats and hoping in his heart
that Strasburg might never surrender. For he was a patriot in spite of
his poverty.
It was a warm night of September, with a starry sky to be seen here and
there between the clouds of sulphurous smoke which floated above the
ramparts. Few walked abroad, for there was danger in the streets, and
scarcely any cessation of the flying shells which the Prussians hurled
upon the doomed city. Sadi was accustomed to the awful sounds and sights
which accompanied the siege, and they were powerless any longer to
affright him. Even the dead in the gutters--the children who had not
made the war but paid the price of it with their young blood--found him
callous and without sympathy. As these had died, so he would die and be
at rest. He envied them as they lay there--the flare of the burning
houses showed him the white faces and they seemed to sleep. Sadi
believed that when next he slept it would be as these--eternally and
without pain.
He was indifferent to the danger; nevertheless some little measure of
prudence remained to him, and he walked in the centre of the street to
avoid the flying fragments and the falling timbers. Doleful cries from
stricken houses fell upon deaf ears so far as Sadi the fiddler was
concerned. The warnings of a friendly soldier, who told him that he was
drawing perilously near the zone of fire, he received with a curt word
of thanks. Had the man given him a crust he would have kissed him on
both cheeks; but the fellow was hungry himself, and the two parted
surlily--the one to a beer-shop, the other toward the ramparts.
[Illustration: "THE TWO PARTED SURLILY."]
"You can play them a tune, old fellow," the soldier said.