Chapter 6

Since noon to-day a south-easterly wind has arisen, causing the conflagration to extend in the direction of the Bastille, and threatening the city with destruction.

The Versailles batteries are firing vigorously upon Belleville.

The fires are apparently slackening. The wind fortunately veered round to the west at 5 o'clock this evening, and this change was followed by a calm, which has since continued. The sky is still lurid from the reflection of the flames, and the _débris_ from the burning buildings fall at distances of 20 kilomètres.

It is said that the Mazas prison is burnt to ashes, and fears are entertained for the safety of the Archbishop, who was incarcerated there.

It is reported that considerable bodies of Insurgents attempted to escape from Paris in the direction of Aubervilliers and Romainville, but they were driven back.

The cannonading from the Versailles batteries at Montmartre against Belleville and Chaumont continues.

MAY 26th.

The attack on Belleville was made this morning soon after daybreak. General Clinchant approached it from the ramparts, and General Bruat's Division marched on it in front from the direction of the Rue de Paris. The troops had to attack seven barricades successively. When they had made a partial progress the Insurgents, seeing defeat inevitable, offered to surrender on condition that their lives should be spared. This was refused, and the struggle continued till the military succeeded. A large number of the Insurgents were shot. Many cannon and 22 red flags were captured.

Last night a large group of the Insurgents imprisoned in the docks of Satory, attempted a rising. The battalion in charge fired, and a number of the prisoners were shot dead. The portion of the Palais Royal consumed by the fire on Wednesday is the block of buildings in which Prince Napoleon resided. The library of the Louvre has been destroyed. The fire was arrested at the portion of the building occupied by the Gendarmerie. Between the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville several shops and private houses have been reduced to ashes. The Théâtre Lyrique is burnt down. Of the Hôtel de Ville nothing remains but some walls. The Hotel of the Ministry of Finance and that of the Cour des Comptes are both destroyed. One of the towers of the Conciergerie, the Prefecture of Police, and a portion of the Palais de Justice are burnt. The Grenier d'Abonbance has disappeared, after being in flames for many hours yesterday. A shell charged with petroleum struck and set on fire the turret of the Church of St. Eustache. This part of the building crumbled away; but the church itself was saved. In the Rue Royale eight houses have been entirely, and two partially, consumed by the fire which broke out at the corners of the Rue Faubourg St. Honoré. In the latter street four houses have been consumed. The upper story of the British Embassy has been much injured by shells. Several women have been arrested while in the act of firing on the troops, and it is said that one _cantinière_ caused the death of ten soldiers by putting poison in their wine. Some of the women whom I have seen marched from Paris as prisoners are dressed in the uniform of National Guards. Not a few of the female prisoners are very furious-looking. Several attempts at escape and assassination have been made by prisoners. They are marched between a double line of Cavalry, each of the latter holding a revolver in his hand, with his finger on the trigger. Women found throwing petroleum into houses have been shot on the spot. Since Monday there has been a very large number of summary executions in the streets of Paris. At No. 27, Rue Oudinot, where Les Ambulances de la Presse have their Head-Quarters, the bodies of 52 persons thus despatched are now deposited. On one, which is dressed in the uniform of a National Guard, bank notes to the amount of 150,000f. were found.

Viard, a member of the Commune, was arrested in the Rue de l'Université yesterday. Gustave Courbet, an artist of celebrity, and also a member of the Commune, has died at Satory of poison, supposed to have been administered by himself. He expired in great agony. He it was who promoted the idea of destroying the Column in the Place Vendôme. Raoul Rigault, Procureur de la Commune, has been shot. Napoléon Gaillard, Director of the Barricades, was insubordinate at Satory, and was shot by the side of the fosse there. It is reported that Cluseret, Amouroux, and Clément, all members of the Commune, have been arrested.

Fort d'Ivry has been evacuated by the Insurgents. They blew it up on leaving, and the troops have taken possession of it. Six thousand insurgents surrendered at discretion this morning at the Barrière d'Italie.

The affair of Belleville is not yet concluded. There is fighting still. A great fire is raging in the direction Buttes de Chaumont.

MAY 27th.

If it is difficult to realize the present condition of Paris, it is still more difficult to describe it. We creep timidly about the streets, haunted by the constant dread, either of being arrested as belonging to the Commune, pressed into a _chaîne_, or struck by the fragment of some chance shell, and oppressed ever by the scenes of destruction and desolation that surround us; the whole forming a combination which produces a sensation more nearly allied to nightmare than to any psychological experience with which I am familiar, but yet requiring some new word to define it. The angry ring of the volleys of execution; the strings of men and women hurried off to their doom; the curses of an infuriated populace; the brutal violence of an exasperated soldiery, are sights and sounds calculated to produce a strange and powerful effect on the mind. Yesterday afternoon I drove over as much of the city already in the occupation of the Versaillists as was consistent with safety. Following the Boulevard Clichy in order to avoid the _chaînes_ in the neighbourhood of the Madeleine, I passed the scenes of terrible fighting. The Place Clichy was a mass of barricades and shattered houses, the _façades_ marked with bullets as if pitted with the smallpox, the windows smashed, and the evidences of a fearful struggle visible everywhere. It seemed as if the ground had been disputed here house by house; but from all I can learn of the resistance, the actual defenders of the barricades, though resolute men, were few in number. One of the most marked characteristics of this fighting has been the cowardice of the many as compared with the courage and resolution of the few; some of the barricades were abandoned by their defenders by hundreds, only ten or a dozen remaining to the last, and holding their ground until they were all killed or wounded. Passing up the Rue Lafayette, I reached the Head Quarters of the Fifth Corps, where, happening to know an officer, I was present at the examination of some prisoners who were brought in, as every soldier who thinks he has good ground for suspicion can arrest men or women, and drag them to the divisional tribunal. They are captured in shoals. One lame man with a villanous countenance, who was brought in while I was there, was accused of being a _chef de barricade_, and having been taken in the act. He was put through a short sharp fire of cross-examination, his pockets emptied and his clothes felt, and he was then hurried off to take his place in the ranks of the condemned ones that are forwarded to Versailles. Instant execution is only ordered in the more extreme cases, excepting where the fighting is actually going on, and then the troops give very little quarter. The bitterness of the belligerents against each other is of a far more intense and sanguinary kind than that which ordinarily exists between combatants. The soldiery, looking at the pedestal on the Place Vendôme and at the numerous public buildings which in some form or other are associated with their military history, now all smoking ruins, can scarcely contain their rage, and not unnaturally vent it with ferocity on an enemy which deliberately planned the destruction of Paris as the price of victory to the conquerors, and who are even yet endeavouring to carry out their diabolical design of destroying the houses still uninjured by secretly introducing petroleum balls and fusées into the cellars. I saw a soldier suddenly seize a man as he was apparently harmlessly walking along the street; his pockets were emptied and found to contain cartridges and combustible balls of various sizes. Another soldier and a sailor rushed to the spot; the latter drew his revolver, and I expected would have shot the man then and there, but he was satisfied on seeing his comrade prick him sharply with his bayonet. The two soldiers then hurried the culprit off in front of them cuffing him occasionally on the head, and accelerating his progress with the points of their bayonets while they cursed him heartily. A small crowd eagerly followed to see his fate, which they loudly hoped would be instant execution; and, looking at the detestable nature of the contents of his pockets and of his intentions, one could scarcely blame either his captors or their sympathizers if they called for vengeance, and long ere this, he has probably ceased to exist. One woman was caught with these fire balls on two occasions, having succeeded once in escaping. As a general rule, the hand-dog look of the prisoners is their most striking characteristic. I passed one gang of about 50 yesterday, and tried in vain, as I walked by their side, to catch a man's eye, or even to see a face turned fairly up to the light of day. With heads bare, and eyes steadily fixed on the ground, they passed between rows of people, who howled and hooted at them, and it was not till I reached the head of the short column that I observed a slender figure walking alone in the costume of the National Guard, with long, fair hair floating over the shoulders, a bright blue eye, and a handsome, bold, young face that seemed to know neither shame nor fear. When the female spectators detected at a glance that this seeming young National Guardsman was a woman, their indignation found vent in strong language, for the torrent of execration seems to flow more freely from feminine lips when the object is a woman than if it be one of the opposite sex; but the only response of the victim was to glare right and left with heightened colour and flashing eyes, in marked contrast to the cowardly crew that followed her. If the French nation were composed only of French women what a terrible nation it would be!

The aspect of the Boulevards is the strangest sight imaginable. I followed them from the Porte St. Martin to the Rue de la Paix. There was fighting at the Château d'Eau, and without either a pass or an ambulance _brassard_ a nearer approach to the scene of action was undesirable; indeed, until recently, the shells had been bursting here in every direction, and their holes might be seen in the centre of those pavements heretofore sacred to the _flâneurs_ of Paris. Strewn over the streets were branches of trees; and fragments of masonry that had been knocked from the houses, bricks and mortar, torn proclamations, shreds of clothings half concealing bloodstains, were now the interesting and leading features of that fashionable resort; foot passengers were few and far between, the shops and _cafés_ hermetically sealed, excepting where bullets had made air holes, and during my whole afternoon's promenade I only met three other carriages besides my own. The Place de l'Opéra was a camping ground of artillery, the Place Vendôme a confusion of barricades, guarded by sentries and the Rue Royale a mass of _débris_. Looked at from the Madeleine the desolation and ruin of that handsome street were lamentable to behold. The Place de la Concorde was a desert, and in the midst of it lay the statue of Lille with the head off. The last time I had looked on that face it was covered with crape, in mourning for the entry of the Prussians. Near the bridge were 24 corpses of Insurgents, laid out in a row, waiting to be buried under the neighbouring paving stones. To the right the skeleton of the Tuileries reared its gaunt shell, the framework of the lofty wing next the Seine still standing; but the whole of the roof of the central building was gone, and daylight visible through all the windows right into the Place de Carrousel. General Mac-Mahon's head-quarters were at the Affaires Etrangères, which were intact. After a visit there, I passed the Corps Législatif, also uninjured by fire, but much marked by shot and shell, and so along the Quais the whole way to the Mint, at which point General Vinoy had established his head-quarters. At the corner of the Rue du Bac the destruction was something appalling. The Rue du Bac is an impassable mound of ruins, 15 or 20 feet high, completely across the street as far as I could see. The Légion d'Honneur, the Cour des Comptes, and Conseil d'Etat were still smoking, but there was nothing left of them but the blackened shells of their noble _façades_ to show how handsome they had once been. At this point, in whichever direction one looked, the same awful devastation met the eye--to the left the smouldering Tuileries, to the right, the long line of ruin where the fire had swept through the magnificent palaces on the Quai, and overhead again to-day a cloud of smoke, more black and abundant even than yesterday, incessantly rolling its dense volumes from behind Notre-Dame, whose two towers were happily standing uninjured. This fire issued from the Grenier d'Abondance and other buildings in the neighbourhood of the Jardin des Plantes. In another direction the Arsenal was also burning. One marked result of a high state of civilization is, that it has furnished improved facilities for incendiarism, which seem to have been developed even more completely than the means of counteracting them. Along the Quais under the trees, cavalry horses were picketed, and a force was about to leave General Vinoy's head-quarters just as I reached it, to support an attack which was even then being made upon the Place de la Bastille, where the Insurgents were still holding out. On the opposite side of the river were the smoking ruins of the Théâtre Châtelet and the Hôtel de Ville. Passing through the Place du Carrousel into the Rue de Rivoli, I had a more complete view of the entire destruction which has overtaken the Tuileries and some of the adjoining buildings. The lower end of the Rue de Rivoli towards the Faubourg St. Antoine was densely crowded with troops, and passage in that direction was interdicted, while at the other end, near the Place de la Concorde, there was a _chaîne_; so I struck once more across to the Boulevards, past the Palais Royal, a large part of which is burnt, wearied and sickened with the waste of ruins through which I had passed, and meeting with only one incident, when I found myself in the midst of a panic-stricken throng all running away from a series of cracker-like explosions, which turned out to be cartridges that from some unexplained cause had begun to go off spontaneously under our feet. To-day the firing is more distant and less audible. The insurgents are still holding the heights of Belleville and Père-Lachaise. In the Jardin des Plantes the loss of the troops was heavy, but up to this time they have won their ground with a less loss than could have been anticipated, and the fearful mortality of Generals which characterized the last "_Campagne Parisienne_" has happily not been repeated upon this occasion. So far, no General has been either killed or wounded.

The affair of Belleville is not yet concluded. There is fighting still. A great fire is raging in the direction of the Buttes de Chaumont.

Loud reports have been heard within the walls of Mazas, and it is supposed that the hostages have been massacred.

Courbet, Amouroux, Gambon, and Valles have been executed.

The night is quiet.

Shells have fallen on the Boulevard Ménilmontant. Great hopes are entertained that the rains will check the conflagration. A few shells have fallen in the Rue de la Paix. Constant arrests or executions are being made of women who throw incendiary matter down the cellar gratings. Many bodies have been exhumed from under shattered houses, some with large sums of money on them. News reaches us that troops of the Line have occupied Ménilmontant and the Cemetery of Père-Lachaise. The Federals had declared Père-Lachaise to be their last stronghold, and that they were prepared to defend it tomb by tomb. The National Guard will be dissolved to-morrow. Upwards of 1,000 prisoners were marched up the Boulevard this morning, escorted by mounted Hussars. Delescluze has been taken at Villiers le Bel. General Eudes and Ranvier have also been taken. The public buildings destroyed up to the present time are the Tuileries, the Palais Royal, the Ministry of Finance, the Cour des Comptes, the Prefecture of Police, the Palace of the Légion of Honour, the Caisse des Dépôts, Graineterie, and the Garde Meuble. The Panthéon was saved by a rush of Marines, who cut a slow match before it reached the powder barrels in the crypt. The Châtelet, Lyrique, and Porte St. Martin Théâtres have been burnt, also the great barracks of the Rue des Célestins. Part of the roof of St. Eustache has fallen in.

The fighting still continues round the Château d'Eau. There will be no difficulty, however, in disarming the National Guard. Valles fought for his life, and received a sabre cut across the face and several bullets before he finally fell close to the Tour St. Jacques. Rows of bodies line the quays awaiting burial where they fell. The individuals arrested will be tried by Court-Martial at Versailles. The Court-Martial will commence its sittings on Monday. Many women and children have been executed around the Luxembourg, having been convicted of firing on soldiers. Fort Bicêtre is still in Federal hands, but the garrison is said to have exhausted its ammunition. Bergeret gave the order for burning the Tuileries. General Douai, by promptness of action, prevented the fire spreading to the Louvre. Humour has it that Delescluze and Pyat, disguised as beggars, were recognized in the Rue du Petit Carreau, and shot. Thirteen women have just been executed after being publicly disgraced in the Place Vendôme. They were caught in the act of spreading petroleum. Such papers as have appeared announce the execution of the Archbishop of Paris and the curé of the Madeleine.

The Column Vendôme is to be rebuilt.

With an English friend I this morning made my way along the line of Boulevards running east of the Madeleine. A marvellous change had come over them since yesterday; they were crowded with troops of the Line and civilians fraternizing with them, and wandering about to look for the traces of the recent conflict without danger of being shot from windows or being pressed into the service of the Communists to build or fight behind a barricade. It was our plan to make for the Hôtel de Ville, and we took the Bourse in our way. Everything was so quiet that we half hoped the fighting in that part of Paris at any rate was over, and we were in consequence greatly astonished to hear near us the furious beating of the _rappel_, as regulars were all about. We thought for a moment a hot conflict was at hand, but we had forgotten, not unnaturally, considering how long it is since we had seen or heard of them, the Party of Order. It was they who were rallying valiantly at the Bourse round the new tricolour banner and a few gentlemen who wore tricolour _brassards_ or pretty bunches of tricolour riband, and whose general tidiness and freshness contrasted strikingly with the grimy, business-like look of the real soldiers close by. These were streaming into the Place des Victoires, close by, receiving cheers and congratulations from the people about in the square or at the windows, who seemed delighted to see them. The men were in capital spirits, and told us they were carrying everything before them, that the Insurgents fought often well enough so far as mere pluck went, but were everywhere outmanoeuvred, and at nearly every barricade found themselves taken at once in front, flank, and rear. This exactly tallied with what we had already heard and seen. An officer told his men to keep a sharp look out on the windows of the houses about, lest they should be surprised by a fusillade. "No fear of that," said a _bourgeois_; "not a gun will be fired at you in this Quarter." This looked peaceful enough, and we were considerably astonished therefore as we went up a street a little further on, the Rue d'Aboukir, I think, to find ourselves facing a barricade about 150 yards off, manned, and with a flag floating over it that looked very red. We stared hard and long, but the flag was unmistakably red, and therefore, supposing any Regulars to advance, we were directly between two fires. We accordingly turned into a side street and waited patiently, as it seemed impossible that Regulars and Reds so near each other should escape collision. The Regulars were sure to come on; the only question was whether the Reds would run. As I looked up another parallel street, the Rue de Cléry, I think, I found the question answered in an odd way. There, within thirty yards, were two officers of Reds lounging leisurely about and stopping now and then to talk to people at doors. I suppose they were told of the near approach of the Regulars, for they turned back in the direction of their barricade. But meantime the Regulars had advanced, and, therefore, the enemies were at one moment within 40 paces of each other, though, being in different streets, they were unconscious of each other's near vicinity. Both parties seemed, as they well might, thoroughly at home, the people, whatever might be their secret sympathies, showing a decent appearance, at least, of impartiality to all men with arms in their hands, and yet in a few minutes or seconds--for there was now no doubt that they were about to fight--everybody was on the _qui vive_, getting ready to escape if necessary. The extraordinary feature of these Paris street fights is that many of them go on with a crowd of non-combatants, men, women, and children, as close to them on both sides as if the whole affair were a theatrical representation of a sensational melodramatic kind, where a good deal of powder and blue lights would be burnt, but no bullets or lives would be spent. In streets in which fighting actually occurs no one of course shows except combatants, and these show as little as possible, lying down or sheltering behind extempore barricades and windows. The people indoors, as may be supposed, do not keep near them, as the bullets fired down the sides of the streets under cover of doorways or corner houses glance and ricochet about in the wildest way. Scarcely a window escapes if the fight lasts long, but adjoining streets running at right angles to the fighting ground are for the moment comparatively safe, and the people crowd about the doorways in these, the more venturesome getting close to street corners, and every now and then cautiously craning their necks round to see, if possible, whether shots tell.