Chapter VIII: Part 8

The _vainqueurs de la Bastille_ took upon themselves such airs of superiority and claimed so many privileges over their fellow-citizens that the municipal authorities finally, wearied with their arrogance, issued a proclamation in the latter part of December, forbidding them to assemble and to deliberate, and directing the procureur of the commune to prosecute any author, printer, or distributor of decrees which the aforesaid "conquerors" issued without any legal authority.

Michelet gives some details of one of the most celebrated of the innumerable murders of the Terror, that of the pretty Princesse de Lamballe, which may serve to illustrate the quality of the populace. She was confined in the prison de la Force, where during the night of the 2d of September, 1792, a Revolutionary tribunal condemned the prisoners to death after a mock trial. In the morning, two of the National Guards came to tell her that she was to be transferred to the Abbaye, to which she replied that she would as soon stay where she was. Taken before the tribunal, she was ordered to take the oath of liberty and equality, of hatred of the king, the queen, and royalty. "I will willingly take the first two oaths," she said; "I cannot take the last, it is not in my heart." A voice cried to her: "Swear; if you do not swear, you are dead." "Cry '_Vive la Nation!_'" said several others, "and no harm will be done thee." "At that moment, she perceived at the corner of the little Rue Saint-Antoine something frightful, a soft and bloody mass upon which one of the participants in the massacres was trampling with his iron-pegged shoes. It was a heap of corpses, stripped, quite white, quite naked, which they had piled up there. It was upon this pile that she was required to lay her hand and take the oath;--this trial was too much. She turned around and uttered a cry: '_Fi! l'horreur!_'"

"Release madame," said the president of the improvised tribunal. This was the signal for her execution. A little peruke-maker, Charlat, a drummer of the volunteers, struck off her cap with a blow of his pike, but in doing so he wounded her in the forehead; the sight of the flowing blood produced its usual effect upon the mob; they precipitated themselves upon her, "her breasts were cut off with a knife, she was stripped quite naked, Charlat opened her chest and took out her heart, then he mutilated her in the most secret part of her body." A certain Sieur Grison cut off her head; then the two wretches, taking on the ends of their pikes, one her head and the other her heart, set off down the Rue Saint-Antoine in the direction of the Temple, followed by an immense crowd, "dumb with astonishment." They carried the head into the shop of a coiffeur, who washed, combed, and powdered the blond hair. "Now," he said, "Antoinette will be able to recognize her." Then the procession proceeded in the direction of the Temple again; but by this time it began to be feared that, carried away by their excitement, the cut-throats might inflict the same fate upon the royal family confined there, and the Commune sent hastily some commissioners, girded with large tricolored sashes. When Grison and Charlat arrived, they demanded permission to promenade under the windows of the apartments occupied by the king and queen, which was immediately granted them, and the king was even requested to go to the window at the moment when the livid head of the princess was elevated in front of him. "The march was continued throughout Paris, without any one interposing any obstacle. The head was carried to the Palais-Royal, and the Duc d'Orléans, who was then at table, was obliged to rise, to go to the balcony, and to salute the assassins."

The only relief to be found in the perusal of these chronicles is in some incident in which the executioners turn on each other. Among the most vociferous of the "citizenesses" was the _belle Liégeoise_, called also la belle Théroigne de Méricourt, and the _première amazone de la Liberté_. From the garden of the Tuileries, the usual scene of her orations, she one day ascended to the terrace of the Feuillants, where she fell into the hands of the women of the party of the Montagne, who surrounded her, trussed up her petticoats, and gave her a public whipping. The "first amazon of Liberty" screamed, shrieked, but no one came to her rescue, and when her persecutors finally released her, it was found that she had lost her reason, and it was necessary to conduct her to an insane asylum in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.

All the chronicles of the times devote a paragraph to the "Furies of the Guillotine," the terrible women who habitually occupied the front places among the spectators at all the executions, and who interrupted their knitting only to hurl insults at the victims who mounted the scaffold. These _tricoteuses_ affected an exalted Revolutionary sentiment, they wore the red cap of liberty, and one day presented themselves at the Convention with an address in which they offered to mount guard while the men went off to combat in the armies on the frontier.

At the great gate of the Tuileries, between the two marble horses of Coustou, was a café-restaurant, painted a lively red, and which bore the sign: "_À la Guillotine._" "Needless to say, that the establishment was always full of customers." During the two years in which the instrument of public executions stood permanently on the Place de la Revolution, on the site of the present obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, so much blood was shed there that, it is said, a herd of cattle refused to cross the Seine on the bridge, terrified at the stale odor of slaughter. By the side of the scaffold was a hole destined to receive the blood of the victims, but this diffused such an infection through the air that "the citizen Coffinet thought it would be advantageous to establish, on a little two-wheeled barrow, a casket lined with lead to receive the blood, which might then be transported to the _fosse commune_."

On the 16th of September, 1797, the Central Bureau, "justly indignant at the debauchery and at the offences constantly committed against the public morality, whether by the impudent exhibition of books and pictures the most obscene, or by the prodigious multiplicity of women and girl prostitutes, or by the indecent masquerading of a great number of women in men's garments," issued a rigorous decree against all women who were found disguised as men, and very many arrests were made in consequence.

When Louis XVIII made his solemn entry into Paris on the 3d of May, 1814, it was in the midst of the popular acclamations; a numerous and very enthusiastic crowd swarmed in the Carrousel, the court of the château, the garden and the terraces, "this same crowd which, on the 10th of August, 1792, filled the air with its imprecations against Capet, which, on the 2d of December, 1804, acclaimed the Emperor and the Empress, and which, on this occasion, welcomed with cries of joy the orphan of the Temple after having applauded the decapitation of his father and his mother." When this same populace, turned Republican again, thronged along the boulevards and into the Place Vendôme in 1831, singing the _Marseillaise_, Maréchal Lobau, unwilling to fire on them, contented himself by ordering the hose of the fire-pumps turned on them, and deluging indiscriminately conspirators, orators on the public place, and spectators. "The Republicans had demonstrated on many occasions that they did not fear fire. But, like all Parisians, they detested water. Surprised at these unexpected douches, they fled in every direction, and the Place Vendôme was immediately cleared."

Well might Napoleon declare, repeating Rabelais's word, on one of the many occasions of popular manifestation: "This is not the first time that I have had occasion to remark that the population of Paris is only a _ramas de badauds_."

The _poissardes_, or fish-women of the Halles, those "_commères fortes en gueule_" (shrill-voiced gossips), appear almost as frequently in these police and scandalous chronicles as the courtesans. They are frequently mentioned in the mediæval records; under Louis XIII, they and their resort were considered worthy of the following description: "You will see at the Halles a multitude of rascals who amuse themselves only by pillaging and robbing each other, sellers as well as buyers, by cutting their purses, searching in their _hottes_ and baskets; others, in order to better secure their prey, will sing dishonest songs and dirty ones, sometimes one and sometimes the other, without any regard for either Sundays or fête days,--things deplorable in a city of Paris! In the Halles and other usual markets, you may see women who sell provisions; if you offer them less than they want, were you the most renowned person in France, there you will be immediately blazoned with every possible insult, imprecation, malediction, dishonor, and the whole with an accompaniment of oaths and blasphemies."

(The same author, speaking of the shop-keepers of Paris at this epoch, says: "They will damn themselves for a liard, gaining on their merchandise the double of what it has cost them, selling bad goods, and blaspheming and swearing by God and the Devil that they are excellent.")

In 1716, Jean-François Gruet, inspector of police and mounted _huissier_ of the Châtelet, was condemned to the pillory of the Halles for malversation of funds, and the _poissardes_ manifested themselves on this occasion in front of him in great shape: "_Huissier du diable! Gueule de chien! jardin à poux, grenier à puces, sac à vin, mousquetaire de Piquepuce, aumônier du cheval de bronze, poulet dinde de la Râpée_," etc., until they were too hoarse to continue. In 1784, the winter began by heavy frosts, which were followed by a sudden thaw which flooded the city. "Paris has become a sewer; communication has been absolutely interrupted between the inhabitants, and for several days past there have been on foot only those who were compelled to it by necessity, by their occupation, or by their duty. Arms and legs broken, and many other accidents, have been the results of this intemperance of the season. In the midst of this species of public calamity, there are those who find entertainment in it, occasion for mirth, and much laughter. In the first place, there have been unlimited opportunities for sled races, and, also, there has been offered to the amateurs a more novel and more piquant spectacle. You went to the Halles to see the _poissardes_ in boots, in breeches, their under-petticoats trussed up to their navels, and exercising their trade in this species of masquerade while redoubling their quirks and their scandalous jests."

Nevertheless, so important was their corporation, that, on the birth of the dauphin, in 1781, they were admitted in a body to compliment the king, to whom they were formally presented by the Duc de Cossé, Governor of Paris. The spokeswoman had her discourse written out on her fan, and read it to his Majesty. They were all dressed in black, and they were all, to the number of a hundred and fifty, invited by him to dinner and to present their compliments also to the queen. They had at first manifested some reluctance to accepting these royal hospitalities; the last time they had been to Versailles on a similar mission, some evilly-disposed person had inserted in the tarts and pâtés some indigestible substances "and dishonest things." The lieutenant of police, however, assured them that this time nothing of the kind would occur, and they were, in fact, treated sumptuously.

But, "the _émeute_ had established itself permanently in Paris, and its effects were disastrous. This condition of intermittent political fever which threatened to become continuous, paralyzed business, ruined commerce, and filled all minds with keen anxiety." "The people became accustomed to substituting sudden overturnings for the regular action of institutions," says another historian, "...a habit which has cost us twenty revolutions in eighty years. England has proceeded differently. Since 1688, she has had, instead of bloody revolutions, only changes in the ministry;--everyone, high as well as low, has, with her, manifested respect for the law, and everything has been left to free discussion,--force is never used." And a later student of the _Mouvement Social_, M. Jules Roche, quoted in the issue of _La Réforme Sociale_ for May 16, 1898: "Every country well governed develops from an economical, industrial, commercial, financial, and political point of view. All those projects necessary to the grandeur and the prosperity of the nation are conceived, decided upon, carried out. At this time, France, so munificently endowed, enriched by all the favors of nature, inhabited by the race the most intelligent, the richest in resources of the mind and the imagination, is delivered over to hazards the most unforeseen and the most dangerous. No one knows in the evening what will happen the next morning, nor in the morning how the day will finish. There is no doctrine, no method whatever, in the direction of public affairs. A Chamber possessed by the electoral epilepsy; charlatans without shame abandoning themselves before the electors to every contortion, to the grossest declamations, to the most shameful manoeuvres, in order to lead public opinion still further astray, instead of enlightening it,--this is the spectacle she presents to the universe. And there is no one to speak out aloud, frankly, and clearly! Silence, envy, cowardice, imbecility, where there should be courage, living reason, and action!" It might be thought that this gloomy presentation lacked in consistency,--this method of government could scarcely be practised by "the most intelligent race."

The street revolutions of 1831 and 1848, which finally expelled from power the royal houses of Bourbon and Orléans, presented the usual characteristics of these popular uprisings in the capital, in the result of which the nation always acquiesced meekly. One of the most senseless of the acts of excess in the former is illustrated in our engraving of the pillage of the archbishop's house, February 15, 1831, from an unpublished design by Raffet, in the possession of M. Cain, the sculptor. The mob had, the evening before, sacked the church and the presbytère of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, and on this day, incited to higher game, they broke into the residence of the archbishop, adjoining Notre-Dame. Everything was broken, overturned, flung out of the windows and into the Seine, rare books, precious manuscripts, rich crucifixes, missals, chasubles,--"that which was, on this day of folly, lost for art and science is incalculable." The heart of Louis XVI, which the doctor Pelletan had placed in a leaden box, sealed with his own seal, and presented to Monseigneur Quélen, was thrown into the river. Louis Blanc, in his _Histoire de dix ans_, relates that Monsieur Thiers, sous-sécretaire d'État in the ministry of finance, was seen walking about amidst this ruin with a satisfied countenance and a smile upon his lips.

From a photograph.]

The bodies of the first victims of the revolution of February, 1848, killed in a collision with a detachment of the 14th regiment of the line, were placed in an open car and paraded through the streets at night by the light of torches, to excite the fury of the populace. "They are assassins who have struck us down; we will avenge ourselves! Arms! give us arms!" The death-chariot, escorted by the crowd, proceeded to the office of the _National_, where the procession was harangued by M. Garnier-Pagès, and then to the Rue Montmartre, to the office of another liberal journal, _La Réforme_. "A man standing in the cart, his feet in the blood, lifted from time to time in his arms the body of a woman, showed it to the people, and then deposited it again on the heap of dead which made for it a gory couch." About two o'clock in the morning, this funeral cortége deposited the corpses at the Mairie of the IVth Arrondissement, and the rest of the night was spent in preparation for the combat of the morrow.

After the revolution of 1831 came the cholera, and as though the pestilence in itself was not a sufficient evil, the ignorant populace, surprised by its sudden outbreak and not comprehending the possibility of such an epidemic, conceived the idea that it was a fiction concocted to cover a system of wholesale poisonings by the police. The préfet de police, Gisquet, in his _Mémoires_, gives a detailed account of the various methods employed by organized bands of from fifty to a hundred men to scatter perfectly harmless substances in the wells, in the streets, in articles of food and drink, in order to increase this panic. "A young child was accosted on the Pont-Neuf by an individual who handed to her a vial containing some liquid and gave her twenty sous to go and empty it into the fountain of the Place de l'École, recommending her to use every precaution to avoid being seen doing so. The child, instead of executing this commission, went and related the story to her mother. Immediately the whole quarter was in an uproar. Crowds assembled in the streets, but some good citizens succeeded in calming the excitement. The flask was carried to the préfecture de police, and it was discovered that its contents were nothing but melissa." In eighteen days, more than twenty thousand persons had been attacked by the malady and more than seven thousand had perished; every one that could, fled the city; there were not enough coffins, not enough hearses, not enough grave-diggers for the dead. The streets were filled with the dying and with corpses; riots broke out, and "the authorities, on the 5th of May, massacred the youths who had crowned with immortelles the Imperial eagles of the Place Vendôme. The police, for their part, instigated an _émeute_ and smothered it in blood." Among the more illustrious victims of the plague were the Minister Casimir-Périer and General Lamarque; the funeral of the latter was made the occasion of a formidable popular manifestation and insurrection which was only put down after hard fighting and the declaration of a state of siege at the instigation of M. Thiers.

Even in the very first days of the new Republic of 1848 the popular discontent broke out afresh. Clubs were formed all over the city; the most violent harangues were made against the bourgeoisie; the words "communism" and "socialism" began to replace "fraternity"; numerous failures occurred in all the business quarters, and all the strangers left the city. Crowds paraded the streets crying, "_À bas les aristos!_" the last being a new word invented to designate the bourgeoisie, and the latter, strengthened by the workmen in blouses, to the number of a hundred thousand men, made a counter-demonstration, singing the _Marseillaise_. In 1850, on the eve of the _Coup d'État_, "a profound discouragement prevailed among the bourgeoisie. The sudden fall in public securities, the rise in the premium on gold, the significant increase in the purchase of foreign bonds, the departure of the numerous strangers who had come to Paris to pass the season, the diminution, more marked even than in the preceding month, in all industrial and commercial transactions,--such were the symptoms of that confidence which was to effect the conciliation of the electors."

The events of the first three or four days of December, 1851, justified only too well these apprehensions, and have been but too frequently related by indignant historians. "It was a sinister and inexpressible moment," says the author of _Napoléon le Petit_,--"cries, arms lifted toward Heaven, the surprise, the terror, the crowd flying in every direction, a hail of bullets, from the pavements even to the roofs, and in a minute the dead strewing the street, young men falling, their cigars still in their mouths, ladies in velvet dresses killed by the musketry, two booksellers shot on the threshold of their shops without even knowing what was wanted of them, bullets fired into cellar-windows and killing no matter whom, the _Bazar de l'Industrie_ riddled with shell and balls, the Hôtel Sallandrouze bombarded, the _Maison-d'Or_ mitrailleused, Tortoni taken by assault, hundreds of corpses on the Boulevard, a stream of blood in the Rue Richelieu!"

Under the new Empire, Paris saw itself almost transformed by the opening of wide and direct avenues of communication, the suppression of gloomy and insalubrious quarters, the completion of the Louvre, the construction of the Halles, the erection of churches, schools, mairies, and the laying out of public gardens and promenades. Six hundred kilomètres of sewers were provided for the drainage of the capital, and the Bois de Boulogne and de Vincennes greatly embellished. The working-classes were still disturbed by vague discussions over social questions, and by souvenirs of the Republic; but the bourgeoisie, enriched by the public security and liberty of trade, desired only the continuance of order and a somewhat more liberal administration of public affairs. The condition of many parts of the city, as revealed by a number of official investigations after the Revolution of 1848, was indeed deplorable. "A third only of the working-classes live under conditions approaching hygienic ones, the remainder are in a frightful state; forty thousand men and six thousand women are lodged in Paris in furnished houses which are for the greater part nothing but damp hovels, scarcely ventilated, badly kept, containing chambers in which are eight or ten beds pressed one against another, and in which several persons sleep together in the same bed." The immediate effects of the opening of Baron Haussmann's magnificent new boulevards were in many cases disastrous for the workmen and for the poorer classes, who found themselves compelled, by the destruction of their old lodgings, and the increase in rents and daily expenses, to seek shelter in the suburbs, and in the _quartiers eccentriques_; the Expositions Universelles also served to increase permanently the cost of living, as they have always done since, and in other cities than Paris. On the other hand, the cost of clothing was considerably diminished, and the workingman was never so well arrayed as in the first years of the Second Empire.

The dubious antecedents of the third Napoleon exposed him to even more than the usual hatreds and perils of crowned heads, and the number of plots against his life rivalled even those of the attempted assassinations of Louis-Philippe, one of the most unlucky of sovereigns in this respect. The Emperor has been accused of having been a member of the Italian secret society of the Carbonari in his youth; the Italian war of 1859 has been said to have been rendered imperative by his former oaths, and the frightful affair of the Opera-house on the evening of January 14, 1858, appears to have been the work of this political and revolutionary society. On this gala night, Massol was to bid adieu to the stage, and Madame Ristori was to appear in three acts of _Marie Tudor_, followed by an act of _Guillaume Tell_ and a scene from the _Muette_. The house was brilliantly illuminated, both the exterior and the interior, and thronged by an eager audience waiting for the arrival of the Emperor and the Empress; at half-past eight the Imperial cortége appeared, descending the boulevards at a trot and turning into the Rue Le Peletier. In the first two carriages were seated the chamberlains and officers of the crown, and in the third the Imperial couple, escorted by a _peloton_ of lancers of the Guard, the lieutenant commanding which rode close by the right side of the coach, while a maréchal des logis chef rode on the left side. The three vehicles slackened their speed to turn into the vaulted passage, under the marquise, which conducted to the stairway newly constructed for the use of the sovereign, and at this instant a bomb fell in the midst of the cortége and exploded. All the lights were extinguished by the concussion, the glass of the marquise of the theatre and that of the windows of the neighboring houses, from the cellars to the mansards, flew in splinters, the street was covered with the dead and wounded, and the terrified horses of the lancers, bolting in every direction, added to the confusion and terror. A few seconds later, a second bomb fell under the horses of the Imperial carriage, killing them, and a third, directly under the carriage itself.

At the first explosion, the Emperor had attempted to leave his carriage by the door on the right, on the side of the peristyle of the Opéra, but this door, jammed in its frame by the terrible shock, refused to open. While he was hesitating to attempt to descend by the other door, which opened on the street in which the assassins were probably stationed, a haggard and bloody countenance presented itself at the opening. It proved to be that of a brigadier of the secret police, Alessandri, one of the most devoted of the Imperial agents; beside it presently showed themselves the faces of M. Lanet, commissaire of the section of the Opéra, a police officer, Hébert, MM. Royer and Vaëz, directors of the Opéra, and General Roguet. The latter, who had been seated on the box of the Imperial carriage, had received a violent contusion on the neck, from which an enormous quantity of blood escaped. The lieutenant commanding the escort hastily assembled those of his men whom the flying projectiles had spared, and behind this friendly human wall the Emperor and the Empress finally ventured to leave their vehicle, and hastened into the Opera-house. Neither of them were injured, though the former had a hole through his hat, and his forehead was lightly cut by a piece of flying glass. His carriage was riddled by seventy-six projectiles, and he owed his life only to the fact that the panels were all lined with iron.

A hundred and fifty-six persons were killed and wounded by the three bombs; the pavement, the sidewalks, and the front of the Opera-house were pitted with holes and splashed with blood. All the issues of the Rue Le Peletier were closed almost immediately after the explosions, and a prompt descent was made on the restaurant and little garden, immediately opposite the Opera-house, which was kept by an Italian named Broggi. Here those of his companions who were at odds with fortune were in the habit of assembling, and here a waiter named Diot found on a table a pistol and beside it a man who was ostentatiously weeping. When questioned, he gave his name as Swiney, declared he was the servant of an Englishman named Allsop, a brewer, who lived at No. 10, Rue du Mont-Thabor, and that he wept because he feared his master had been killed. The real name of Swiney was Gomez, and that of his master, Allsop, was Orsini; the latter, who had been wounded by his own bomb, was arrested as he was walking peacefully away. He had the assurance to write a long letter to the Emperor from Mazas prison, after his trial, in which, while making no appeal for his own life, he interceded for the independence of Italy, without which, he asserted, "the tranquillity of Europe and that of your Majesty will be but chimeras." He admitted having brought the bombs from England and charged them with fulminating powder, but denied having thrown any of them; he was guillotined on the 13th of March, with his accomplice, Pieri,--Orsini crying with his last breath: "_Vive l'Italie! Vive la France!_" Gomez was condemned to hard labor for life.

"In 1867," says a historian, "France believed herself invincible. The capital of capitals surpassed the splendors of all other cities, ancient and modern. It was a bedazzlement, a fairy spectacle. But a time was approaching when a bloody and funereal vail was to be suddenly thrown over so many more than Babylonian magnificences, and in which the great city, so proud of her riches and her glory, was to have no other ceremonial than the overthrow of the Vendôme column by French hands in the face of the Prussians."

By the 18th of September, 1870, the siege of Paris by the Germans was formally opened, and yet, on that date, the author of the _Journal du Siège_ declares the capital to be "the most strange and the most marvellous city. On the eve of combat she still preserves her unalterable gaiety, still sings, and strews flowers in front of the soldiers. It is because her resolution is firmly taken, and that she awaits the attack with a firm stand and a valiant heart. To-day, it is a festival Sunday indeed;--on every side is animation, enthusiasm, life. We have made the tour of the boulevards; we have traversed the Champs-Élysées, the Rue de Rivoli, the quais. Everywhere there are tranquil countenances, and everywhere the Sunday crowd, gay, in no way impressed, nowise dejected, as the despatches to foreign journals assert.... The little street industries have not ceased; the tight-rope dancers continue their performances tranquilly in the midst of the military groups. If the Prussian spies were there, they could have heard, as we did, the converse of this valiant and joyous population, which waits only for a signal to hasten to the ramparts, and which has lost nothing of its complete self-assurance of the great days."

From a drawing, in colors, by Maurice Bonvoison, called "Mars."]

Two months later, the picture had become somewhat more sombre. M. Edouard Dangin writes: "Paris has become a veritable city of war. At seven o'clock in the morning, before all the gates of the city, the guard is under arms, the drum beats _aux champs_, the portcullis is lowered. It is the opening of the gates. At eight o'clock, in all the quarters of the city, the rappel is beaten, all the citizen soldiers who are to relieve the guard on the ramparts and on the minor posts are called to arms. Others are called out for the drill; there are, however, some quarters in which there is no drill in the mornings. The crowd commences to form in line before the butcher-shops in which beef and horse-flesh are sold, even before the doors are opened, then it becomes more numerous; the housekeepers press against each other, crowd and jostle. The men hasten to the different kiosques and purchase the newspapers, to learn the news of the morning. At noon, the distributions are all made; calm reigns, Paris is taking its déjeuner.... Toward half-past three the rappel is heard again in various quarters,--it is the evening drill. From all the houses issue the national guards, their muskets on their shoulders. At five o'clock, the drums beat _aux champs_ again before all the gates and the portcullis is raised. Paris is closed. The Parisians return home for dinner. The greater number of them go to bed early. Some of them go in the evening to take a little promenade, whilst others, who have not lost their café habits, commence, by the light of gas, games of dominoes which they finish by candle-light. In the streets, there are no cries, no drunkards, almost no more _petites dames_, nor others who lodge in houses and accost the passer-by too much preoccupied to reply to them. After eleven o'clock, silence prevails in the streets and the darkness deepens, because it is necessary to save gas."

Finally, the Germans entered the capital, and the population became more patriotic than ever. "The vanquishers, enclosed in their restricted zone, looked with astonishment at the grand city indomitable, whose superb monuments were seen in profile against the horizon. Those who showed themselves at the windows were hooted.... Women accused of having smiled on the enemy were whipped. Those unfortunate honest women who were wrong enough to inhabit the quarters occupied, or, perhaps, to be curious, were subjected to the same fate as the street-walkers. The ferocity of the populace began to manifest itself."

"It was much remarked that the German officers had all new uniforms, and that they all held in their hands plans of Paris. Their soldiers, frightfully dirty, prepared their meals in the open air, whilst the noisy fanfares of their military music were greeted by the hootings and hissings of the spectators. The stone statues of the Place de la Concorde, veiled in black by unknown hands, did not see the soiling of Paris. The Arch of Triumph of the Place de l'Étoile had been barricaded and obstructed in such a manner that the Germans could not pass under it. The triumphal monument remained virgin of this defilement. In the evening, Paris assumed the aspect, strange and prodigious, of a city asleep. Nowhere were there any lights, rare pedestrians, no omnibuses, no carriages. The footsteps of a patrol which resounded rhythmical and sonorous in the distance, and the _qui vive?_ of the sentinels, alone came to break the mournful silence which hung over the capital. The long line of boulevards, black and sombre, displayed the mourning of the city. Paris was superb in her suffering."

From a drawing, in colors, by L. Sabattier.]

It may be remembered that the number of German troops admitted into the city was restricted by the terms of the capitulation to thirty thousand, the entrance to be made at ten o'clock on the morning of the 1st of March, 1871, and the district occupied by them to be limited to the space between the Seine and the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, from the Place de la Concorde to the Quartier des Ternes. The evacuation was to take place immediately after the ratification of the preliminaries of the treaty of peace by the Assemblée Nationale. On the appointed morning all the public edifices, even the Bourse, were closed, as well as the great majority of the cafés and restaurants. All the battalions of the National Guard were under arms in their various quarters, their standards draped in crape, in the streets and on the various mairies black flags were displayed, and on many shutters might be read inscriptions: "Closed on account of the national mourning," or, "because of the public grief." On the boulevards, opposite the new Opera-house, and on all the streets leading down to the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées, detachments of the National Guard were stationed who prevented from passing any person wearing a uniform, or even a képi or pantaloons with a red stripe. The Rue Royale, from the Madeleine to the Place de la Concorde, was barred in the middle of its length by artillery caissons, and the Rue and the Faubourg Saint-Honoré were patrolled by strong detachments of the Chasseurs d'Afrique and mounted gendarmes. But in the afternoon the sun came out, and, according to M. Claretie, "the appearance of Paris, alas! became quite different from that of the morning. The population, carried away by an unwholesome curiosity, and aware that the entrance of the enemy had occasioned no disorder, decided to come out in the streets." The next day the Germans wished to visit the Louvre and the Invalides, but the sight of Prussian uniforms under the colonnade of the Louvre produced such an effect on the populace, it is said, that the French general Vinoy informed the German general von Kammecke that if his soldiers entered the Invalides he would not be responsible for the public peace,--and the Prussian officer abandoned the attempt.

If the Prussians had remained in Paris, the public peace would have been much better preserved. On the heels of their withdrawal came the Commune, and within three weeks the condition of the city had become such that the following is the official report of a quiet night, made to the Comité Central by "a Sieur Garnier d'Aubin, 'général de brigade, commandant de place du 18e arrondissement'":

"REPORT OF THE 20TH AND 21ST OF MARCH.

"Nothing new.

"I have received the reports of the different chiefs of the posts. The night has been calm and without incident.

"At five minutes past ten, two sergents de ville, disguised as bourgeois, were brought in by the francs-tireurs and immediately shot.

"At twenty minutes past midnight, a police officer, accused of having fired his revolver, was shot.

"At seven o'clock, a gendarme, brought in by the guard of the 28th, was shot."

"'The night was calm and without incidents,'" comments M. Gourdon de Genouillac, from whom we borrow many of these details, "and only four men were shot!"

The quality of the officers of this inchoate government may be judged from another contemporary document, inserted in _L'Officiel_ of the 18th of May:

"Those officers of the general staff of the National Guard who have neglected their duties to banquet with _filles de mauvaise vie_, at the restaurant Peters, were arrested yesterday by order of the Committee of Public Safety. They have been sent to the Bicêtre, with spades and picks, to work in the trenches. The women have been sent to Saint-Lazare to make sacks for containing earth."

One of the strongest characteristics of the Commune was its hatred and persecution of the clergy, manifested in a hundred acts, and culminating in the murder of the archbishop and the hostages. On the morning after the arrest of all the clergy of Montmartre, the following notice was posted on the doors of the church of Saint-Pierre:

"_Whereas_, the priests are bandits, and the haunts in which they have morally assassinated the masses, by bowing France under the claws of the infamous Bonaparte, Favre, and Trochu, are the churches,

"The civil delegate of the Carrières of the ex-prefecture of police orders that the church of Saint-Pierre (Montmartre) shall be closed and decrees the arrest of the priests and the Ignorantins."

On the preceding day, the cathedral and the church of Saint-Laurent had been closed, and in the crypt of the latter were found a great number of human bones; some of these were arranged so as to constitute the skeletons of fourteen women which, it was asserted, had been sequestered by the priests of the church, outraged, and murdered. Great was the virtuous indignation, the bones were officially photographed by the photographer Carjat, all Paris went to see them, and the affair made such a noise that after the capture of the city by the Versailles troops and the restoration of order, it was officially investigated by a scientific commission, which reported through its chairman, M. Tardieu, that the bones were those of persons who had been buried for at least a hundred and fifty years.

Of the women of the Commune, M. Maxime du Camp draws the following unflattering picture: "They were wicked and cowardly. Utilized by the police of the Rigaults and the Ferrés, they were pitiless in the search for refractory citizens who hid themselves that they might not have the shame of serving the Commune.... From the heights of the pulpits of the churches, converted into clubs, they poured out all the corruption of which their ignorance was full; with their shrill and yelping voices, in the midst of the smoke of pipes, to the accompaniment of vinous hiccoughs, they demanded 'their place in the sun, their rights as citizens, the equality which was refused them,' and other vague claims which concealed, perhaps, the secret dream which they put into practice shamelessly,--the plurality of husbands.

"They disguised themselves as soldiers; ... they 'manifested'; they assembled in bands, and, like the Tricoteuses, their grandmothers, they wished to go to Versailles '_chambarder la parlotte_ and hang Foutriquet the first.' They were all there, rushing about and squalling, the boarders of Saint-Lazare in vacation, the natives of the little Pologne and the great Bohemia, the sellers of tripe _à la mode de Caen_, the seamstresses for messieurs, the shirt-makers for men, the instructors for elder students, the maids of all work, the vestals of the temple of Mercury, and the virgins of Lourcine. That which was the most profoundly comic was that those escaped from the Dispensaire delighted in alluding to Joan of Arc and in comparing themselves to her.

"The Commune, without concerning itself about it, aided in this feminine uprising which emptied the houses with big street-numbers [houses of ill-fame] to the detriment of the public health and to the profit of the civil war. It knew how to resolve--this good Commune, composed of the sensible men that we know--it knew how to resolve, with one sole blow, the social problem which had troubled, for so many years, the administrators, the economists, the moralists, the philosophers, the doctors, and the legislators. It caused a paper to be pasted on the walls of Paris, and the great difficulty was solved forever. By a poster, well and duly stamped, it forbade prostitution. It was not any more difficult than that! The poor creatures liberated from all administrative regulation, from all sanitary control, did not wait to have it repeated; they spread themselves like a leprosy through the city, and when, reduced to poverty by the men who exploited them, they no longer had anything to eat, they donned the great-coat of the foot-soldier and went to the advance posts, where they were as formidable to their friends as to their adversaries.

"In the last days, all these belligerent viragoes fired from behind the barricades longer than did the men; very many of them were arrested, their hands black with powder, their shoulders bruised by the recoil of the musket, all excited still with the fever of battle. A thousand and fifty-one of them were conducted to Versailles, among whom were to be counted, according to the euphemism of the statistics, 'two hundred and forty-six celibataires under police surveillance.' As in the case of children, no undue severity was exercised, and eight hundred and fifty decisions of _non-lieu_ were rendered in their favor; among the female prisoners, four were sent to insane asylums,--that was very little! For any student of _possession_, there is scarcely any room for doubt; nearly all the unfortunates who combatted for the Commune were that which science calls 'patients.'"

The last stand of the insurgents before the constantly advancing forces of Marshal MacMahon was made in the last days of May in the quarters Ménilmontant and Popincourt and in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. The Buttes Chaumont were taken on the evening of the 27th; through the cemetery, around the tombstones, in the rain, the combat was waged with the bayonet, and without quarter. The marine infantry pursued the Communards into the vaults and killed every one they found. On the gray stones of the tombs could be seen for days afterwards the imprint of hands blackened with gunpowder and red with blood. In the quarries of Amérique, many of the last survivors killed themselves in despair. "The Seine for many days was filled with corpses, and the streets of Paris were only a slaughter-house." Two hundred and thirty-four buildings were destroyed, and the losses in property were estimated at a hundred and fourteen million francs.

The hideous virgins of the Commune are no longer in evidence, but they have been succeeded by a variety of their sex, in the idle and fashionable society of the present day, which, if we may believe a modern romancer, is sufficiently numerous to constitute a still more formidable menace. His story is put forth as a serious psychological study of Parisian manners and customs in certain walks of life; the interest, if not the approval, with which it has been received has been very marked, and the volume from which we quote is of the hundred and sixty-first edition. It is in much such a salon as M. Montzaigle has endeavored to paint that the explanation of these _demi-vierges_ is furnished to his friend from the provinces by the critical Parisian man of the world:--"There have happened in Paris, within the last fifteen years, two grave events,--two _kracks_, as my brother the banker would say.... Firstly, the krack of modesty. Our epoch may be compared to the Latin decadence or to the Renaissance, in the matter of love. Our young girls (I refer to those of the idle world of pleasure) no longer serve naked at the table of the Médicis; they do not wear necklaces of representations of the generative organs; but they are as knowing in matters of love as those Florentines and those Roman women. Who troubles himself to refrain from speaking before them of the last scandal? To what theatrical representations are they not taken? What romances have they not read? And yet conversation, books, the theatre, these are only words.... There are at Paris, in the world of society, professors of defloration, men on the hunt for innocence: ... the first lesson is given to young girls on the evening of their first ball; the course is continued through the season; when the summer comes, the promiscuousness of the watering-places or the sea-beach will permit the professional deflorator to put the finishing touch to his work....

"The second krack is that of the _dot_, as pernicious for the modern virgin as that of modesty. There are no longer any innocent young girls, but there are, also, no more rich young girls. The millionaire gives two hundred thousand francs of dot to his daughter, that is to say, six thousand francs of income, that is to say, nothing, not even enough to hire a coupé by the month. Hence, in this respect, the young girl has never been dependent upon the man, and as she has but one weapon with which to conquer him--love--the mothers allow them to learn love as soon as possible, through maternal devotion.... Yes, through maternal devotion. In my opinion, the universal alteration in the type of the young girl of former times may be imputed, first of all, to the mothers of the present generation." ...M. Marcel Prevost justifies his unpleasant discourse on the plea that modern education tends more and more to develop the type "_demi-vierge_," and that, if the education of the young girl be not greatly modified, "Christian marriage will perish."

There has been no successful street revolution in Paris since the days of the Commune, but the terrible under-strata ever and anon break through the thin upper crust of society with some such outburst as that of the dynamite explosions of 1892 in the Boulevard Saint-Germain, in the caserne Lobau, and in the Rue de Clichy. On this occasion, the Paris _Matin_ published the result of the official researches as to the locality of the various groups of anarchists in the city, from which it appeared that they were to be found in associations of greater or lesser numbers in the quartiers of the Bourse, of the Temple, of the Panthéon, of the fashionable Champs-Élysées, among the _valets de chambre_, the cooks, and the coachmen, and in the fourth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fifteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth arrondissements. In the quartiers of the Louvre, of the Luxembourg, and in the seventh, sixteenth, and seventeenth arrondissements, no organized groups existed. Their titles varied: _L'Avant-garde cosmopolite_, _Le Réveil du quinzième_ (arrondissement), _La Bibliothèque socialiste_, _La Jeunesse anarchiste du vingtième_ (arrondissement), _La Jeunesse révolutionnaire_ and _La Ligue des antipatriotes_; their publications ranged from _Le drapeau rouge_ [the red flag] to _La Révolte_ and Henri Rocheforte's _Intransigeant_. The arrest of the chief dynamiter, Ravachol, was effected through the intelligence of a waiter named Lhérot in the restaurant Véry, on the Boulevard Magenta, of which we give a view, on Victor Hugo's authority that it is always interesting to look at a wall behind which we think something is happening.

Their haunts, or those of the desperate poverty and misery which tend to swell their ranks, may be represented by the _Cabaret_ or _Buvette du Père Lunette_ or the _Château Rouge_, both of them threatened with demolishment for the last nine years, but still standing. The first, situated in one of the worst streets of old Paris, the Rue des Anglais, in the quartier of the Place Maubert, has been famous for forty years, having succeeded, as it were, to the evil renown of the _Lapin blanc_, in the Rue aux Fèves, celebrated by Eugène Sue and believed to have dated from the reign of Pepin le Bref, and the cabaret of Paul Niquet, in the Rue aux Fers. The founder of the Père Lunette, a Sieur Lefebvre, is said to have made a fortune by it. Its name is derived from a gigantic pair of spectacles (_lunettes_) hanging over the entrance-door, and another painted on the small window beside it. The whole small front of the establishment is of a deep red. Our illustration represents the inner sanctuary, to which the visitor attained by passing through an antechamber only slightly less characteristic. The walls are decorated by ignoble frescoes; on the disbursal of a franc for several litres of a species of wine, the stranger is admitted to the honors of the establishment, and there are duly unrolled for him six canvases hanging on the wall on which are figured various personages, Gambetta, Cassagnac, Prince Napoleon, and even the Pope, in various situations. The Rue des Anglais, at the present day, very short and narrow and irregular, is very clean and proper.

A large porte-cochère, surrounded by a red border, near the middle of the Rue Galande, opens under an arched passage-way into a small court, badly paved, at the bottom of which a few steps lead up to an entrance in a wall also painted red, and a glass door opens into the first apartment of the Château Rouge. This visit should be made between midnight and two o'clock in the morning, the hours at which the establishment is in its fullest activity. The first two rooms on the ground-floor are merely low drinking-places, crowded with both men and women; the second floor, reached by a narrow staircase, was formerly known familiarly to the inmates as the _Salle des Morts_ or the _Bataille de Champigny_; at these hours it is strewn with motionless bodies, in various attitudes of uneasy slumber, and in various stages of squalid undress. As the visitor turns to descend, he will find the stairway blocked by the recumbent forms of late arrivals for whom no space has been left in this wretched dormitory. At two o'clock in the morning the establishment closes, and all the sleepers are aroused and turned out into the street. For this transient hospitality each of them pays two sous.

Curiously enough, the building seen at the left of the Château Rouge, with its balustraded stairway under the arch and its arched windows filled with innumerable little panes, was the residence of Gabrielle d'Estrées, the _belle amie_ of Henri IV. It may still be seen, but the railing of the stairway at the present day is a simple iron one.

The Place Maubert, now forming part of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and ornamented by a statue of Étienne Dolet, was at the period shown in our illustration, in 1889, a rendezvous for the professionals of that peculiar street industry who are known as _ramasseux de mégots_,--those highly unpleasant individuals who slouch about the cafés on the boulevards and pick up the butts of cigars and cigarettes. They claim to be several thousand in number, and they have definite hours for the exercise of their profession, hours in which their harvest is the greatest and just before the street-sweepers come along, at two o'clock in the morning, when the establishments close, at noon, and at nine o'clock in the evening. An industrious man, who has pretty good eyesight, may pick up a hundred to a hundred and fifty grammes of tobacco on each round. A good day's work will bring in as much as fifty sous; a rainy day, not more than twelve or fifteen. The best localities, which it is, of course, very important to know, are the surroundings of the Halle aux blés, the Bourse, the Louvre, the cafés on the boulevards, and in summer the public gardens and the crowds around the military bands. This tobacco which is thus saved from the street sweepings is--it is painful to relate--dried, assorted, made over again, and sold to other smokers. When one reflects on the quality of ordinary French tobacco at its best, this consideration tends to add another ease to death. And yet an ingenious chronicler, who extracted these details from a professional, declares that upon examining, with his eyes and his nose, a package of the best of this resuscitated weed, a package of "_théâtre_," these faithful organs gave him no reason to suspect its origin. The _théâtre_ is made from _londrès_ exclusively, no cigarettes and no _tabac de chique_ are allowed to enter in its composition; the two cheaper brands manufactured are _le petit_ and _le gros_. There are special clients for this merchandise, ranging from the inmates of asylums for old men and the insane patients at Charenton to military men on insufficient pensions who make their purchases hurriedly and with anxious glances around. When the fine season opens, the _ramasseur de mégots_ who has collected a good winter harvest will issue from the city to sell his merchandise in the suburbs. In this irregular commerce he runs the risks of denunciation by the authorized _bureaux de tabac_, and of six months in prison, although his tobacco has once paid the _régie_, or tax.