On the night of May 24, the Hôtel-de-Ville was in flames. The smoke, at times a deep red, enveloped everything; the air was laden with the nauseous odors of petroleum. The Tuileries, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Ministry of War, and the Treasury were flaming like the craters of a great volcano.
We have heard much of pétroleuses. They appear to have worked among private houses in the more open parts of the city. Here is a picture of one seen by an Englishman:—
"She walked with a rapid step under the shadow of a wall. She was poorly dressed, her age was between forty and fifty; her head was bound with a red-checked handkerchief, from which fell meshes of coarse, uncombed hair. Her face was red, her eyes blurred, and she moved with her eyes bent down to the ground. Her right hand was in her pocket; in the other she held one of the high, narrow tin cans in which milk is carried in Paris, but which now contained petroleum. The street seemed deserted. She stopped and consulted a dirty bit of paper which she held in her hand, paused a moment before the grated entrance to a cellar, and then went on her way steadily, without haste. An hour after, that house was burning to the ground. Sometimes these wretched women led little children by the hand, who were carrying bottles of petroleum. There was a veritable army of these incendiaries, composed mainly of the dregs of society. This army had its chiefs, and each detachment was charged with firing a quarter."
The orders for the conflagration of public edifices bore the stamp of the Commune and that of the Central Committee of the National Guard; also the seal of the war delegate. For private houses less ceremony was used. Small tickets of the size of postage-stamps were pasted on the walls of the doomed houses, with the letters, B. P. B. (Bon Pour Brûler). Some of these tickets were square, others oval, with a Bacchante's head upon them. A pétroleuse was to receive ten francs for every house which she set on fire.
All the sewers beneath Paris had been strewn with torpedoes, bombs, and inflammable materials, connected with electric wires. "The reactionary quarters shall be blown up," was the announced intention of the Commune. Mercifully, these arrangements had not been completed when the Versailles troops obtained the mastery. Almost the first thing done was to send sappers and miners underground to cut the wires that connected electric currents with inflammable material in all parts of the city. The catacombs that underlie the eastern part of Paris were included in the incendiary arrangement.
When Paris was at last in safety, and the Commune subdued, would that it had been only the guilty on whom the great and awful vengeance fell!
MONSEIGNEUR DARBOY.
(Archbishop of Paris.)
[CHAPTER XVI.]
THE HOSTAGES.