XC.
The roaring of cannon close at hand, the whizzing of shells, volleys of musketry! I hear this in my sleep, and awake with a start. I dress and go out. I am told the troops have come in. “How? where? when?” I ask of the National Guards who come rushing down the street, crying out, “We are betrayed!” They, however, know but very little. They have come from the Trocadero, and have seen the red trousers of the soldiers in the distance. Fighting is going on near the viaduct of Auteuil, at the Champ de Mars. Did the assault take place last night or this morning? It is quite impossible to obtain any reliable information. Some talk of a civil engineer having made signals to the Versaillais; others say a captain in the navy was the first to enter Paris.[[98]] Suddenly about thirty men rush into the streets crying, “We must make a barricade.” I turn back, fearing to be pressed into the service. The cannonading appears dreadfully near. A shell whistles over my head. I hear some one say, “The batteries of Montmartre are bombarding the Arc de Triomphe;” and strange enough, in this moment of horror and uncertainty, the thought crosses my mind that now the side of the arch on which is the bas-relief of Rude will be exposed to the shells. On the Boulevard there is only here and there a passenger hurrying along. The shops are closed; even the café’s are shut up. The harsh screech of the mitrailleuse grows louder and nearer. The battle seems to be close at hand, all round me. A thousand contradictory suppositions rush through my brain and hurry me along, and here on the Boulevard there is no one that can tell me anything. I walk in the direction of the Madeleine, drawn there by a violent desire to know what is going on, which silences the voice of prudence. As I approach the Chaussée d’Antin I perceive a multitude of men, women, and children running backwards and forwards, carrying paving-stones. A barricade is being thrown up; it is already more than three feet high. Suddenly I hear the rolling of heavy wheels; I turn, and a strange sight is before me—a mass of women in rags, livid, horrible, and yet grand, with the Phrygian cap on their heads, and the skirts of their robes tied round their waists, were harnessed to a mitrailleuse, which they dragged along at full speed; other women pushing vigorously behind. The whole procession, in its sombre colours, with dashes of red here and there, thunders past me; I follow it as fast as I can. The mitrailleuse draws up a little in front of the barricade, and is hailed with wild clamours by the insurgents. The Amazons are being unharnessed as I come up. “Now,” said a young gamin, such as one used to see in the gallery of the Théâtre Porte St. Martin, “don’t you be acting the spy here, or I will break your head open as if you were a Versaillais.”—“Don’t waste ammunition,” cried an old man with a long white beard—a patriarch of civil war—“don’t waste ammunition; and as for the spy, let him help to carry paving-stones. Monsieur,” said he, turning to me with much politeness, “will you be so kind as to go and fetch those stones from the corner there?”
Café Life Under the Commune.
Spectacles of Paris.
I did as I was bid, although I thought, with anything but pleasure, that if at that moment the barricade were attacked and taken, I might be shot before I had the time to say, “Allow me to explain.” But the scene which surrounds me interests me in spite of myself. Those grim hags, with their red headdresses, passing the stones I give them rapidly from hand to hand, the men who are building them up only leaving off for a moment now and then to swallow a cup of coffee, which a young girl prepares over a small tin stove; the rifles symmetrically piled; the barricade, which rises higher and higher; the solitude in which we are working—only here and there a head appears at a window, and is quickly withdrawn; the ever-increasing noise of the battle; and, over all, the brightness of a dazzling morning sun—all this has something sinister and yet horribly captivating about it. While we are at work, they talk; I listen. The Versaillais have been coming in all night.[[99]] The Porte de la Muette and the Porte Dauphine have been surrendered by the 13th and the 113th battalions of the first arrondissement. “Those two numbers 13 will bring them ill-luck,” says a woman. Vinoy is established at the Trocadéro, and Douai at the Point du Jour: they continue to advance. The Champ de Mars has been taken from the Federals after two hours’ fighting. A battery is erected at the Arc de Triomphe, which sweeps the Champs Elysées and bombards the Tuileries. A shell has fallen in the Rue du Marché Saint Honoré. In the Cours-la-Reine the 188th battalion stood bravely. The Tuileries is armed with guns, and shells the Arc de Triomphe. In the Avenue de Marigny the gendarmes have shot twelve Federals who had surrendered; their bodies are still lying on the pavement in front of the tobacconist’s. Rue de Sèvres, the Vengeurs de Flourens have put to flight a whole regiment of the line: the Vengeurs have sworn to resist to a man. They are fighting in the Champs Élysées, around the Ministère de la Guerre, and on the Boulevard Haussman. Dombrowski has been killed at the Château de la Muette. The Versaillais have attacked the Western Saint Lazare station, and are marching towards the Pépinière barracks. “We have been sold, betrayed, and surprised; but what does it matter, we will triumph. We want no more chiefs or generals; behind the barricades every man is a marshal!”
Poor Pradier’s statues.
Place de La Concorde: LILLE suffers from her friends in fight, whilst STRASBOURG, in crape, mourns the foe of France.