The fugitives from the invaded quarters brought the news of these massacres to the Mairie of the eleventh arrondissement. There, within smaller compass and more menacing, reigned the same confusion as at the Hôtel-de-Ville. The narrow courts were full of waggons, cartridges, and powder; every step of the principal staircase was occupied by women sewing sacks for the barricades. In the Salle des Mariages, whither Ferré had removed the office of Public Safety, the delegate, assisted by two secretaries, gave orders, signed free passes, questioned the people brought to him with the greatest calm, and pronounced his decisions in a polite, soft, and low voice. Farther on, in the rooms occupied by the War Office, some officers and chiefs of services received and expedited despatches; some of them, as at the Hôtel-de-Ville, doing their duty with perfect sangfroid. At this hour certain men revealed extraordinary strength of character, especially among the secondary actors of the movement. They felt that all was lost, that they were about to die, perhaps even at the hands of their own people, for the fever of suspicion had reached its utmost degree of paroxysm; yet they remained in the furnace, their hearts calm, their minds lucid. Never had a Government, with the exception of that of the National Defence, more resources, more intelligence, more heroism at its disposal than the Council of the Commune; never was there one so inferior to its electors.
At half-past seven a great noise was heard before the prison of La Roquette, where the day before the three hundred hostages, detained until then at Mazas, had been transported. Amidst a crowd of guards, exasperated at the massacres, stood a delegate of the Public Safety Commission, who said, "Since they shoot our men, six hostages shall be executed. Who will form the platoon?" "I! I!" was cried from all sides. One advanced and said, "I avenge my father;" another, "I avenge my brother." "As for me," said a guard, "they have shot my wife." Each one brought forward his right to vengeance. Thirty men were chosen and entered the prison.
The delegate looked over the jail register, pointed out the Archbishop Darboy, the President Bonjean, the banker Jecker, the Jesuits Allard, Clerc, and Ducoudray; at the last moment Jecker was replaced by the Curé Deguerry.
They were taken to the exercise-ground. Darboy stammered out, "I am not the enemy of the Commune. I have done all I could. I have written twice to Versailles." He recovered a little when he saw death was inevitable. Bonjean could not keep on his legs. "Who condemns us?" said he. "The justice of the people." "Oh, this is not the right one," replied the president. One of the priests threw himself against the sentry-box and uncovered his breast. They were led further on, and, turning a corner, met the firing-party. Some men apostrophised them; the delegate at once ordered silence. The hostages placed themselves against the wall, and the officer of the platoon said to them, "It is not we whom you must accuse of your death, but the Versaillese, who are shooting the prisoners." He then gave the signal and the guns were fired. The hostages fell back in one line, at an equal distance from each other. Darboy alone remained standing, wounded in the head, one hand raised. A second volley laid him by the side of the others.[189]
The blind justice of revolutions punishes in the first-comers the accumulated crimes of their caste.
At eight o'clock the Versaillese closed in upon the barricade of the Porte St. Martin. Their shells had long since set the theatre on fire, and the Federals, pressed by this conflagration, were obliged to fall back.
That night the Versaillese bivouacked in front of the Strasbourg Railway, the Rue St. Denis, the Hôtel-de-Ville (occupied towards nine o'clock by Vinoy's troops), the Ecole Polytechnique, the Madelonnettes, and the Monsouris Park. They presented a kind of fan, of which the fixed point was formed by the Pont-au-Change, the right side by the thirteenth arrondissement, the left by the streets of the Faubourg St. Martin and the Rue de Flandre, the arc by the fortifications. The fan was about to close at Belleville, which formed the centre.
Paris continued to burn furiously. The Porte St. Martin, the St. Eustache Church, the Rue Royale, the Rue de Rivoli, the Tuileries, the Palais-Royal, the Hôtel-de-Ville, the Théâtre-Lyrique, the left bank from the Légion d'Honneur up to the Palais de Justice and the Prefecture de Police, stood out bright red in the darkness of night. The caprices of the fire displayed a blazing architecture of arches, cupolas, spectral edifices. Great volumes of smoke, clouds of sparks flying into the air, attested formidable explosions; every minute stars lit up and died out again in the horizon. These were the cannon of the fort of Bicêtre, of the Père Lachaise, and the Buttes Chaumont, which fired on the invaded quarters. The Versaillese batteries answered from the Panthéon, the Trocadéro, and Montmartre. Now the reports followed each other at regular intervals; now there was a continuous thunder along the whole line. They aimed at random, blindly, madly. The shells often exploded in the midst of their career; the whole town was enveloped in a whirl of flame and smoke.
What men this handful of combatants, who, without chiefs, without hope, without retreat, disputed their last pavements as though they implied victory! The hypocritical reaction has charged them with the crime of incendiarism, as if in war fire were not a legitimate arm; as if the Versaillese shells had not set fire to at least as many edifices as those of the Federals; as if the private speculation of certain men of order had not its share in the ruins.[190] And that same bourgeois who spoke of "burning everything"[191] before the Prussians, calls this people scoundrels because they preferred to bury themselves in the ruins rather than abandon their faith, their property, their families, to a coalition of despots a thousand times more cruel and more lasting than the foreigner.
At eleven o'clock two officers entered Delescluze's room and informed him of the execution of the hostages. He listened to the recital without ceasing to write, and then only asked, "How did they die?" When the officers were gone, Delescluze turned to the friend who was working with him, and, hiding his face in his hands, "What a war!" cried he, "what a war!" But he knew revolutions too well to lose himself in bootless reflections, and, mastering his emotion, he exclaimed, "We shall know how to die!"