Our right wing held out better. The Versaillese had not been able to proceed further than the Eastern Railway line. From afar they attacked the Rue d'Aubervilliers, aided by the fire of the Rotonde. Ranvier vigorously cannonaded Montmartre, when a despatch from the Committee of Public Safety informed him that the red flag was floating from the Moulin de la Galette. Ranvier, unable to believe this, refused to cease firing.
In the evening the Versaillese formed in front of the Federals a broken line, commencing from the Eastern Railway, passing the Château d'Eau and the Bastille, and ending at the Lyons Railway. There remained to the Commune but two arrondissements intact, the nineteenth and twentieth, and about half of the eleventh and twelfth.
The Paris of Versailles no longer presented a civilised aspect. Fear, hate, and fiendish brutishness smothered all feelings of humanity. It was a universal "furious madness," said the Siècle of the 26th. "One no longer distinguishes the just from the unjust, the innocent from the guilty. The life of citizens weighs no more than a hair. For a cry, for a word, one is arrested, shot." The ventilators of the cellars were blocked up by order of the army, which wanted to give credit to the legend of the petroleuses. The National Guards of order crept out from their lurking-places, proud of their armlets, offering their services to the officers, ransacking the houses, revindicating the honour of presiding at the fusillades. In the tenth arrondissement the former mayor, Dubail, assisted by the commander of the 109th battalion, led the soldiers to hunt those who had formerly been under his administration. Thanks to the brassardiers, the tide of prisoners swelled so that it became necessary to centralise the carnage. The victims were pushed into the mairies, the barracks, the public edifices, where prevotal courts were organised, and shot in troops. When the fusillade proved insufficient the mitrailleuse mowed them down. All did not die at once, and in the night there arose from these bleeding heaps ghastly cries of agony.
The shades of night brought back the spectacle of the conflagrations. Where the rays of the sun had only shown sombre clouds, pyramids of fire now appeared. The Grenier d'Abondance illuminated the Seine far beyond the fortifications. The column of the Bastille, entirely perforated by the shells, which had set its covering of crowns and flags on fire, blazed like a gigantic torch. The Boulevard Voltaire was burning on the side of the Château d'Eau.
The death of Delescluze had been so simple and so rapid, that even at the Mairie of the eleventh arrondissement it was doubted. Towards midnight some members of the Council agreed to evacuate the Mairie. What! always fly before powder and shot! Is the Bastille taken? Does not the Boulevard Voltaire still hold out? The whole strategy of the Committee of Public Safety, its whole plan of battle, was to retreat. At two o'clock in the morning, when a member of the Commune was wanted to support the barricade of the Château d'Eau, only Gambon was found, asleep in a corner. An officer awoke him and begged his pardon. The worthy Republican answered, "It is as well it should be I as another; I have lived," and he departed. But the balls already swept the Boulevard Voltaire up to the St. Ambroise Church. The barricade was deserted.
FOOTNOTES:
[192] Armlet conspirators.
[193] Summoned several times to surrender, the Federals answered, "Vive la Commune!" They were thrown against the wall of the prison and fell with the same cry, one of them still clasping the red flag of the barricade. Before such faith the Versaillese officer felt a little ashamed. He turned to the people who had hurried up from the neighbouring houses, and several times repeated by way of excuse, "It is their fault! Why did they not surrender!" As though all Federals were not regularly and mercilessly massacred by them.