CHAPTER XXXIII.
"La cause de la justice, de l'ordre, de l'humanité, de la civilisation, a triomphé."—M. Thiers à l'Assemblée Nationale, 22 Mai 1871.
THE CONVOYS OF PRISONERS—THE ORANGERIE—THE ARRESTS—SATORY—THE DENUNCIATORS—THE PRESS—THE LEFT INSULTS THE VANQUISHED—DEMONSTRATIONS IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES.
Happy the dead! They had not to mount the Calvary of the prisoners.
From the wholesale fusillades one may guess the number of arrests. It was a furious razzia; men, women, children, Parisians, provincials, foreigners, a crowd of people of all sexes and all ages, of all parties and all conditions. All the lodgers of a house, all the inhabitants of a street, were carried off in a body. A suspicion, a word, a doubtful attitude were sufficient to cause one to be seized by the soldiers. From the 21st to the 30th May they thus picked up 40,000 persons.
These prisoners were formed into long chains, sometimes free, sometimes, as in June, 1848, bound by cords so as to form only one body. Whoever refused to walk on was pricked with the bayonet, and, if he resisted, shot on the spot, sometimes attached to a horse's tail.[224] In front of the churches of the rich quarters the captives were forced to kneel down, bareheaded, amidst an infamous mob of lackeys, fashionables, and prostitutes, crying, "Death! death! Do not go any further; shoot them here!" At the Champs-Elysées they wanted to break the files to taste blood.
The prisoners were sent on to Versailles. Gallifet awaited them at La Muette. In the town he escorted the chains, halting under the windows of the aristocratic clubs in order to earn plaudits and hurrahs. At the gates of Paris he levied his tithe, walked past the ranks, and, with his look of a famished wolf, "You seem intelligent," said he to some one; "step out of the ranks." "You have a watch," said he to another; "you must have been a functionary of the Commune," and he placed him apart. On the 26th, in one single convoy, he chose eighty-three men and three women, made them draw up along the talus of the fortifications and had them shot.[225] Then he said to their comrades, "My name is Gallifet. Your journals in Paris had sullied me enough. I take my revenge." On Sunday, the 28th, he said, "Let those who have white hairs step out from the ranks." One hundred and eleven captives advanced. "You," continued Gallifet, "you have seen June, 1848; you are more culpable than the others," and he had their corpses thrown over into the fortifications.
This purgation over, the convoys entered upon the route to Versailles, pressed between two files of cavalry. It looked like the population of a city dragged away by fierce hordes. Lads, grey-bearded men, soldiers, dandies, all and every condition; the most delicate and the most rude confounded in the same vortex. Many women, some with manacles on their hands; such a one with her baby, who pressed its mother's neck with its frightened little hands; another, her arm broken, her chemisette stained with blood; another depressed, clinging to the arm of her more vigorous neighbour; another in a statuesque attitude, defying pain and insults; always that woman of the people, who, after having carried the bread to the trenches and given consolation to the dying, hopeless—
"Découragée de mettre au jour des malheureux,"