"The hut was already full, and we were made to lie on the earth in groups of about 200. An officer came and said to us, 'Vile creatures! listen to the order I give. Gendarmes, the first who moves, fire on these——!'
"At ten o'clock we heard reports quite near. We jumped up. 'Lie down, wretches!' cried the gendarmes, taking aim at us. It was some prisoners being shot a few steps from us. We thought the balls would pass through our heads. The gendarmes who had just been shooting came to relieve our guardians. We remained the whole night watched by men heated with carnage. They grumbled at those who writhed with terror and cold. 'Do not be impatient; your turn is coming.' At daybreak we saw the dead. The gendarmes said to each other, 'Oh! isn't this a jolly vintage?'
"In the evening the prisoners heard a sound of spades and hammers in the wall of the south. The fusillades, the menaces had maddened them. They awaited death from all sides and in every shape; they thought that this time they were going to be blown up. Holes opened and mitrailleuses appeared, some of which were discharged."[228]
On Friday evening a storm of several hours broke out above the camp. The prisoners were forced, on pain of being shot, to lie down all night in the mud. About twenty died of cold.
The camp of Satory soon became the Longchamp of Versailles high life. Captain Aubrey did the honors with the ladies, the deputies, the literary men, showing them his subjects grovelling in the mud, devouring a few biscuits, taking tumblers of water from the pond into which the gendarmes stood on no ceremony in easing themselves. Some, going mad, dashed their heads against the walls; others howled, tearing their beards and hair. A fetid cloud arose from this living mass of rags and horrors. "There are," said the Indépendence Française, "several thousands of people poisoned with dirt and vermin spreading infection a kilomètre around. Cannon are levelled at these wretches penned up like wild beasts. The inhabitants of Paris are afraid of the epidemic resulting from the burying of the insurgents killed in the town. Those whom the Officiel of Paris called the rurals are much more afraid of the epidemic resulting from the presence of the live insurgents at Satory."
Those are the honest people of Versailles, who had just caused the triumph of "the cause of justice, order, humanity, and civilisation." How good and humane, despite the bombardment and the sufferings of the siege, those brigands of Paris had been, above all by the side of these honest people! Who ever ill-treated a prisoner in the Paris of the Commune? What woman perished or was insulted? What obscure corner of the Parisian prisons had hidden a single one of the thousand tortures which displayed themselves in broad daylight at Versailles?
From the 24th May to the first days of June the convoys did not cease flowing into those depths. The arrests went on in large hauls by day and night. The sergents-de-ville accompanied the soldiers, and, under the pretext of perquisitions, forced the locks, appropriating objects of value. Several officers were in the sequel condemned for the embezzlement of objects seized.[229] They arrested not only the persons compromised in the late affairs, those who were denounced by their uniforms, or documents found in the mairies and at the War Office, but whoever was known for his republican opinions. They arrested, too, the purveyors of the Commune, and even the musicians, who had never crossed the ramparts. The ambulance attendants shared the same fate. And yet during the siege a delegate of the Commune, having inspected the ambulances of the press, had said to the personnel, "I am aware that most of you are the friends of the Government of Versailles, but I hope you may live long enough to recognise your mistake. I do not trouble myself to know whether the lancets at the service of the wounded are royalist or republican. I see that you do your task worthily. I thank you for it. I shall report it to the Commune."
Some poor wretches had taken refuge in the Catacombs. They were hunted by torchlight. The police agents, assisted by dogs, fired at every suspicious shadow. Battues were organised in the forests near Paris. The police watched all the stations, all the ports of France. Passports had to be renewed and viséd at Versailles. The masters of boats were under supervision. On the 26th Jules Favre had solemnly asked the foreign powers for the extradition of the fugitives, under the pretext that the battle of the streets was not a political act.
Extradition flourished at Paris. Fear closed all doors. No shelter was there for the fugitives. Few friends were left—no comrades. Everywhere pitiless refusals or denunciations. Doctors renewed the infamies of 1834, and delivered up the wounded.[230] Every cowardly instinct rose to the surface, and Paris disclosed sloughs of infamy whose existence she had not suspected even under the Empire. The honest people, masters of the streets, had their rivals, their creditors, arrested as Communards, and formed committees of inquiry in their arrondissements. The Commune had rejected the denunciators; the police of order received them with open arms. The denunciations rose to the fabulous height of 399,823,[231] of which a twentieth at most were signed.
A very considerable part of these denunciations issued from the press. For several weeks it did not cease stirring the rage and panic of the bourgeoisie. M. Thiers, re-editing one of the absurdities of June, 1848, in a bulletin spoke of "poisonous liquids collected in order to poison the soldiers." All the inventions of that time were again taken up, appropriated to the hour, and horribly amplified; chambers in the sewers with wires all prepared, 8,000 petroleuses enrolled, houses marked with a stamp for burning, pumps, injectors, eggs filled with petroleum, poisoned balls, roasted gendarmes, hanged sailors, violated women, prostitutes requisitioned, endless thefts—all was printed, and the gulls believed all. Some journals had the speciality of false orders for arson;[232] false autographs, of which the originals could never be produced, but which were to be admitted as positive evidence by the courts-martial and honest historians. When it fancied the fury of the bourgeoisie was flagging, the press fanned it again, each journal outbidding the other in villainy. "Paris, we know," said the Bien Public, "asks for nothing better than to go to sleep again; though we should trouble her, we will awaken her." And on the 8th June the Figaro still drew up plans of carnage.[233] The revolutionary writer who will take the pains to collect in a volume extracts from the reactionary press of May and June, 1871, from the Parliamentary inquiries, the bourgeois pamphlets, and histories of the Commune—a mixture as monstrous as that of the witches' cauldron—will do more for the edification and the future justice of the people than a whole band of mouthing agitators.