[241] Letter addressed to the Liberté of Brussels.
[242] Besides the 27,837 prisoners officially recognised at the pontoons, 8472 others were admitted as being dispersed at Satory, L'Orangerie, Les Chautiers, the houses of justice and correction of Rouen-Clermont and St. Cyr. On the 15th of October there were still 3500 in the prisons of Versailles.
[243] The former resort of all sorts of criminals.
[244] The great political hecatombs have taken place in France since the decree of the Provisional Government of 1848.
[245] Here is a sample, and not one of the most emphatic, "We must make no mistake," said La Liberté; "we must, above all, not stand on niceties; this is certainly a band of scoundrels, assassins, thieves, and incendiaries whom we have before our eyes. To argue from their situation of accused in order to exact for them the respect and benefit of the law which supposes them innocent would be a want of faith. No, no! a thousand times no! These are not ordinary accused; they were taken, some in the very act, and the others have so surely signed their culpability by authentic and solemn acts that it suffices to establish their identity in order to cry with the full and sonorous voice of conviction, 'Yes, yes! they are guilty!'
"The detained witnesses are, for the most part, sinister bandits, with atrocious faces, repulsive types, especially the youngest, and whom one would not like to meet even in broad daylight at the corner of a wood."
[246] Family and morality were triumphing along the whole line. Some days after the fall of the Commune, the first president of the Court of Cassation, the official go-between of the amours of Napoleon III., solemnly reoccupied, before all the courts united, his seat, whence the hypocritical prudery of the men of the 4th September had expelled him.