“Sir,” he said, bringing his hand to his cap in salute, “we ask that you will not lead your men under our arch. If you do,” he added firmly, “it will be over our bodies.”
The troops made a circuit.
It was only three days that the Prussians remained in Paris, but during that time the city mourned openly. All the shops were closed, all business was discontinued. When the enemy left everything they had touched was treated as if defiled. It is said that because a Prussian soldier had been seen to leap over one of the chains which swing from post to post to keep a space clear around the Arch of the Star a new chain was substituted.
The pride of Paris was humbled grievously.
CHAPTER XXII
PARIS OF TO-DAY
WHEN the siege of Paris came to an end and the German troops were withdrawn the provisional government which had been making its headquarters at Bordeaux removed to Versailles. The violent element in Paris which had given Louis Philippe so much trouble had increased both in numbers and in strength of feeling during the third quarter of the century. Now these radicals asserted that Thiers, the head of the provisional government, had betrayed France to the enemy, and they won to their way of thinking the Central Committee of the usually conservative National Guard. From the City Hall they directed the election of a new city government, the Commune of Paris, which held itself independent of the Assembly at Versailles and defied it.
Just a month after the hated Prussians had left Paris the communists made a sortie toward Versailles. As a natural reaction the Versailles government invested the city, and Frenchmen were pitted against Frenchmen as in the days when Henry IV was besieging his own capital town. Nor was the conflict merely between the people inside and the people outside—within Paris there was a constant struggle between the conservatives and the communists and even among the communists themselves. The conservatives disapproved of the drastic social changes made by the new government in closing the churches, and dispersing some of the religious orders, as well as of their confiscations of property on slight warrant and their onslaught upon monuments of sentimental and artistic value, such as the Vendôme Column. The communists, on the other hand, were torn by internal dissensions and their constant quarrels brought about the usual weakness resulting from poor team work.
Ferocity never failed them, however. Constructive measures were postponed; revenge, never. No sufficient excuse ever has been offered for their massacres of hostages, good Archbishop Darboy among them; none for the senseless orgy of destruction with which, after a two months’ struggle, they recognized their defeat by the government troops under Marshal MacMahon. When the soldiers entered Paris their first work was the extinguishing of the fires which the communists had set in a hundred places. Men and women, urged by hatred and fanaticism, piled kegs of gunpowder into
