Paris had never seemed to Dunoisse so crowded and so empty as when, on foot—for no public conveyance was obtainable—he returned to his rooms in the Rue du Bac. Entire regiments of cavalry, riding at a foot’s pace in close column, flowed in slow, resistless rivers of flesh and steel, along the boulevards. And brigades, with their batteries of artillery, were drawn up in the great squares and public places, waiting the signal to roll down and overwhelm any organized attempt at resistance, under cataclysms of disciplined force.
No street but had its silent menace of cannon posted at the mouth of it, waiting, in case Liberty and Equality should lift their heads up from the blood-smeared asphalte, to decapitate them with a discharge of grape. But no head was lifted, and no Red Flag was raised; the iron heel of the Friend of Labor and the Lover of Humanity bore with such paralyzing, crushing weight upon the necks of men.
Save for curt words of command, the jingling of bridles, and the snorting of wearied horses, the silence in this city of shot-riddled walls and splintered windows was like a heavy hand upon the public mouth. Street-lamps were few—nearly all had been shattered by bullets—but when dusk had given place to darkness, the immense bivouac-fires of the troops reddened the lowering sky, and Paris might have been Tophet, she so reeked of smoke and furnace-heat. And by that lurid glare in the heavens dark, furtive shapes might have been seen hurrying by in the shadow of walls and hoardings, that were spies of the police, or agents of the National Printing-Office, charged with the posting of yet more proclamations; or Revolutionists speeding to join their comrades on the barricades, and share with them the last crust, and the few remaining cartridges, before drinking with them of the strong black wine that brims the cup of Death. Or they were men and women crazed with anxiety, or frantic with grief; dragging by the hand pale, frightened children, as they went to search for missing friends or relatives at that universal Lost Property Office, the Cemetery of Montmartre; crying with that dumb voice of anguish that echoes in the chambers of the desolate heart, and which the most stringent decrees of Monseigneur were powerless to silence.
“Oh, my father!... Oh, my mother!... Alas! my husband! lover! sister! brother! friend!... Am I despairing—searching by the flickering light of the tallow candle in the broken lantern, or the uncertain match-flare, amongst all these ghastly unburied heads of staring corpses, starting like monstrous fungi from the trodden, bloody soil of this consecrated place of murder—to find the face beloved?...”
More corpses, and yet more, were being made, to the echoing roll of the drums in the Champ de Mars, and piled in carts under the scared eye of the pale, sickened moon, and rattled away to Golgotha.
Turning the corner of one of the narrower thoroughfares, where a single unbroken oil-lamp made a little island of yellow light upon the murkiness, Dunoisse came upon two persons who were, for a wonder, conversing so earnestly that neither paid attention to the light, quick, even footstep drawing near. Said one of the couple, a bloused, shaggy-headed man of the artisan type, whose lantern-jawed, sallow face was lighted from below with rather demoniacal effect, by the flare of the match he had struck and sheltered between his hollowed hands, for the kindling of his short, blackened pipe:
“They made no resistance—they were butchered like sheep.... That was at midday, on the boulevard opposite the Café Vachette. Before dark, when I passed that way, the bodies were lying piled up anyhow.... The blood still smoked as it ran down the kennels—my shoes were wet with it, and the bottoms of my trousers. See for yourself the state they are in!”
He held up a foot, supporting himself with a hand against the wall behind him. His companion, a shorter, stouter figure, whose back was towards Dunoisse, stooped to look, and said in an astonished tone, as he straightened himself again:
“There seems no end to the killing, sacred name of a pig! One wonders how many they have polished off?”