fusillade had been brought here. I found my dear wounded ones in a fair way to be healed, but very much depressed by what was passing around them, and humiliated especially by the shameful defection of a part of the troops on the deplorable day of Saturday, the eighteenth.
My sacerdotal mission was ended. In returning across the Place Vendôme, I was not the witness or the object of any occurrence that merits attention. The dense line of insurgents that guarded the entrance of the Place from the Rue de la Paix opened for me to pass. The patrol, who remembered having allowed me to enter, asked no questions in permitting me to go out. I met a man in the Rue Neuve-des-Capucines who was covering a real pool of blood with sand. There was no change in the manner of the patrols: the street was still like a tomb. Nearly in front of the Crédit Foncier, a shop-keeper of respectable appearance timidly opened one of the doors of his shop, and asked permission to pass from the last patrol toward the boulevard, which was not more than fifty yards from me. He appeared so alarmed, and his face was so extremely pale, that the patrol, proud of the fear he inspired, did not fail to avail himself of so favorable an opportunity of amusing himself at the other’s expense. He questioned him with an affected solemnity which would have excited my laughter in less tragical times, addressed him a long and severe recommendation, and when the man turned, more dead than alive, toward the boulevard, the youngest of the band, who hid the malicious hilarity of a gamin under the gravity of a judge, took his gun, and pointing it toward the shop-keeper, who happily was not aware of such a salute, had the air
of saying: “If the rest of the bourgeoisie resemble this one, Paris is certainly ours.”
I was as much saddened at the dejected and disconcerted appearance of most of the inhabitants of this quarter, as I had been alarmed by the boldness and audacity displayed on the Place Vendôme by the workmen of the faubourgs, old criminals and revolutionists from all countries, who held possession of it. There was more stupor than indignation among the former. They hardly ventured to the doors of their houses, they spoke in low tones for fear of being compromised. This unfortunate attitude of the lovers of order only encouraged the energy and boldness of the enemies of society. I comprehended for the first time how a handful of factionists had been able in 1793 to terrify and decimate the better part of the community, who were ten times as numerous. The very day when the lovers of order will say to those of disorder, with the same energy and firmness as God to the waves of the sea, “Thou shalt go no further!” Paris will have no more to fear from anarchy and revolution, and France will no longer oscillate between the equally deplorable extremes of despotism and license.
If this simple and impartial account, intended to cast a little light upon one of the saddest and most execrable episodes of the revolution of the eighteenth of March, could also have the effect of calling the more particular attention of the lovers of order and stability, of whatever nation and party, to the dark aims of the International league of demagogues
who, under the mask of workingmen’s associations, prudential interests, and mutual protection, aim at the denial of God, the destruction of family and country, of public capital and private savings, of the domestic and political hierarchy—in a word, the destruction of all those principles which are the foundation of society; and also of thoroughly convincing the better classes of Paris and all the larger cities of France, that the promoters of disorder and anarchy, though now recruiting from the lowest social grades of Europe, are only strong in consequence of their own inaction and regard for self; that such power is only derived from their own want of discipline and energy; that they would only have to enroll, organize, and assert themselves to utterly destroy it—I shall have realized one of my most ardent wishes, and labored in my sphere of action for the consolidation of the social edifice and of public order, so profoundly shaken.
It was nearly six o’clock when I reached home. I had passed a little more than three-quarters of an hour among the insurgents and the wounded of the Place Vendôme. God alone knows with what emotion and earnestness I implored him that I might never be subjected again to such a trial to my heart as a priest and a Frenchman.
Here ends my first account, drawn up at the end of March. I need not add that my prayer was not granted. The Commune was founded in blood and terror, and was to end in a fiendish debauchery of madness and crime.
TO BE CONTINUED.
[41] Here is what, according to the Paris Journal of Versailles for the 18th of May, citizen Raoul Rigault wrote from the préfecture of police to citizen Floquet, one of the unhappy instigators of this pretended compromise: