“The projectiles of the besieging army having reached Longchamps, it was found necessary to remove further, into the city the sick and wounded with which the ambulance was crowded. It was then that, on an order of the Committee of Public Health, our house was requisitioned by the Administration of the Press, who required there a hundred beds. It was arranged that the Brothers should undertake the attendance on the sick, but scarcely had they begun to organize the work before a new order arrived from the committee, forbidding any of the Brothers to remain in the house under pain of arrest and imprisonment. Our dear Brother Assistants therefore, with the others who until then had remained at the post of danger, as well as our sick and aged men, found themselves compelled to quit that home which could no longer, alas! be railed the mother, but the widowed, house, and, during five or six days, the abode of pain and death. The ambulance was established there under the direction of the Press, the administrators of which testified a kindly interest towards us, and we gladly acknowledge that to them we owe the preservation of our house, which, but for them, would in all probability have been given up to the flames.
“On Sunday, the 21st of May, there was no Mass in our deserted chapel, from whence the Blessed Sacrament had been removed the evening before. The persecution against us had reached its height, and also its term. That same day the besieging army forced the Gate of St. Cloud, and on the next, the 22d, took possession of our quarter, and put an end for us to the Reign of Terror.…
“All this week was nothing but one sanguinary conflict; our mother-house was crowded with wounded to the number of six hundred; a temporary building had also been erected within its precincts, to which were brought those who were slain in the neighborhood; as many as eighty dead would sometimes be carried in at a time. On Wednesday, the 24th, however, the military authorities decided that the ambulance should be transferred back again to Longchamps, and that the Brothers should immediately be restored to the possession of the mother-house as well as of their other establishments. From that day a new order of things commenced for us, and with it the reflux into Paris of our emigrated Brothers.
“But all were not able to return; some were prisoners at Mazas. Already, out of hatred to religion, the Commune had shot Monseigneur the Archbishop, the cure of the Madeleine, and several other priests, secular and regular, … and they now proposed to shoot all their prisoners, and renew in 1871 the massacre of 1792. But again time failed them.
“The liberating army, like an irresistible torrent, carried away the barricades, and the firing soon began around Mazas, whereupon the keepers of the prison seized the Communist director and locked him up, opening all the doors, and bringing down the captives—between four and five hundred in number—into the court, from whence they made their exit three by three. Our Brothers went out; but only to find themselves entangled in the lines of the Federals, and forced to work at the barricades, until night seemed to favor their escape. It was while he was thus employed that our dearest Brother Néomede-Justin, of Issy, was killed by the bursting of a shell.”
During three days and nights the Brothers were the objects of the most active surveillance, and had to watch their opportunity to recede from one barricade to another. In this way several managed to reach the mother-house on Friday, the 25th; others, on the two following days, but not all. To continue in the words of Brother Philip:
“On Whit-Sunday, towards one o’clock in the morning, all the insurgents were surrounded on the heights of Belleville, disarmed, chained five together, taken to La Roquette (the prison of the condemned), and brought before a council of war. Our two Brothers, who had been also chained to three insurgents, were present at the interrogation of those who had preceded them, and at the execution of sentence of death upon a large number. For the space of three hours they waited thus in the most anxious expectation. When it was their turn to appear, they said that they were Brothers of the Christian Schools, just out of prison, but that for three days they had found it impossible to escape from the vigilant oppression of the insurgents. On ascertaining the truth of their statement, the council gave them a pass, and facilitated their return to the mother-house.
“They came back to us worn out and broken down by fatigue, as well as by all the terrible emotions they had undergone, and blessing God for their wonderful preservation.”
On hearing of the restoration of order the emigrated Brothers hastened back to Paris, their venerable superior joining them at the mother-house on the evening of the 9th of June.
“It was,” writes Brother Philip, “the hour of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, … after which we sang the psalm, Ecce quam bonum, … and then I attempted to say a few words to our dearest Brothers, reunited once more, but I found it impossible, so great was my emotion.”