They fired into the cellars by the air-holes.
A workman, a currier, named Moulins, who had taken refuge in one of these shot-riddled cellars, saw through the cellar air-hole a passer-by, who had been wounded in the thigh by a bullet, sit down on the pavement with the death rattle in his throat, and lean against a shop. Some soldiers who heard this rattle ran up and finished off the wounded man with bayonet thrusts.
One brigade killed the passer-by from the Madeleine to the Opera, another from the Opera to the Gymmase; another from the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle to the Porte Saint Denis; the 75th of the line having carried the barricade of the Porte Saint Denis, it was no longer a fight, it was a slaughter. The massacre radiated—a word horribly true—from the boulevard into all the streets. It was a devil-fish stretching out its feelers. Flight? Why? Concealment? To what purpose? Death ran after you quicker than you could fly. In the Rue Pagevin a soldier said to a passer-by, "What are you doing here?" "I am going home." The soldier kills the passer-by. In the Rue des Marais they kill four young men in their own courtyard. Colonel Espinasse exclaimed, "After the bayonet, cannon!" Colonel Rochefort exclaimed, "Thrust, bleed, slash!" and he added, "It is an economy of powder and noise." Before Barbedienne's establishment an officer was showing his gun, an arm of considerable precision, admiringly to his comrades, and he said, "With this gun I can score magnificent shots between the eyes." having said this, he aimed at random at some one, and succeeded. The carnage was frenzied. While the butchering under the orders of Carrelet filled the boulevard, the Bourgon brigade devastated the Temple, the Marulaz brigade devastated the Rue Rambuteau; the Renault division distinguished itself on the "other side of the water." Renault was that general, who, at Mascara, had given his pistols to Charras. In 1848 he had said to Charras, "Europe must be revolutionized." And Charras had said, "Not quite so fast!" Louis Bonaparte had made him a General of Division in July, 1851. The Rue aux Ours was especially devastated. Morny that evening said to Louis Bonaparte, "The 15th Light Infantry have scored a success. They have cleaned out the Rue aux Ours."
At the corner of the Rue du Sentier an officer of Spahis, with his sword raised, cried out, "This is not the sort of thing! You do not understand at all. Fire on the women." A woman was flying, she was with child, she falls, they deliver her by the means of the butt-ends of their muskets. Another, perfectly distracted, was turning the corner of a street. She was carrying a child. Two soldiers aimed at her. One said, "At the woman!" And he brought down the woman. The child rolled on the pavement. The other soldier said, "At the child!" And he killed the child.
A man of high scientific repute, Dr. Germain Sée, declares that in one house alone, the establishment of the Jouvence Baths, there were at six o'clock, beneath a shed in the courtyard, about eighty wounded, nearly all of whom (seventy, at least) were old men, women, and children. Dr. Sée was the first to attend to them.
In the Rue Mandar, there was, stated an eye-witness, "a rosary of corpses," reaching as far as the Rue Neuve Saint Eustache. Before the house of Odier twenty-six corpses. Thirty before the hotel Montmorency. Fifty-two before the Variétés, of whom eleven were women. In the Rue Grange-Batelière there were three naked corpses. No. 19, Faubourg Montmartre, was full of dead and wounded.
A woman, flying and maddened, with dishevelled hair and her arms raised aloft, ran along the Rue Poissonnière, crying, "They kill! they kill! they kill! they kill! they kill!"
The soldiers wagered. "Bet you I bring down that fellow there." In this manner Count Poninsky was killed whilst going into his own house, 52, Rue de la Paix.
I was anxious to know what I ought to do. Certain treasons, in order to be proved, need to be investigated. I went to the field of murder.
In such mental agony as this, from very excess of feeling one no longer thinks, or if one thinks, it is distractedly. One only longs for some end or other. The death of others instills in you so much horror that your own death becomes an object of desire; that is to say, if by dying, you would be in some degree useful! One calls to mind deaths which have put an end to angers and to revolts. One only retains this ambition, to be a useful corpse.