"At five minutes past ten, two sergents de ville, disguised as bourgeois, were brought in by the francs-tireurs and immediately shot.
"At twenty minutes past midnight, a police officer, accused of having fired his revolver, was shot.
"At seven o'clock, a gendarme, brought in by the guard of the 28th, was shot."
"'The night was calm and without incidents,'" comments M. Gourdon de Genouillac, from whom we borrow many of these details, "and only four men were shot!"
The quality of the officers of this inchoate government may be judged from another contemporary document, inserted in L'Officiel of the 18th of May:
"Those officers of the general staff of the National Guard who have neglected their duties to banquet with filles de mauvaise vie, at the restaurant Peters, were arrested yesterday by order of the Committee of Public Safety. They have been sent to the Bicêtre, with spades and picks, to work in the trenches. The women have been sent to Saint-Lazare to make sacks for containing earth."
One of the strongest characteristics of the Commune was its hatred and persecution of the clergy, manifested in a hundred acts, and culminating in the murder of the archbishop and the hostages. On the morning after the arrest of all the clergy of Montmartre, the following notice was posted on the doors of the church of Saint-Pierre:
"Whereas, the priests are bandits, and the haunts in which they have morally assassinated the masses, by bowing France under the claws of the infamous Bonaparte, Favre, and Trochu, are the churches,
"The civil delegate of the Carrières of the ex-prefecture of police orders that the church of Saint-Pierre (Montmartre) shall be closed and decrees the arrest of the priests and the Ignorantins."
On the preceding day, the cathedral and the church of Saint-Laurent had been closed, and in the crypt of the latter were found a great number of human bones; some of these were arranged so as to constitute the skeletons of fourteen women which, it was asserted, had been sequestered by the priests of the church, outraged, and murdered. Great was the virtuous indignation, the bones were officially photographed by the photographer Carjat, all Paris went to see them, and the affair made such a noise that after the capture of the city by the Versailles troops and the restoration of order, it was officially investigated by a scientific commission, which reported through its chairman, M. Tardieu, that the bones were those of persons who had been buried for at least a hundred and fifty years.