Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/287



me, 'Si on vent traverser, piques.' [If any one crosses the street, spear him.] Little suspecting what horrors were about to ensue, I was not greatly frightened by this menace, upon which the nearest sergeant, with a halberd, did not act, and without quickening my pace, I walked to my then lodging, a few doors off, No. 29, Boulevard des Capucins. From my windows I saw the regiment to which I had heard the order given to tout balayer charge down the Boulevards des Italiens as far as Tortoni's, where there was nothing to balayer at all. Then they halted, and each soldier drawing his carbine, his horse going at a walk, fired deliberately into every house right and left, killing servants and children at the windows. I did not see the river of blood on the slope of the Boulevard Montmartre, attested by irrefragable evidence, and I was not present when a gun under Canrobert's command made a gigantic round hole in the Maison Sallandranze. But I did see the next day, when terror had done its work, every house for the space of a mile on the Boulevards from Tortoni's to the Porte St. Martin, spotted like a plum padding, from ground-floor to sixth story, with bullet marks.

"This was done in pursuance of the diabolical orders from the Elysée, to strike terror into the rich bourgeois quarters, where there was no resistance, in order that the rumour of their submission might discourage the St. Antoine faubourg and other arrondissements where there were barricades. Marshal Canrobert calculates on short memories when he pretends that the massacre of the Boulevards, in which he was a principal actor, was only the haphazard work of a few drunken or excited soldiers."

Mr. Cobden thus describes the first impressions