Page:The Rise and Fall on the Paris Commune in 1871.djvu/148



Favre, and Trochu, the delegate of Les Carrières at the ex-Prefecture of Police orders the church of St. Pierre to be closed, and decrees the arrest of the ecclesiastics and ignorantins.—Le Moussu."

Two Commune seals were affixed to the paper.

One of the venerable fathers was conducted to the ex-Prefecture of Police and brought before the citizen delegate, the notorious atheist, Raoul Rigault, who demanded his name.

"My children," replied the venerable man, whose hair was whitened with the frost of eighty winters.

"Citizen," interrupted the delegate Rigault, who was not quite thirty years old, "you are not before children, but in presence of a magistrate." "What is your profession?"

"I am a servant of God."

"Where does he live?" interrogated Rigault.

"Everywhere," responded the pious old priest, noted for his deeds of charity for over half a century.

"Send this man to the Conciérgerie, and issue a warrant for the arrest of his Master, one called God, who has no permanent residence, and is consequently, contrary to law, living in a perpetual state of vagabondage," replied the infamous blasphemer.

The following day the Commune ordered the religious service to be discontinued in all the prisons. It also ordered the destruction of the Column Vendôme. This decree was probably the most remarkable, as well as the most dastardly, of all the proclamations of these vandals:

", April 12, 1871.

"—Considering that the imperial column in the Place Vendôme is a monument of barbarism, a symbol of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law,