Page:The Rise and Fall on the Paris Commune in 1871.djvu/299



"The number of victims is estimated at more than a hundred. Women were blown to pieces as well as a child at the breast.

"Four of the criminals are in custody."

The official journal also says: "Certain officers of the staff of the National Guards who failed in their service in order to indulge in an orgie at Peter's Restaurant with women of light character, were arrested yesterday by order of the Committee of Public Safety. They have been sent to Fort Bicètre with shovels and pickaxes for service in the trenches, and the women sent to St. Lazare, to make earth-bags."

The Commune, one of the organs of the insurgents, had been for some days sneering at the action of the authorities at the Hotel de Ville, becoming more and more indignant at their decrees. It said, on the morning of the 18th:

"Have they lost their heads at the Hotel de Ville? Are they going to play at parliamentarism? What! the intelligent minority is withdrawing, not to Mount Aventine, but under the tent of inaction. It is abandoning the citadel to the ignorant, material, and grotesque element, to the brawlers of the clubs, the mountebanks of 1793, the popes and canons of fusionism, to the believers in Robespierre and the Père Toureuil, to ghosts and reverends, and to the carnival of the revolution! What remains of the Commune? The upright Gambon and the stoical Delescluze; with Diogènes-Pyat seeking in vain at noon with his lantern for an honest man, and in the evening, having become a rag-gatherer, turning over the heaps of rubbish to find some useful scraps. To-morrow he will blow out his candle, convinced of the perfect uselessness of his search. What so unusual has then taken place? The pedants, hair-brained men, and ambitious nullities,