Page:The Rise and Fall on the Paris Commune in 1871.djvu/368

 This amount was more difficult to realize than the former. M. Libmann accepted in principle, but reclaimed valuation after valuation, for to gain time was everything. The attack on Paris came to interrupt the negotiations, and proved that the foresight of the courageous defender of the monument had been correct.

The building is to-day intact, with the exception of a little damage received during the attack made against it by the troops.

The night of the 23d passed with a sinister tranquillity, scarcely troubled by the works of defence, which were being actively continued, or by an occasional report of a distant cannon.

The time, however, was not lost by the insurgents. Federal officers, passing in the Rues Saint-Jacques, Gay-Lussac, and the Boulevard Saint-Michel, gave orders for a new disposition of barricades, and, following their indications, several squads of barricade-makers set immediately to work. Women were there in great numbers, calling, with threats and imprecations, on all the citizens, male and female, to aid in pulling up the paving-stones, in digging the ditches.

The barricade of the Rue Royer-Collard was composed of three defensive works: one at its entrance into the Boulevard Saint-Michel; another at its intersection with the Rue Gay-Lussac; and a third in the middle of the Rue Royer-Collard itself.

Meanwhile, at the prison of Sainte-Pélagie, was perpetrated the first of the many horrible murders which leave such a stain on the memory of the Commune.

M. Gustave Chaudey, one of the editors of the Siècle, had been arrested in the middle of April, at the instigation of Citizen Vermesch, editor of a scurrilous paper called the Père Duchesne. M. Chaudey was accused of having, while adjoint to the Mayor of Paris, ordered the