Page:The Rise and Fall on the Paris Commune in 1871.djvu/535

 mendicant, as they implored Mon bon monsieur to pity and release them. There were a few very young boys with the women; some rather older ones I saw going about the enclosure with their fathers. It was the boys and women, we were told, who had acted as incendiaries. Many of the latter, however, had fought. In one of the recent convoys of prisoners that passed through Versailles came a female colonel, in a braided uniform, with straps for epaulets on her shoulders, and lace bars upon her wrist, indicating her rank. Another woman was being driven on by a gendarme, who goaded her with the point of his sabre till the blood ran. 'Shame,' cried a spectator, 'to treat a woman so!' 'Woman!' exclaimed the gendarme; 'that woman, as you call her, killed my captain and lieutenant and a sergeant with three shots from her revolver.'"

A most curious scene which also occurred at Satory proves to what an extent many of the Communists carried their audacity.

A quartermaster of artillery presented himself at the camp, and asked from the chief of the guard permission to see his son, who had been arrested by mistake, he said, in one of the razzias of Paris. The chief of the guard took off his hat, expressed his regret most humbly that such a mistake should have been made, and ordered the young man to be called.

Suddenly a gendarme on duty in the yard dashed his gun upon the ground, and throwing himself upon the quartermaster, seized him by the throat and endeavored to strangle him, crying, "I recognize you; you are a Communist; you ordered the execution of forty-five gendarmes. I was the only one who succeeded in escaping. At last I've got you, and will kill you."

Seeing this, the chief and several persons intervened, and succeeded in disengaging the grasp of the gendarme.