ed to!" Calumny and exaggeration no
doubt; but I am angry with America for sending Cluseret back, as I am
angry with the Commune for having imposed him on Paris. The Commune,
however, has an admirable excuse: it has not, perhaps, found among true
Frenchmen one with an ambition criminal enough to direct, according to
her wishes, the destruction of Paris by Paris, and France by France.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 49: There are two versions of Dombrowski's earlier history. By
his admirers he was said to have headed the last Polish insurrection:
the party of order stigmatise him as a Russian adventurer, who had
fought in Poland, but against the Poles, and in the Caucasus, in Italy,
and in France--wherever; in fine, blows were to be given and money
earned. He entered France, like many other adventurous knights, in
Garibaldi's suite, came to Paris after the siege, and immediately after
the outbreak of the eighteenth of March was created general by the
Commune, and gathered round him in guise of staff the most illustrious,
or least ignoble, of those foreign parasites and vagabonds, who have
made of Paris a grand occidental Bohemian Babel. These soldiers of
fortune, most of whom had been "unfortunate" at home, formed the marrow
of the Commune's military strength.

Dombrowski had gained a name for intrepidity even among these men of
reckless courage and adventurous lives. He maintained strict discipline,
albeit to a not very moral purpose. Whoever dared connect his name with
the word defeat was shot. Like many other Communist generals he took the
most stringent measures for concealing the truth from his soldiers, and
thus staved off total demoralisation until the Versailles troops were in
the heart of Paris. His relations with the Federal authorities were not
of an uniformly amiable character.]

[Footnote 50: A poor Italian smith told me he had three men seized. They
had taken a stove near the fortifications of Ternes, when they were
arrested. "But we are Italians!" they cried. It was no excuse, for the
Federals replied, "Italians! so much the better; you shall serve as
Garibaldians!"]

XLI.

It was not enough that men should be riddled with balls and torn to
pieces by shells. The women are also seized with a strange enthusiasm in
their turn, and they too fall on the battle-field, victims of a terrible
heroism. What extraordinary beings are these who exchange the needle for
the needle-gun, the broom for the bayonet, wh