led muskets, soldiers sitting and lying about, and corpses
everywhere. He then managed, without incurring too much danger, to reach
the Boulevards, where the insurgents, who were then very numerous, had
not yet been attacked. He worked for some little time at the barricade,
and then was allowed to pass on. It was thus that we had met. Just as we
were about to turn up the Faubourg Montmartre a man rushed up saying
that three hundred Federals had taken refuge in the church of the
Madeleine, followed by gendarmes, and had gone on fighting for more than
an hour. "Now," he finished up by saying, "if the _cure_ were to return
he would find plenty of people to bury!"

I am now at home. Evening has come at last; I am jotting down these
notes just as they come into my head. I am too much fatigued both in
mind and body to attempt to put my thoughts into order. The cannonading
is incessant, and the fusillade also. I pity those that die, and those
that kill! Oh! poor Paris, when will experience make you wiser?

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 98: It was known by this time at Versailles in what a
desperate condition was the Commune, by the information of persons
devoted to order, but who remained amongst the insurgents to keep watch
over and restrain them as much as possible.

The Versailles authorities know that, thanks to the well-directed fire
of Montretout, the bastions of the Point du Jour were no longer tenable,
and that their defenders had abandoned them and had organized new works
of defence; nevertheless, the operations were earned on just as
systematically as if the fire of the besieged had not ceased for several
days, when, on Sunday, the 21st May, about midday, an officer on duty in
the trenches, in course of formation in the Bois de Boulogne, perceived
a man making signs with a white handkerchief near the military post of
Saint Cloud; the officer immediately approached near enough to hear the
bearer of the flag of truce, say:--

"My name is Ducatel, and I belong to the service of the Engineers of
Roads and Bridges, and I have been a soldier. I declare that your
entrance into Paris is easy, and as a guarantee of the truth of what I
say, I am about to give myself up;" so saying, he passed over the fosse
by means of one of the supports of the drawbridge, in spite of several
shots fired at him by Federals hidden in the houses at Auteuil, but none
of which reached him.

A few resolute men now passed over the fosse, and arrived w