e church, outraged, and murdered. Great was the
virtuous indignation, the bones were officially photographed by the
photographer Carjat, all Paris went to see them, and the affair made
such a noise that after the capture of the city by the Versailles troops
and the restoration of order, it was officially investigated by a
scientific commission, which reported through its chairman, M. Tardieu,
that the bones were those of persons who had been buried for at least a
hundred and fifty years.

Of the women of the Commune, M. Maxime du Camp draws the following
unflattering picture: "They were wicked and cowardly. Utilized by the
police of the Rigaults and the Ferres, they were pitiless in the search
for refractory citizens who hid themselves that they might not have the
shame of serving the Commune.... From the heights of the pulpits of the
churches, converted into clubs, they poured out all the corruption of
which their ignorance was full; with their shrill and yelping voices, in
the midst of the smoke of pipes, to the accompaniment of vinous
hiccoughs, they demanded 'their place in the sun, their rights as
citizens, the equality which was refused them,' and other vague claims
which concealed, perhaps, the secret dream which they put into practice
shamelessly,--the plurality of husbands.

"They disguised themselves as soldiers; ... they 'manifested'; they
assembled in bands, and, like the Tricoteuses, their grandmothers, they
wished to go to Versailles '_chambarder la parlotte_ and hang Foutriquet
the first.' They were all there, rushing about and squalling, the
boarders of Saint-Lazare in vacation, the natives of the little Pologne
and the great Bohemia, the sellers of tripe _a la mode de Caen_, the
seamstresses for messieurs, the shirt-makers for men, the instructors
for elder students, the maids of all work, the vestals of the temple of
Mercury, and the virgins of Lourcine. That which was the most profoundly
comic was that those escaped from the Dispensaire delighted in alluding
to Joan of Arc and in comparing themselves to her.

[Illustration: IN THE LATIN QUARTER. AU CINQUIEME. From a drawing by
Lucien Simon.]

"The Commune, without concerning itself about it, aided in this feminine
uprising which emptied the houses with big street-numbers [houses of
ill-fame] to the detriment of the public health and to the profit of
the civil war. It knew how to resolve--this good Commune, composed of
the sensible men that we know