nd the Insurgents was
going on. In the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Rivoli, all down to
the Trocadero, reserves were in waiting with their chassepots stacked on
each side of the road, but there was no fighting along the Quays.
General Vinoy had established himself in his new Head-Quarters, and the
70,000 or 80,000 men already in the heart of the city are believed to be
quite sufficient to dispose of the last desperadoes of the Commune. The
sounds of battle we heard from more than one point, and yet every one
spoke of the Insurrection as in its last agonies. Men and women once
more held up their heads and snapped their fingers at Delescluze,
Dombrowski, and the Commune, but there was sad evidence all around us of
what this rebellion had done. There in the little cemetery behind the
ramparts lay the unburied and mangled remains of 32 National Guards who
had been killed at the batteries just above. The whole place was a
picture of ruin and desolation. Passing out of the Point du Jour by the
opining where the Porte de St. Cloud had stood, whole and entire, even
after the Prussian bombardment, but where there is not a vestige of it
bigger than a splinter now, I walked along the glacis in the direction
of Auteuil. I was surprised to find that, at a distance of less than an
eighth of a mile from the latter place, the military had fixed their
gabions, sapped right up the glacis, and to within four or five yards of
the fosse. The trenches had been cut across the Bois de Boulogne.
Nothing, however, like enough of the parapet and the earthwork above had
been thrown down to fill up the fosse. Indeed, no effort whatever had
been made in the way of filling up, except at either side of the two
Portes, so that an assault at any other than these points would have
been a very difficult undertaking. On the glacis I saw the dead and
decomposed body of a man not in uniform. He lay on his side, with one
hand under his head and the other raised in the air. A gentleman who
lives close by stated that the deceased, with two or three other men,
had come out to fire stray shots at the soldiers in the trenches. As he
lay there to-day I perceived that he had been pierced by several rifle
balls. The gates at Auteuil have disappeared as completely as those at
Point du Jour, and at the Railway Station behind the iron railway bridge
over the road all the habitations are, so to speak, in a heap. The
French term "_debris_" best describes what is left