ad. Scores of similar incidents took place on that dreadful Thursday
afternoon.--Friends, acquaintances of my own, had friends, neighbors,
relations, servants, killed. Yet it was all accident,
chance-medley--excusable, of course. How were the soldiers to distinguish
between insurgents and sight-seers? These murders were, after all, but a
few of the thorns to be found in the rose-bush of glorious war!

From the street which in old Paris times used to go by the name of the Rue
Royale, and which I know by the token that there is an English
pastry-cook's on the right-hand side, coming down; where in old days I
used (a small lad then at the College Bourbon) to spend my half-holidays
in consuming real English cheesecakes, and thinking of home--in the Rue
Royale, now called, I think, Rue de la Republique; I walked on to the
place, and by the Boulevard de la Madeleine, des Italiens, and so by the
long line of that magnificent thoroughfare, to within a few streets of the
Porte St. Denis. Here I stopped, for the simple reason that a hedge of
soldiery bristled ominously across the road, close to the Rue de Faubourg
Montmartre, and that the commanding officer would let neither man, woman,
nor child pass. The Boulevards were crowded, almost impassable in fact,
with persons of every grade, from the "lion" of the Jockey Club, or the
English nobleman, to the pretty grisette in her white cap, and the
scowling, bearded citizen, clad in blouse and _calotte_, and looking very
much as if he knew more of a barricade than he chose to aver. The houses
on either side of the way bore frightful traces of the combat of the
previous day. The Maison Dore, the Cafe Anglais, the Opera Comique,
Tortoni's, the Jockey Club, the Belle Jardiniere, the Hotel des Affaires
Etrangeres, and scores, I might almost say hundreds of the houses had
their windows smashed, or the magnificent sheets of plate-glass starred
with balls; the walls pockmarked with bullets: seamed and scarred and
blackened with gunpowder. A grocer, close to the Rue de Marivaux, told me
that he had not been able to open his door that morning for the dead
bodies piled on the step before it. Round all the young trees (the old
trees were cut down for former barricades in February and June, 1848), the
ground shelves a little in a circle; in these circles there were pools of
blood. The people--the extraordinary, inimitable, consistently inconsistent
French people--were unconcernedly lounging about,