e at the
corner of Rue du Sentier. The curious spectators continued to assemble
mainly on the southern side of the street. It was an ordinary crowd and
nothing more,--men, women, children, and old people who looked upon the
languid attack and defence of the barricade as a sort of sham fight.

"This barricade served as a spectacle pending the moment when it should
become a pretext.

IV

"The soldiers had been firing, and the defenders of the barricade
returning their fire, for about a quarter of an hour, without any one
being wounded on either side, when suddenly, as if by an electric
shock, an extraordinary and threatening movement took place, first in
the infantry, then in the cavalry. The troops suddenly faced about.

"The historiographers of the _coup d'etat_ have asserted that a
shot, directed against the soldiers, was fired from the window which
had remained open at the corner of Rue du Sentier. Others say that
it was fired from the roof of the house at the corner of Rue
Notre-Dame-de-Recouvrance and Rue Poissonniere. According to others, it
was a pistol shot and was fired from the roof of the tall house at the
corner of Rue Mazagran. The shot is contested, but what cannot be
contested is that, for having fired this problematical shot, which was
perhaps nothing more than the slamming of a door, a dentist, who lived
in the next house, was shot. The question resolves itself into this:
Did any one hear a pistol or musket shot fired from one of the houses
on the boulevard? Is this the fact, or is it not? a host of witnesses
deny it.

"If the shot was really fired, there still remains a question: Was it a
cause, or was it a signal?

"However this may be, all of a sudden, as we have said before, cavalry,
infantry, and artillery faced towards the dense crowd upon the
sidewalks, and, no one being able to guess why, unexpectedly, without
motive, 'without parley,' as the infamous proclamations of the morning
had announced, the butchery began, from the Gymnase Theatre to the
Bains Chinois, that is to say, along the whole length of the richest,
the most frequented, and the most joyous boulevard of Paris.

"The army began shooting down the people at close range.

"It was a horrible and indescribable moment: the cries, the arms raised
towards heaven, the surprise, the terror, the crowd flying in all
directions, a shower of balls falling on the pavement and bounding to
the roofs of the houses, corpses strewn alo