n heaps in
their cellars, others despatched by the bayonet under their beds,
others struck down by a bullet on their own hearths. The impress of
bloodstained hands of all sizes may be seen at this moment, here on a
wall, there on a door, there in a recess; for three days after the
victory of Louis Bonaparte, Paris walked in ruddy mire; a cap full of
human brains was hung on a tree on Boulevard des Italiens. I, who write
these lines, saw, among other victims, on the night of the 4th, near
the Mauconseil barricade, an aged white-haired man, stretched on the
pavement, his bosom pierced with a bayonet, his collar-bone broken; the
gutter that ran beneath him bore away his blood. I saw, I touched with
my hands, I helped to undress, a poor child seven years old, killed,
they told me, on Rue Tiquetonne; he was pale, his head rolled from one
shoulder to the other while they were taking off his clothes; his
half-closed eyes were fixed and staring, and as I leaned over his
half-opened mouth, it seemed that I could still hear him murmur
faintly, "Mother!"

Well, there is something more heart-rending than murdered child, more
lamentable than that old man shot dead, more horrible than that cap
full of human brains, more frightful than those pavements red with
carnage, more irreparable than those men and women, those fathers and
those mothers, stabbed and murdered,--it is the vanishing honour of a
great people!

Assuredly those pyramids of dead bodies which one saw in the
cemeteries, after the wagons from the Champ-de-Mars had emptied their
contents; those immense open trenches, which they filled in the morning
with human bodies, making speed because of the increasing light of
day,--all this was frightful; but what is still more frightful is to
think that, at this hour, the nations are in doubt; and that in their
eyes France, that great moral splendour, has disappeared!

That which is more heart-rending than skulls cleft by the sword, than
breasts riddled by bullets, more disastrous than houses pillaged, than
murder filling the streets, than blood shed in rivers, is to think that
now, among all the peoples of the earth, men are saying to one another:
"Do you know that that nation of nations, that people of the 14th of
July, that people of the 10th of August, that people of 1830, that
people of 1848, that race of giants which razed bastiles, that race of
men whose faces cast a bright light, that fatherland of the human race
which p