It was singular that, notwithstanding the order given by the officers, the two companies successively came up to the Representatives, charged with the bayonet, and turned aside.  Instructions may order, but instinct prevails; instructions may be crime, but instinct is honor.  Major P——­ said afterwards, “They had told us that we should have to deal with brigands, we had to deal with heroes.”

Meanwhile those on the barricade were growing uneasy, and seeing their colleagues surrounded, and wishing to succor them, they fired a musket shot.  This unfortunate shot killed a soldier between De Flotte and Schoelcher.

The officer who commanded the second attacking squad passed close to Schoelcher as the poor soldier fell.  Schoelcher pointed out the fallen man to the officer, and said to him, “Lieutenant, look!”

The officer answered by a gesture of despair,—­

“What would you have us do?”

The two companies replied to the shot by a general volley, and rushed to the assault of the barricade, leaving behind them the seven Representatives astounded at being still alive.

The barricade replied by a volley, but it could not hold out.  It was carried.

Baudin was killed.

He had remained standing in his position on the omnibus.  Three balls reached him.  One struck him in the right eye and penetrated into the brain.  He fell.  He never regained consciousness.  Half-an-hour afterwards he was dead.  His body was taken to the Ste. Marguerite Hospital.

Bourzat, who was close to Baudin, with Aubry (du Nord), had his coat pierced by a ball.

We must again remark a curious incident,—­the soldiers made no prisoner on this barricade.  Those who defended it dispersed through the streets of the Faubourg, or took refuge in the neighboring houses.  Representative Maigne, pushed by some affrighted women behind a door, was shut in with one of the soldiers who had just taken the barricade.  A moment afterwards the soldier and the Representative went out together.  The Representatives could freely leave this first field of battle.

At this solemn moment of the struggle a last glimmer of Justice and of Right still flickered, and military honesty recoiled with a sort of dread anxiety before the outrage upon which they were entering.  There is the intoxication of good, and there is an intoxication of evil:  this intoxication later on drowned the conscience of the Army.

The French Army is not made to commit crimes.  When the struggle became prolonged, and ferocious orders of the day had to be executed, the soldiers must have been maddened.  They obeyed not coldly, which would have been monstrous, but with anger, and this History will invoke as their excuse; and with many, perhaps, despair was at the root of their anger.

The fallen soldier had remained on the ground.  It was Schoelcher who raised him.  A few women, weeping, but brave, came out of a house.  Some soldiers came up.  They carried him, Schoelcher holding his head, first to a fruiterer’s shop, then to the Ste. Marguerite Hospital, where they had already taken Baudin.