demolishing the barricade.  A barricade is being constructed in the Rue du Renard.  Some National Guards in uniform watch its construction, but do not work on it.  One of them said to me, ’We are not against you, you are on the side of Right.’  They add that there are twelve or fifteen barricades in the Rue Rambuteau.  This morning at daybreak the cannon had fired ‘steadily,’ as one of them remarks, in the Rue Bourbon-Villeneuve.  I visit a powder manufactory improvised by Leguevel at a chemist’s opposite the Rue Guerin-Boisseau.

“They are constructing the barricades amicably, without angering any one.  They do what they can not to annoy the neighborhood.  The combatants of the Bourg-Labbe barricades are ankle-deep in mud on account of the rain.  It is a perfect sewer.  They hesitate to ask for a truss of straw.  They lie down in the water or on the pavement.

“I saw there a young man who was ill, and who had just got up from his bed with the fever still on him.  He said to me, ‘I am going to my death’ (he did so).

“In the Rue Bourbon-Villeneuve they had not even asked a mattress of the ‘shopkeepers,’ although, the barricade being bombarded, they needed them to deaden the effect of the balls.

“The soldiers make bad barricades, because they make them too well.  A barricade should be tottering; when well built it is worth nothing; the paving-stones should want equilibrium, ’so that they may roll down on the troopers,’ said a street-boy to me, ‘and break their paws.’  Sprains form a part of barricade warfare.

“Jeanty Sarre is the chief of a complete group of barricades.  He presented his first lieutenant to me, Charpentier, a man of thirty-six, lettered and scientific.  Charpentier busies himself with experiments with the object of substituting gas for coal and wood in the firing of china, and he asks permission to read a tragedy to me ’one of these days.’  I said to him, ‘We shall make one.’

“Jeanty Sarre is grumbling at Charpentier; the ammunition is failing.  Jeanty Sarre, having at his house in the Rue Saint Honore a pound of fowling-powder and twenty army cartridges, sent Charpentier to get them.  Charpentier went there, and brought back the fowling-powder and the cartridges, but distributed them to the combatants on the barricades whom he met on the way.  ‘They were as though famished,’ said he.  Charpentier had never in his life touched a fire-arm.  Jeanty Sarre showed him how to load a gun.

“They take their meals at a wine-seller’s at the corner, and they warm themselves there.  It is very cold.  The wine-seller says, ’Those who are hungry, go and eat.’  A combatant asked him, ‘Who pays?’ ‘Death,’ was the answer.  And in truth some hours afterwards he had received seventeen bayonet thrusts.

“They have not broken the gas-pipes—­always for the sake of not doing unnecessary damage.  They confine themselves to requisitioning the gasmen’s keys, and the lamplighters’ winches in order to open the pipes.  In this manner they control the lighting or extinguishing.