I walked along terribly thoughtful.

I went towards the boulevards; I saw there a furnace; I heard there a thunderstorm.

I saw Jules Simon coming up to me, who during these disastrous days bravely risked a precious life.  He stopped me.  “Where are you going?” he asked me.  “You will be killed.  What do you want?” “That very thing,” said I.

We shook hands.

I continued to go on.

I reached the boulevard; the scene was indescribable.  I witnessed this crime, this butchery, this tragedy.  I saw that reign of blind death, I saw the distracted victims fall around me in crowds.  It is for this that I have signed myself in this book AN EYE-WITNESS.

Destiny entertains a purpose.  It watches mysteriously over the future historian.  It allows him to mingle with exterminations and carnages, but it does not permit him to die, because it wishes him to relate them.

In the midst of this inexpressible Pandemonium, Xavier Durrieu met me as I was crossing the bullet-swept boulevard.  He said to me, “Ah, here you are.  I have just met Madame D. She is looking for you.”  Madame D.[24] and Madame de la R.,[25] two noble and brave women, had promised Madame Victor Hugo, who was ill in bed, to ascertain where I was, and to give her some news of me.  Madame D. had heroically ventured into this carnage.  The following incident happened to her.  She stopped before a heap of bodies, and had had the courage to manifest her indignation; at the cry of horror to which she gave vent, a cavalry soldier had run up behind her with a pistol in his hand, and had it not been for a quickly opened door through which she threw herself, and which saved her, she would have been killed.

It is well known that the total slaughter in this butchery is unrecorded.  Bonaparte has kept these figures hidden in darkness.  Such is the habit of those who commit massacres.  They are scarcely likely to allow history to certify the number of the victims.  These statistics are an obscure multitude which quickly lose themselves in the gloom.  One of the two colonels of whom we have had a glimpse in pages 223-225 of this work, has stated that his regiment alone had killed “at least 2,500 persons.”  This would be more than one person per soldier.  We believe that this zealous colonel exaggerates.  Crime sometimes boasts of its blackness.

Lireux, a writer, arrested in order to be shot, and who escaped by a miracle, declares that he saw “more than 800 corpses.”

Towards four o’clock the post-chaises which were in the courtyard of the Elysee were unhorsed and put up.