cause a recoil.  The roll of firearms was now terrific.  Mortars and cannon were fired at short-range point-blank at the suspicious houses, which were then carried by assault.  The rattle of small shot against windows and walls was incessant.  This, too, was in the finest part of the Boulevard.  Costly houses were completely riddled, their fronts were knocked in, their floors pierced with balls.  The windows throughout the neighborhood were destroyed by the concussion of the cannon.  Of the hairbreadth escape of some of the inmates, and of the general destruction of property, I need not speak.  The Government afterwards footed all the bills for the last.  The firing continued for more than an hour, and then receded to more distant parts of the city; for the field of combat embraced an area of several miles, and there were forty thousand troops engaged in it.  As soon as I could do so with safety, I left my covert, and endeavored to see what had happened elsewhere.  But troops guarded every possible avenue, and fired on all those who attempted to approach any interdicted spot.  I noticed some pools of blood, but the corpses had been removed; in a cross-street I saw a well-dressed man gasping his life away on a rude stretcher.  Those around him told me he had six balls in him.  In the Rue Richelieu there was the corpse of a young girl.  Somebody had placed lighted candles at its head and feet.  When I reached the parts of the town removed from the surveillance of the soldiers, I noticed a bitter feeling among the better classes for the day’s work.  The slaughter had been amongst those of their own class, which was unusual.  The number slain was at first, of course, exaggerated, but it was with no gratifying emotions that we could reduce it a few hundreds.  It was civil war,—­fratricide.  I reached home indignant and mournful.”

Victor Hugo says of the massacre:  “There were no combatants on the side of the people.  There could not be said to have been any mob, though the Boulevard was crowded with spectators.  Then, as the wounded and terrified rushed into houses, the soldiers rushed in after them.”

Tortoni’s was gutted; the fashionable Baths of Jouvence were torn to pieces; one hotel was demolished; twenty-eight houses were so injured that they had next day to be pulled down.  Peaceful shopkeepers, dressmakers, and English strangers were among the slain,—­an old man with an umbrella, a young man with an opera-glass.  In the house where Jouvin sold gloves there was a pile of dead bodies.

The firing was over by four P. M. It has never been known how many were massacred.  Some said twenty-five hundred, some made it five hundred, and almost every person killed was, not a Red combatant, but an innocent victim.

Thus Louis Napoleon made himself master of Paris.  The army was all for him, the masses were apathetic, the rural population was on his side.  A few weeks later a plebiscite made him emperor.