“I visited a lady of world-wide reputation, who gave me a history of the past months in Paris so brilliantly and epigrammatically that I was infinitely amused, and carried away the drollest impressions of L’Empire Cluseret; but her manner changed when I asked her what I should say to her friends in England.  ‘Tell them,’ she said, ’to fear everything, and to hope very little.  We are a degraded people; we deserve what we have got.’

“In the street I bought some daffodils from a woman who was tying them up in bunches.  As she put them into my hand, her face seemed full of horror.  Seeing probably an answering sympathy in my face, she whispered:  ‘It is said that they have shot the archbishop.’  I did not believe it, and I was right.  He was arrested, but his doom was delayed for six weeks.  That night the churches were all closed.  There were no evening services that Easter day.

“I may add that I saw but one bonnet rouge, which I had supposed would be the revolutionary headdress.  It was worn by an ill-looking ruffian, who sat with his back to the Quai, his legs straddled across the foot-walk, his drunken head fallen forward on his naked, hairy breast, a broken pipe between his knees, his doubled fists upon the stones at either side of him.”

In the story of Louis Napoleon’s abortive attempt at Boulogne to incite France against Louis Philippe’s Government, we were much indebted to the narrative of Count Joseph Orsi, one of the Italians who from his earliest days had attended on his fortunes.  The same gentleman has given us an account of his own experiences during the days of the Commune:—­

“One could not help being struck by the contrasts presented at that time in Paris itself:  destruction and death raging in some quarters, cannon levelling its beautiful environs, while at the same moment one could see its fashionable Boulevards crowded with well-dressed people loitering and smiling as if nothing were going on.  The cafes, indeed, were ordered to close their doors at midnight, but behind closed shutters went on gambling, drinking, and debauchery.  After spending a riotous night, fast men and women considered it a joke to drive out to the Arch of Triumph and see how the fight was going on.”

The troops at Versailles, reinforced by the prisoners of war who had been returned from Prussia, began, by the 9th of April, to make active assaults on such forts as were held by the Federals.  Confusion and despair began to reign in the Council of the Commune.  Unsuccessful in open warfare, the managing committee tried to check the advance of the Versaillais by deeds of violence and retaliation.  They arrested numerous hostages, and the same night the palace of the archbishop was pillaged.  The prefect of police, Raoul Rigault, issued a decree that every one suspected of being a reactionnaire (that is, a partisan of the National Assembly) should be at once arrested.  The delivery of letters was suspended, gas was cut off, and with the exception of a few places where lamp-posts were supplied with petroleum, Paris was in darkness.