All the sewers beneath Paris had been strewn with torpedoes, bombs, and inflammable materials, connected with electric wires.  “The reactionary quarters shall be blown up,” was the announced intention of the Commune.  Mercifully, these arrangements had not been completed when the Versailles troops obtained the mastery.  Almost the first thing done was to send sappers and miners underground to cut the wires that connected electric currents with inflammable material in all parts of the city.  The catacombs that underlie the eastern part of Paris were included in the incendiary arrangement.

When Paris was at last in safety, and the Commune subdued, would that it had been only the guilty on whom the great and awful vengeance fell!

[Illustration:  MONSEIGNEUR DARBOY. (Archbishop of Paris.)]

CHAPTER XVI.

THE HOSTAGES.

About once in every seventy or eighty years some exceptionally moving tragedy stirs the heart of the civilized world.  The tragedy of our own century is the execution of the hostages in Paris, May 24 and 26, 1871.

At one o’clock on the morning of April 6, three weeks after the proclamation of the Commune, a body of the National Guard was drawn up on the sidewalk in the neighborhood of the Madeleine.  A door suddenly opened and a man came hastily out, followed by two National Guards shouting to their comrades.  The man was arrested at once, making no resistance.  It was the Abbe Duguerry, cure of the Madeleine,[1]—­the first of the so-called hostages arrested in retaliation for the summary execution of General Duval, who had commanded one of the three columns that marched out of Paris the day before to attack the Versaillais.

[Footnote 1:  Cure in France means rector; what we mean by a curate or assistant minister is there called vicaire.]

Both the cure of the Madeleine and his vicaire, the Abbe Lamazou, were that night arrested.  The latter, who escaped death as a hostage, published an account of his experiences; but he died not long after of heart disease, brought on by his excitement and suffering during the Commune.

The same night Monseigneur Darboy, the archbishop of Paris, his chaplain, and eight other priests, were arrested.  One was a missionary just returned from China, another was the Abbe Crozes, the admirable chaplain (aumonier) of the prison of La Roquette,—­a man whose deeds of charity would form a noble chapter of Christian biography.

When Archbishop Darboy was brought before the notorious “delegate,” Raoul Rigault, he began to speak, saying, “My children—­” “Citizen,” interrupted Rigault, “you are not here before children,—­we are men!” This sally was heartily applauded in the publications of the Commune.