Accounts, the State Safe Deposit (Caisse des Depots et de Consignations), the Library of the Louvre, the manufactory of Gobelin’s tapestry, the Prefecture of Police, eight whole streets, and innumerable scattered private houses.  The vengeance of the soldiers as they made their way from street to street, from barricade to barricade, was savage and indiscriminate.  Every man arrested whose hands were black with powder was carried to a street corner or a courtyard, and summarily shot.  Of course many wholly innocent persons perished, for the troops of the Commune had been of two kinds,—­the National Guard and the Volunteers.  Most of the latter were devils incarnate.  Among them were the Vengeurs de Flourens, who were foremost in executions, and bands called by such names as Les Enfants du Pere Duchene and Les Enfants Perdus.  The National Guards were of three classes,—­genuine Communists, workmen whose pay was their only resource for the support of their families, and pressed men, forced to fight, of whom there were a great many.

I have before me three narratives written by gentlemen who either suffered or participated in the Great Revenge.  One was a resident in Paris who had taken no part either for or against the Commune; one had served it on compulsion as a soldier; and one was an officer of the Versailles army, who on May 21 led his troops through a breach into the city, and fought on till May 27, when all was over.

It seems to me that such accounts of personal experience in troubled times give a far more vivid picture of events than a mere formal narration.  I therefore quote them in this chapter in preference to telling the story in my own words.

The first is by Count Joseph Orsi,[1] whose visit to Raoul Rigault’s office at the Prefecture of Police has already been told.  He was left unmolested by the Commune, most probably because in early life he had been a member of those secret societies in Italy to which Louis Napoleon himself belonged.  He says,—­

[Footnote 1:  Published in Fraser’s Magazine, 1879.]

“On May 22 Paris was entering the last stage of its death struggle.  The army of Versailles had entered it from four different points.  The fight was desperate.  Barricades were erected in almost every street.  Prisoners on both sides were shot in scores at the street-corners.  Three of the largest houses in the Rue Royale, where I lived, were on fire.  Soldiers of the regular army were beginning to appear in our quarter, and early on Thursday, May 25, I heard the bell of my apartment ring violently.  I opened it, and found myself face to face with twelve voltigeurs of the Versailles army; commanded by a lieutenant, who ordered the soldiers to search the house and shoot any one wearing a uniform.  He told me that he must occupy my drawing-room, which looked on the Rue Royale, for the purpose of firing on the insurgents, who were holding a barricade where