At Versailles they were shut up in the wine-cellars of the palace, forty-five feet underground.  The prisoners confined there were the very dregs and scum of the insurrection.  The cellars had only some old straw on the floors, left there by the Prussians.  There were six hundred men confined in this place, and the torture they endured from the close air, the filth, and the impossibility of lying down at night was terrible.

Count Orsi was ten days in this horrible prison.  At last one evening he heard his name called.  His release had come.  On going to the door he was taken before a superior officer, who expressed surprise and regret at the mistake that had been committed, and at once set him at liberty.  A brave little boy, charged with one of his notes, had persevered through all kinds of difficulties in putting it into the hands of the English lady to whom it was addressed.  This lady and the Italian ambassador had effected Count Orsi’s release.  He was ill with low fever for some weeks in consequence of the bad air he had breathed during his confinement.  Subsequently he discovered that personal spite had caused his arrest as a friend of the Commune.

My next account of those days is drawn from the experience of the Marquis de Compiegne,[1] one of the Versailles officers.  He was travelling in Florida when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, but hastened home at once to join the army.  He fought at Sedan and was taken prisoner to Germany, but returned in time to act against the Commune.  Afterwards he became an explorer in the Soudan, and in 1877 was killed in a duel.

[Footnote 1:  His narrative was published in the “Supplement Litteraire du Figaro.”]

On the 20th of May, news having reached Versailles that the first detachment of regular troops had made their way into Paris, M. de Compiegne hastened to join his battalion, which he had that morning quitted on a few hours’ leave.  As they approached the Bois de Boulogne at midnight, the sky over Paris seemed red with flame.  They halted for some hours, the men sleeping, the officers amusing themselves by guessing conundrums; but as day dawned, they entered Paris through a breach in the defences.  The young officer says,—­

“I shall never forget the sight.  The fortifications had been riddled with balls; the casemates were broken in.  All over the ground were strewn haversacks, packets of cartridges, fragments of muskets, scraps of uniforms, tin cans that had held preserved meats, ammunition-wagons that had been blown up, mangled horses, men dying and dead, artillerymen cut down at their guns, broken gun-carriages, disabled siege-guns, with their wheels splashed red from pools of blood, but still pointed at our positions, while around were the still smoking walls of ruined private houses.  A company of infantry was guarding about six hundred prisoners, who with folded arms and lowering faces were standing among the ruins.  They were of all