The punishment of the unfortunate, as well as of the guilty, was very severe.  Their imprisonment in the Great Orangery at Versailles, where thousands of orange-trees are stored during the winter, involved frightful suffering.  A commission was appointed to try the prisoners, but its work was necessarily slow.  It was more than a year before some of the captured leaders of the Commune met their fate.  Those condemned were shot at the Buttes of Satory,—­an immense amphitheatre holding twenty thousand people, where the emperor on one of his fetes, in the early days of his marriage, gave a great free hippodrome performance, to the intense gratification of his lieges.

Some prisoners were transported to New Caledonia; Cayenne had been given up as too unhealthy, and this lonely island in the far Pacific Ocean had been fixed upon as the Botany Bay for political offenders.  Some of the leaders in the Council of the Commune were shot in the streets.  Raoul Rigault was of this number.  Some were executed at Satory; some escaped to England, Switzerland, and America; some were sent to New Caledonia, but were amnestied, and returned to France to be thorns in the side of every Government up to the present hour; some are now legislators in the French Chamber, some editors and proprietors of newspapers.  Among those shot in the heat of vengeance at Satory was Valin, who had vainly tried to save the hostages.  Deleschuze, in despair at the cowardice of his associates, quietly sought a barricade when affairs grew desperate, and standing on it with his arms folded, was shot down.  Cluseret, who had real talent as an artist, had an exhibition a few years since of his pictures in Paris, and writing to a friend concerning it, speaks thus of himself:[1]

[Footnote 1:  Le Figaro.]

“You can tell me the worst.  When a man has passed through a life full of vicissitudes as I have done, during seventeen years of which I have seen many campaigns, fighting sometimes three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, or marching and counter-marching, without tents or anything; when one has been three times outlawed and under sentence of death; when one has known much of imprisonment and exile; when one has suffered from ingratitude, calumny, and poverty,—­one is pretty well seasoned, and can bear to hear the truth.”

One thousand and thirty-one women were among the prisoners at Versailles and Satory.  Many of them were women of the worst character.  Eight hundred and fifty were set at liberty; four were sent to an insane asylum; but doctors declared that nearly every woman who fought in the streets for the Commune was more or less insane.