The next duty of our Englishman was to act as mounted orderly to captains who were ordered to visit and report on the state of the barricades, also to command all citizens to go into their houses and close the doors and windows.  There was little enthusiasm at the barricades, and everywhere need of reinforcements.  The army of the Commune was melting away.  The most energetic officer they saw was a stalwart negro lieutenant,—­possibly the man who, as De Compiegne tells us, had scared some Versaillais in a cellar on the 22d of May.

On the night of Thursday, May 25, the Column of July was a remarkable sight.  It had been hung with wreaths of immortelles, and those caught fire from an explosive.  Elsewhere, except for burning buildings, there was total darkness.  There was no gas in Paris, of course.  And here our Englishman goes on to say that so far as his experience went, he saw no petroleuses nor fighting women, nor did he believe in their existence.

By Friday, May 26, provisions and fodder were exhausted, and it was hard for the soldiers of the Commune to get anything to eat.  Our Englishman, in the general disorganization, became separated from his comrades, and joined himself to a small troop of horsemen wearing the red shirt of Garibaldi, who swept past him at a furious gallop.  They were making for the cemetery of Pere la Chaise.  “All is lost!” they cried.  “To get there is our only chance of safety.”  Yet they still shouted to the men and women whom they passed, “All goes well! Vive la Commune!  Vive la Republique!” By help of an order to visit all the posts, which the Englishman had in his pocket, they obtained admittance into Pere la Chaise.  There were five Poles in the party, one Englishman, and one Frenchman; “and certainly,” adds the narrator, “they were no credit to their respective nations.  It was on their faces that I remarked for the first time that peculiar hunted-down look which was afterwards to be seen on every countenance, and I presume upon my own.”

Our Englishman rode up to a battery in Pere la Chaise, planted on the spot made famous by a celebrated passage in “Le Pere Goriot,” in which Balzac describes Rastignac, on the eve of finally selling himself to Satan, as standing and gazing down on Paris, to conquer a high place in which is to be his reward.  The observer who saw the city from the same spot on the 26th of May, 1871, says,—­

“Beneath me lay stretched out like a map the once great and beautiful city, now, alas! given over a prey to fire and sword.  I could see smoke rising from many a heap of ruins that but a few short hours before had been a palace or a monument of art.  It was impossible, however, to decide what buildings were actually burning, for a thick, misty rain had set in, which prevented my seeing distinctly.  In my descent I passed the place where the body of Dombrowski was lying.  He had been shot from behind, and the ball had passed through his body.  At