to the hands of the
Versailles army the defeat of the Commune was assured, and in their
frenzy of panic the leaders resorted to most detestable measures.

Maurice favored the creation of a Committee of Public Safety. The
warnings of history came to his mind; had not the hour struck for
adopting energetic methods if they wished to save the country? There was
but one of their barbarities that really pained him, and that was the
destruction of the Vendome column; he reproached himself for the feeling
as being a childish weakness, but his grandfather's voice still sounded
in his ears repeating the old familiar tales of Marengo, Austerlitz,
Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Wagram, the Moskowa--those epic narratives that
thrilled his pulses yet as often as he thought of them. But that they
should demolish the house of the murderer Thiers, that they should
retain the hostages as a guarantee and a menace, was not that right
and just when the Versaillese were unchaining their fury on Paris,
bombarding it, destroying its edifices, slaughtering women and children
with their shells? As he saw the end of his dream approaching dark
thoughts of ruin and destruction filled his mind. If their ideas of
justice and retribution were not to prevail, if they were to be crushed
out of them with their life-blood, then perish the world, swept away in
one of those cosmic upheavals that are the beginning of a new life. Let
Paris sink beneath the waves, let it go up in smoke and flame, like a
gigantic funeral pyre, sooner than let it be again delivered over to its
former state of vice and misery, to that old vicious social system of
abominable injustice. And he dreamed another dark, terrible dream, the
great city reduced to ashes, naught to be seen on either side the Seine
but piles of smoldering ruins, the festering wound purified and healed
with fire, a catastrophe without a name, such as had never been before,
whence should arise a new race. Wild stories were everywhere circulated,
which interested him intensely, of the mines that were driven under all
the quarters of the city, the barrels of powder with which the catacombs
were stuffed, the monuments and public buildings ready to be blown into
the air at a moment's notice; and all were connected by electric wires
in such a way that a single spark would suffice to set them off; there
were great stores of inflammable substances, too, especially petroleum,
with which the streets and avenues were to be conv