ate day that
the public was informed of the murder of the hostages; the archbishop,
the cure of the Madeleine and others, shot at la Roquette on Wednesday,
the Dominicans of Arcueil coursed like hares on Thursday, more priests
and gendarmes, to the number of forty-seven in all, massacred in
cold blood in the Rue Haxo on Friday; and a furious cry went up for
vengeance, the soldiers bunched the last prisoners they made and shot
them in mass. All day long on that magnificent Sunday the volleys of
musketry rang out in the courtyard of the Lobau barracks, that were
filled with blood and smoke and the groans of the dying. At la Roquette
two hundred and twenty-seven miserable wretches, gathered in here and
there by the drag-net of the police, were collected in a huddle, and the
soldiers fired volley after volley into the mass of human beings until
there was no further sign of life. At Pere-Lachaise, which had been
shelled continuously for four days and was finally carried by a
hand-to-hand conflict among the graves, a hundred and forty-eight of
the insurgents were drawn up in line before a wall, and when the firing
ceased the stones were weeping great tears of blood; and three of them,
despite their wounds, having succeeded in making their escape, they
were retaken and despatched. Among the twelve thousand victims of the
Commune, who shall say how many innocent people suffered for every
malefactor who met his deserts! An order to stop the executions had been
issued from Versailles, so it was said, but none the less the slaughter
still went on; Thiers, while hailed as the savior of his country, was
to bear the stigma of having been the Jack Ketch of Paris, and Marshal
MacMahon, the vanquished of Froeschwiller, whose proclamation announcing
the triumph of law and order was to be seen on every wall, was to
receive the credit of the victory of Pere-Lachaise. And in the pleasant
sunshine Paris, attired in holiday garb, appeared to be _en fete_; the
reconquered streets were filled with an enormous crowd; men and women,
glad to breathe the air of heaven once more, strolled leisurely from
spot to spot to view the smoking ruins; mothers, holding their little
children by the hand, stopped for a moment and listened with an air of
interest to the deadened crash of musketry from the Lobau barracks.

When Jean ascended the dark staircase of the house in the Rue des
Orties, in the gathering obscurity of that Sunday evening, his heart was
opp