nd the barricade
could not have been held for two minutes. As they left this barricade
they were assailed by a sharp discharge of musketry. A company of
infantry, hardly visible in the dusk, was close upon them.

They fell back hastily; but one of them, who was a shoemaker of the
Faubourg du Temple, was hit, and had remained on the pavement. They went
back and brought him away. He had the thumb of the right hand smashed.
"Thank God!" said Jeanty Sarre, "they have not killed him." "No," said
the poor man, "it is my bread which they have killed."

And he added, "I can no longer work; who will maintain my children?"

They went back, carrying the wounded man. One of them, a medical
student, bound up his wound.

The sentries, whom it was necessary to post in every direction, and who
were chosen from the most trustworthy men, thinned and exhausted the
little central land. There were scarcely thirty in the barricade itself.

There, as in the Quarter of the Temple, all the streetlamps were
extinguished; the gas-pipes cut; the windows closed and unlighted; no
moon, not even stars. The night was profoundly dark.

They could hear distant fusillades. The soldiers were firing from around
Saint Eustache, and every three minutes sent a ball in their direction,
as much as to say, "We are here." Nevertheless they did not expect an
attack before the morning.

Dialogues like the following took place amongst them:--

"I wish I had a truss of straw," said Charpentier; "I have a notion that
we shall sleep here to-night."

"Will you be able to get to sleep?" asked Jeanty Sarre.

"I? Certainly I shall go to sleep."

He did go to sleep, in fact, a few moments later.

In this gloomy network of narrow streets, intersected with barricades,
and blockaded by soldiers, two wine-shops had remained open. They made
more lint there, however, than they drank wine; the orders of the chiefs
were only to drink reddened water.

The doorway of one of these wine-shops opened exactly between the two
barricades of the Petit Cancan. In it was a clock by which they
regulated the sentries' relief. In a back room they had locked up two
suspicious-looking persons who had intermingled with the combatants. One
of these men at the moment when he was arrested said, "I have come to
fight for Henri V." They kept them under lock and key, and placed a
sentry at the door.

An ambulance had been established in an adjoining room. There the
wounded shoemaker was