ping like a goat, he made his
escape. The general was very angry. Step by step we made our way,
slowly, it is true, but never losing ground. About two hundred
yards from Montmartre were tall houses and wood-yards where many
insurgents had taken refuge. These sent among us a shower of balls.
We had sharp fighting in this place, but succeeded in gaining the
position. Then we halted for about two hours, to make preparations
for an attack upon the heights. Some of us while we halted, fired
at the enemy, some raided houses and made prisoners; some went in
search of something to eat, but seldom found it. I was fortunate,
however, while taking some prisoners to the provost-marshal, to
be able to buy a dozen salt herrings, four pints of milk, nine
loaves of bread, some prunes, some barley-sugar, and a pound of
bacon. I took all I could get, and from the colonel downward, all my
comrades were glad to get a share of my provisions. The heights of
Montmartre had been riddled by the fire from Mont Valerien. Sometimes
a shell from our mortars would burst in the enemy's trenches, when
a swarm of human beings would rush out of their holes and run like
rabbits in a warren."

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 proprie