ment, one trying to press forward, the
other determined to oppose its passage. A pistol-shot was heard. This
was a signal. Down went the muskets, the armed crowd fired, and the
unarmed dispersed in mad flight, leaving dead and wounded on their path.

But who fired that first pistol-shot? "One of the citizens of the
demonstration; and moreover, the sentinels had their muskets torn from
them;" affirm the partisans of the Central Committee, and they bring
forward, among other proofs; the evidence of an eye-witness, a foreign
general, who saw it all from a window of the Rue de la Paix. But these
assertions are but little to be relied upon. Can it be seriously
believed that a crowd, to all appearance peaceful, would commit such an
act of aggression? Who would have been insane enough to expose a mass of
unarmed people to such dire revenge, by a challenge as criminal as it
was useless? The account according to which the pistol was fired by an
officer of the Federal guard from the foot of the Place Vendome, thus
giving the signal to those under his orders to fire upon the citizens,
improbable as appears such an excess of cold-blooded barbarity, is much
the more credible. And now how many women mourn their husbands and son's
wounded, and perhaps dead? How many victims have fallen? The number is
not yet known. Monsieur Barle, a lieutenant of the National Guard, was
shot in the stomach. Monsieur Gaston Jollivet, who some time ago
committed the offence, grave in our eyes, of publishing a comic ode in
which he allows himself to ridicule our illustrious and beloved master,
Victor Hugo, but was certainly guilty of none in desiring a return to
order, had his arm fractured, it is said. Monsieur Otto Hottinger, one
of the directors of the French Bank, fell, struck by two balls, while
raising a wounded man from the ground.

One of my friends assures me that half-an-hour after the fusillade he
was fired at, as he was coming out from a _porte-cochere_,[18] by
National Guards in ambuscade.

At four o'clock, at the corner of the Rue de la Paix and the Rue Neuve
des Petits Champs, an old man, dressed in a blouse, still lay where he
had fallen across the body of a _cantiniere_, and beside him a soldier
of the line, the staff of a tricolour flag grasped in his dead hand. Is
this soldier the same of whom my friend Monsieur A---- J---- speaks in
his account of the first demonstration, and who was said to be an
employe at Siraudin's?

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