sacks, and loaves of bread stuck
aloft on their bayonets, moved in the direction of Porte Maillot. By
the side of the captain in command of the first company marched a woman
in a strange costume, the skirt of a vivandiere and the jacket of a
National Guard, a Phrygian cap on her head, a chassepot in her hand, and
a revolver stuck in her belt. From the distance at which I was standing
she looked both young and pretty. I asked some Federals who she was; one
told me she was the wife of Citizen Eudes,[47] a member of the Commune,
and another that she was a newspaper seller in the Avenue des Ternes,
whose child had been killed in the Rue des Acacias the night before by a
fragment of a shell, and that she had sworn to revenge him. It appeared
the battalion was on its way to support the combatants at Neuilly, who
were in want of help. From what I hear the gendarmes and sergents de
ville had fought their way as far as the Rue des Huissiers. Now I had no
doubt the Versailles generals had made use of the gendarmes and sergents
de ville, who were most of them old and tried soldiers, but if in very
truth they were wherever the imagination of the Federals persisted in
placing them, they must either have been as numerous as the grains of
sand on the sea-shore, or else their leaders must have found out a way
of making them serve in several places at once. Having followed the
battalion, I found myself a few yards in front of the Arc de Triomphe.
Suddenly a hissing, whizzing sound is heard in the distance, and rapidly
approaches us; it sounds very much like the noise of a sky-rocket. "A
shell!" cried the sergeant, and the whole battalion to a man, threw
itself on the ground with a load jingling of saucepans and bayonets.
Indeed there was some danger. The terrible projectile lowered as it
approached, and then fell with a terrific noise a little way from us, in
front of the last house on the left-hand side of the avenue. I had never
seen a shell burst so near me before; a good idea of what it is like may
be had from those sinister looking paintings, that one sees sometimes
suspended round the necks of certain blind beggars, supposed to
represent an explosion in a mine. I think no one was hurt, and the
mischief done seemed to consist in a Wide hole in the asphalte and a
door reduced to splinters. The National Guards got up from the ground,
and several of them proceeded to pick up fragments of the shell. They
had, however, not gone many yards