condition of the city had become
such that the following is the official report of a quiet night, made to
the Comite Central by "a Sieur Garnier d'Aubin, 'general de brigade,
commandant de place du 18e arrondissement'":

"REPORT OF THE 20TH AND 21ST OF MARCH.

"Nothing new.

"I have received the reports of the different chiefs of the posts. The
night has been calm and without incident.

"At five minutes past ten, two sergents de ville, disguised as
bourgeois, were brought in by the francs-tireurs and immediately shot.

"At twenty minutes past midnight, a police officer, accused of having
fired his revolver, was shot.

"At seven o'clock, a gendarme, brought in by the guard of the 28th, was
shot."

"'The night was calm and without incidents,'" comments M. Gourdon de
Genouillac, from whom we borrow many of these details, "and only four
men were shot!"

The quality of the officers of this inchoate government may be judged
from another contemporary document, inserted in _L'Officiel_ of the 18th
of May:

"Those officers of the general staff of the National Guard who have
neglected their duties to banquet with _filles de mauvaise vie_, at the
restaurant Peters, were arrested yesterday by order of the Committee of
Public Safety. They have been sent to the Bicetre, with spades and
picks, to work in the trenches. The women have been sent to Saint-Lazare
to make sacks for containing earth."

One of the strongest characteristics of the Commune was its hatred and
persecution of the clergy, manifested in a hundred acts, and culminating
in the murder of the archbishop and the hostages. On the morning after
the arrest of all the clergy of Montmartre, the following notice was
posted on the doors of the church of Saint-Pierre:

"_Whereas_, the priests are bandits, and the haunts in which they have
morally assassinated the masses, by bowing France under the claws of the
infamous Bonaparte, Favre, and Trochu, are the churches,

"The civil delegate of the Carrieres of the ex-prefecture of police
orders that the church of Saint-Pierre (Montmartre) shall be closed and
decrees the arrest of the priests and the Ignorantins."

On the preceding day, the cathedral and the church of Saint-Laurent had
been closed, and in the crypt of the latter were found a great number of
human bones; some of these were arranged so as to constitute the
skeletons of fourteen women which, it was asserted, had been sequestered
by the priests of th