--it knew how to resolve, with one sole
blow, the social problem which had troubled, for so many years, the
administrators, the economists, the moralists, the philosophers, the
doctors, and the legislators. It caused a paper to be pasted on the
walls of Paris, and the great difficulty was solved forever. By a
poster, well and duly stamped, it forbade prostitution. It was not any
more difficult than that! The poor creatures liberated from all
administrative regulation, from all sanitary control, did not wait to
have it repeated; they spread themselves like a leprosy through the
city, and when, reduced to poverty by the men who exploited them, they
no longer had anything to eat, they donned the great-coat of the
foot-soldier and went to the advance posts, where they were as
formidable to their friends as to their adversaries.

"In the last days, all these belligerent viragoes fired from behind the
barricades longer than did the men; very many of them were arrested,
their hands black with powder, their shoulders bruised by the recoil of
the musket, all excited still with the fever of battle. A thousand and
fifty-one of them were conducted to Versailles, among whom were to be
counted, according to the euphemism of the statistics, 'two hundred and
forty-six celibataires under police surveillance.' As in the case of
children, no undue severity was exercised, and eight hundred and fifty
decisions of _non-lieu_ were rendered in their favor; among the female
prisoners, four were sent to insane asylums,--that was very little! For
any student of _possession_, there is scarcely any room for doubt;
nearly all the unfortunates who combatted for the Commune were that
which science calls 'patients.'"

The last stand of the insurgents before the constantly advancing forces
of Marshal MacMahon was made in the last days of May in the quarters
Menilmontant and Popincourt and in the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise. The
Buttes Chaumont were taken on the evening of the 27th; through the
cemetery, around the tombstones, in the rain, the combat was waged with
the bayonet, and without quarter. The marine infantry pursued the
Communards into the vaults and killed every one they found. On the gray
stones of the tombs could be seen for days afterwards the imprint of
hands blackened with gunpowder and red with blood. In the quarries of
Amerique, many of the last survivors killed themselves in despair. "The
Seine for many days was filled with corpses, and