Commune, offered them wine. They drank it unsuspectingly, and within an
hour were all dead. Orders, were consequently issued that no soldier
should on any account accept drink or food of any kind offered them by
women.

"This horrible massacre of the Archbishop and the other prisoners is
next door to madness," Cuthbert said, as he read the account at
breakfast. "The Communists could have no personal feeling of hostility
against their victims, indeed, the Archbishop was, I know, most popular.
Upon the other hand it seals the fate of thousands. The fury excited by
such a deed will be so great that the troops will refuse to give quarter
and the prisoners taken will have to suffer to the utmost for the crime
committed by perhaps a handful of desperate wretches. The omnibuses
began to run yesterday from Sevres, and I propose, Mary, that we go over
to Versailles to-day and get out of sound of the firing. They say there
are fully 20,000 prisoners there."

"I don't want to see the prisoners," Mary said, with a shudder. "I
should like to go to Versailles, but let us keep away from horrors."

And so for a day they left the sound of battle behind, wandered together
through the Park at Versailles, and carefully abstained from all
allusion to the public events of the past six months. The next day
Cuthbert returned to Paris and made his way down to the Place de la
Bastille, where, for the sum of half a Napoleon, he obtained permission
to ascend to the upper window of a house. The scene here was terrible.
On the side on which he was standing a great drapery establishment,
known as the Bon Marche, embracing a dozen houses, was in flames. In the
square itself three batteries of artillery belonging to Ladmirault's
Division, were sending their shell up the various streets debouching on
the place.

Most of the houses on the opposite side were in flames. The insurgent
batteries on the Buttes de Chaumont were replying to the guns of the
troops. The infantry were already pressing their way upwards. Some of
the barricades were so desperately defended that the method by which
alone the troops on the south side had been able to capture these
defences, was adopted; the troops taking possession of the houses and
breaking their way with crow-bar and pick-axe through the party wall,
and so, step by step, making their way along under cover until they
approached the barricades, which they were then able to make untenable
by their musketry fire fr