nd ruin of that
handsome street were lamentable to behold. The Place de la Concorde was
a desert, and in the midst of it lay the statue of Lille with the head
off. The last time I had looked on that face it was covered with crape,
in mourning for the entry of the Prussians. Near the bridge were 24
corpses of Insurgents, laid out in a row, waiting to be buried under the
neighbouring paving stones. To the right the skeleton of the Tuileries
reared its gaunt shell, the framework of the lofty wing next the Seine
still standing; but the whole of the roof of the central building was
gone, and daylight visible through all the windows right into the Place
de Carrousel. General Mac-Mahon's head-quarters were at the Affaires
Etrangeres, which were intact. After a visit there, I passed the Corps
Legislatif, also uninjured by fire, but much marked by shot and shell,
and so along the Quais the whole way to the Mint, at which point General
Vinoy had established his head-quarters. At the corner of the Rue du Bac
the destruction was something appalling. The Rue du Bac is an impassable
mound of ruins, 15 or 20 feet high, completely across the street as far
as I could see. The Legion d'Honneur, the Cour des Comptes, and Conseil
d'Etat were still smoking, but there was nothing left of them but the
blackened shells of their noble _facades_ to show how handsome they had
once been. At this point, in whichever direction one looked, the same
awful devastation met the eye--to the left the smouldering Tuileries, to
the right, the long line of ruin where the fire had swept through the
magnificent palaces on the Quai, and overhead again to-day a cloud of
smoke, more black and abundant even than yesterday, incessantly rolling
its dense volumes from behind Notre-Dame, whose two towers were happily
standing uninjured. This fire issued from the Grenier d'Abondance and
other buildings in the neighbourhood of the Jardin des Plantes. In
another direction the Arsenal was also burning. One marked result of a
high state of civilization is, that it has furnished improved facilities
for incendiarism, which seem to have been developed even more completely
than the means of counteracting them. Along the Quais under the trees,
cavalry horses were picketed, and a force was about to leave General
Vinoy's head-quarters just as I reached it, to support an attack which
was even then being made upon the Place de la Bastille, where the
Insurgents were still holding out.