or to my
visit, had been removed several wounded children, most of them under
eight years old. One of the most horrible features of the war in a
thickly-peopled city is to be found in the sufferings which it entails
upon the innocent who are thus early familiarized with scenes of blood
and violence, and who too often, unfortunately, are themselves the
victims of them. The _gamins_ of Paris love to dabble in petroleum and
play with lucifer matches, and revel in destruction and conflagration.
More daring than their elders, they stick with their mothers to
barricades after the father of the family has deemed it prudent to
retire, and numerous are the stories of their heroism and courage.
Unfortunately, their propensities for arson render them liable to be
shot, and it is sad to see how many children are often comprised in a
band of prisoners. I went underground to the cells in which the
prisoners were confined at the Prevote, and wandered along narrow,
subterranean passages, where the noisome exhalations were almost
stifling, into dark cells, where the eye got at last sufficiently
accustomed to the light to distinguish the relics left by the prisoners:
here a pair of stays of which some female prisoner had divested herself,
there a red cockade, all kinds of articles of clothing steeped in slime
of indescribable foulness; and cowering at one end of the corridor a
dozen prisoners waiting to know their fate. They were more respectable
than usual, and not apparently of a very sanguinary type. They were all
men. To-day no less than a hundred women were marched down the streets
in one gang. The papers are so full of false reports that it is scarcely
safe to give news which has not been verified. Thus, unless I had seen
the Genius of Liberty on the top of the column in the Place de la
Bastille, and visited the Jardin des Plantes, I might have reported the
accounts, of which the papers are full, of the destruction of the figure
on the Column and of the animals and rare plants in the gardens, which
you will be happy to hear are all in a state of perfect health and
preservation. I am afraid, however, it is only too true that half the
Gobelins are destroyed, and that 67 of the "Freres de la Doctrine
Chretienne" have been shot by their fellow-Christians of the Commune. A
friend of mine saw Madame Milliere in a prisoners' gang, and we have
authentic intelligence to-day that her husband, one of the most
pestilent of the apostles of Frate