des Deux-Ponts." Three citizens were also asphyxiated in trying to
save him, two of whom died; "and the deaths of Sixdenier and Toulon will
be for all another and a grand example to add to the history of the
regiment."

A Parisian merchant or manufacturer, Dumourrier-Duperrier, in 1699,
furnished the first effective, organized system of combating fires in
the city, and in 1717 he received, by letters-patent, the direction of
the _Compagnie de Garde-Pompes_, the origin of the present organization.
In 1792, the total effective of this force was two hundred and
sixty-three men, officers included, with forty-four force-pumps, twelve
suction-pumps, and forty-two casks. The men were provided with uniforms
and, later, armed with sabres; in the year IX of the Republic, the
corps, then four hundred strong, was placed under the direction of the
Prefet de police, under the general administration of the Prefet de la
Seine. The frightful conflagration which ended the fete given by the
Austrian ambassador, Prince von Schwartzenberg, to the Emperor, in honor
of his marriage with Marie-Louise, in 1810, awoke public attention to
the insufficiency of the arrangements for extinguishing fires, and in
the following year measures were taken to secure a larger authority and
more energetic action. Napoleon decided that the gardes-pompes should be
put on a strictly military footing; an imperial decree of September 18,
1811, created a battalion of sapeurs-pompiers consisting of four
companies with thirteen officers and five hundred and sixty-three men.
For the first time, they were armed with muskets, and as a military
force were held as an auxiliary in the police service and in the
maintenance of public order. One of the articles of this decree provided
for the payment of this force by the city until the establishment of a
company to insure against fire,--which was held to foreshadow an
intention to place this expense, at least in part, upon these companies,
and thereby relieve the municipal budget.

During the Revolution of 1848, the provisory government thought it
prudent to deprive the pompiers of their muskets; and in April, 1850,
the President of the Republic disbanded the battalion and reorganized
it, retaining a small proportion of the former members. Down to this
date, it had been recruited from the engineers and the artillery of the
army, but since then, from the infantry only. In 1860, the annexation of
the banlieue necessitated a ne