morning of Friday, the 23rd, at
the Porte Saint Denis. It was attacked the same day. The National
Guard marched resolutely against it. The attacking force was made up of
battalions of the First and Second Legions, which arrived by way of the
boulevards. When the assailants got within range a formidable volley was
fired from the barricade, and littered the ground with National Guards.
The National Guard, more irritated than intimidated, charged the
barricade.

At this juncture a woman appeared upon its crest, a woman young,
handsome, dishevelled, terrible. This woman, who was a prostitute,
pulled up her clothes to her waist and screamed to the guards in that
frightful language of the lupanar that one is always compelled to
translate:

"Cowards! fire, if you dare, at the belly of a woman!" Here the affair
became appalling. The National Guard did not hesitate. A volley brought
the wretched creature down, and with a piercing shriek she toppled
off the barricade. A silence of horror fell alike upon besiegers and
besieged.

Suddenly another woman appeared. This one was even younger and more
beautiful; she was almost a child, being barely seventeen years of age.
Oh! the pity of it! She, too, was a street-walker. Like the other she
lifted her skirt, disclosed her abdomen, and screamed: "Fire, brigands!"
They fired, and riddled with bullets she fell upon the body of her
sister in vice.

It was thus that the war commenced.

Nothing could be more chilling and more sombre. It is a hideous thing
this heroism of abjection in which bursts forth all that weakness has of
strength; this civilization attacked by cynicism and defending itself
by barbarity. On one side the despair of the people, on the other the
despair of society.

On Saturday the 24th, at 4 o'clock in the morning, I, as a
Representative of the people, was at the barricade in the Place Baudoyer
that was defended by the troops.

The barricade was a low one. Another, narrow and high, protected it
in the street. The sun shone upon and brightened the chimney-tops. The
tortuous Rue Saint Antoine wound before us in sinister solitude.

The soldiers were lying upon the barricade, which was little more
than three feet high. Their rifles were stacked between the projecting
paving-stones as though in a rack. Now and then bullets whistled
overhead and struck the walls of the houses around us, bringing down
a shower of stone and plaster. Occasionally a blouse, sometimes a