XIV. might fly over them. The impulse to shoot people CHAP. had been sudden, but was not momentary. The soldiers loaded and reloaded with a strange industry, and made haste to kill and kill, as though their lives depended upon the quantity of the slaughter they could get through in some given period of time. When there was no longer a crowd to fire into, the soldiers would aim carefully at any single fugitive who was trying to effect his escape; and if a man tried to save himself by coming close up to the troops and asking for mercy, the soldiers would force or persuade the suppliant to keep off and hasten away, and then, if they could, they killed him running. This slaughter of unarmed men and women was continued for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. It chanced that amongst the persons standing at the balconies near the corner of the Rue Montmartre there was an English officer; and because of the position in which he stood, the professional knowledge which guided his observation, the composure with which he was able to see and to describe, and the more than common responsibility which attaches upon a military narrator, it is probable that his testimony will be always appealed to by historians who shall seek to give a truthful account of the founding of the Second French Empire. At the moment when the firing began, this officer was looking upon the military display with his wife at his side, and was so placed that if he looked eastward he would carry his eye along the Boulevard for a distance of about 800 yards, and XIV. 6 6 CHAP. see as far as the head of the column; and if he looked westward he could see to the point where the Boulevard Montmartre runs into the Boulevard des Italiens. This is what he writes: "I went to the balcony ' at which my wife was standing, and remained there watching the troops. The whole Boulevard, as far as the eye could reach, was crowded with them, -principally infantry in subdivisions at quarter distance, with here and there a batch of twelvepounders and howitzers, some of which occupied the rising ground of the Boulevard Poissonière. The officers were smoking their cigars. The win'dows were crowded with people, principally women, tradesmen, servants, and children, or, like ourselves, 'the occupants of apartments. Suddenly, as I was 'intently looking with my glass at the troops in 'the distance eastward, a few musket-shots were 'fired at the head of the column, which consisted ' of about 3000 men. In a few moments it spread; and, after hanging a little, came down the Boulevard in a waving sheet of flame. So regular, however, was the fire that at first I thought it was a feu de 'joie for some barricade taken in advance, or to signal 'their position to some other division; and it was 'not till it came within fifty yards of me that I re'cognised the sharp ringing report of ball-cartridge ; 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 ' but even then I could scarcely believe the evidence ' of my ears, for, as to my eyes, I could not discover any enemy to fire at; and I continued looking at the men until the company below me were actually raising their firelocks, and one vagabond sharper 'than the rest-a mere lad without whisker or mous- CHAP. 'tache-had covered me. In an instant I dashed my 6 wife, who had just stepped back, against the pier between the windows, when a shot struck the ceiling immediately over our heads, and covered us 'with dust and broken plaster. In a second after, I ' placed her upon the floor; and in another, a volley came against the whole front of the house, the 6 balcony, and windows; one shot broke the mirror over the chimney-piece, another the shade of the 'clock; every pane of glass but one was smashed; the curtains and window-frames cut the room, in short, 6 6 6 was riddled. The iron balcony, though rather low, was a great protection; still fire-balls entered the room, and in the pause for reloading I drew my ' wife to the door, and took refuge in the back-rooms ' of the house. The rattle of musketry was incessant for more than a quarter of an hour after this; and 6 6 in a very few minutes the guns were unlimbered and pointed at the "Magasin" of M. Sallandrouze, 'five houses on our right. What the object or 6 tainly had not from our house or any other on the Boulevard Montmartre, or we must have seen it 'from the balcony. . . . This wanton fusilade must have been the result of a panic, lest the windows 'should have been lined with concealed enemies, and XIV. XIV. 6 CHAP. they wanted to secure their skins by the first fire, or 'else it was a sanguinary impulse. . The men, as 'I have already stated, fired volley upon volley for 'more than a quarter of an hour without any return; they shot down many of the unhappy individuals 'who remained on the Boulevard and could not obtain an entrance into any house; some persons 'were killed close to our door.'* The like of what was calmly seen by this English officer, was seen with frenzied horror by thousands of French men and women. If the officers in general abstained from ordering the slaughter, Colonel Rochefort did not follow their example. He was an officer in the Lancers, and he had already done execution with his horsemen amongst the chairs and the idlers in the neighbourhood of Tortoni's; but afterwards imagining a shot to have been fired from a part of the Boulevard occupied by infantry, he put himself at the head of a detachment which made a charge upon the crowd; and the military historian of these events relates with triumph that about thirty corpses, almost all of them in the clothes of gentlemen, were the trophies of this exploit. Along a distance of a thousand yards, going eastward from the Rue Richelieu, the dead bodies were strewed upon the foot-pavement of the Boule *Letter from Captain Jesse, first printed in the 'Times,' 13th December 1851, and given also in the 'Annual Register.' This was in the Boulevard Poissonière. Mauduit, pp. 217, 218. Mauduit speaks of these thirty killed as armed men, but it is well proved that there were no armed men in the Boulevard Poissonière, and I have therefore no difficulty in rejecting that part of his statement. XIV. vard, but at several spots they lay in heaps. Some CHA P. of the people mortally struck would be able to stagger blindly for a pace or two until they were tripped up by a corpse, and this, perhaps, is why a large proportion of the bodies lay heaped one on the other. Before one shop - front they counted thirty-three corpses. By the peaceful little nook or court which is called the Cité Bergère they counted thirty-seven. The slayers were many thousands of armed soldiery: the slain were of a number that never will be reckoned; but amongst all these slayers and all these slain there was not one combatant. There was no fight, no riot, no fray, no quarrel, no dispute.* What happened was a slaughter of unarmed men, and women, and children. Where they lay, the dead bore witness. Corpses lying apart struck deeper into people's memory than the dead who were lying in heaps. Some were haunted with the look of an old man with silver hair, whose only weapon was the umbrella which lay at his side. Some shuddered because of seeing the gay idler of the Boulevard sitting dead against the wall of a house, and scarce parted from the cigar which lay on the ground near his hand. Some carried in their minds the sight of a printer's boy leaning back against a shop-front, because, though the lad was killed, the proof-sheets which he was carrying had remained in his hands, and were red with his blood, and were fluttering in the wind.t The * I speak here of the Boulevard from the Rue du Sentier to the western extremity of the Boulevard Montmartre. For accounts of the state of the Boulevard after the massacre, see the written statements of eyewitnesses supplied to Victor Hugo, |