re Such as they were, however, they imposed on the people of Paris, and for ten weeks, as has been said, the world saw the amazing spectacle of a trained army, practically unlimited in sources, vainly endeavoring, with the passive assistance of its recent conquerors, to capture a city held by probably less than a fourth of its numbers, entirely devoid of skilled leadership, and not even beginning to recover from a three months' blockade. It was not until Sunday, May 21, that the first Versailles troops ventured within the fortifications of Paris. Then followed a week of horrors to which it would be difficult to find a parallel. Street by street the Parisians retired, fighting stubbornly. No quarter was given. In the matter of panic there was little to choose between the two sides, and a Frenchman in a panic is perhaps the most bloodthirsty creature on this earth. Prisoners were indeed taken by the invading troops, but not prisoners with arms in their hands. Indeed, the possession of a pair of "ammunition" boots is said to have been equivalent to a death-warrant. By the middle of the week the defenders had lost all their leaders of any experience whatever, and such orders as were given were merely the counsels of frenzy. Two or three young men of the lowest type which Paris produces were practically supreme. If we can imagine the government of a great city, at a moment when all passions were excited to the utmost, placed in the hands of a few vicious and uneducated schoolboys, we can conceive something of the state of Paris during the days from May 24 to May 29, 1871. Every edition of the newspaper's brought the report of fresh horrors. One day the Hôtel de Ville and other public buildings had been burnt. The VOL. XV. 770 LIVING AGE. next the Archbishop of Paris and a number of other more or less known ecclesiastics and public men had been shot in the prison where they had been confined since the early days of the insurrection. Civilization seemed to have gone back four or five centuries. Even the men of St. Bartholomew and those of August and September had drawn the line short of deliberate incendiarism. Excited as one was, what could be more natural than the desire to see something of the scene in which these events had been taking place before returning order had restored everything to the decorum of a modern capital? Thus when, in the late afternoon of Saturday, June 3, I left the department in which I then held a subordinate post, and considered how I could best pass the time until my services should be again required on Monday morning, it was not strange that my thoughts should have turned towards Paris. After the necessary change of garments and a hasty dinner I accordingly made my way to Victoria station. The railway service was still disorganized, and the ticket-clerk entirely declined to give me a return ticket-on the ground, so far as I could make out, that my return was somewhat doubtful. One would have supposed that this would have made it all the more desirable to secure the return fare in advance; but in the matter of return tickets the railway official mind, as all the world knows, has its own peculiar laws of logic. There was a fair number of passengers, mostly French. On the steamer, however, I fell in with a friend, bound on the same errand as myself; though, If I remember right, being an artist, he had something more practical in view than the mere gratification of curiosity. It was a fortunate meeting for me, since he had a friend living in Paris who had been there throughout both sieges, and proved a most efficient show man. On landing at Calais we were made to give up our passports, and bidden to reclaim them at the station. Here I foresaw trouble-indeed, probable ejection from France by the first boat; for though I had put an old passport in my pocket I had not had time to get it visé, and I understood that the regulations were strict on this head. How ever, I handed the document to the gendarme, and hoped for the best. We were directed to a small room adjoining the station, in which an official, seated at a table, was examining the passports by the dim light of a candle or two. A pile of them lay in front of him, and the space on our side of the table was crowded. My own passport was in a leather pocket-book, with my name stamped on the flap. My friend O'C― caught sight of it in the heap, and pointed it out to me as I stood behind him. Slipping my hand under his arm, while the official was engaged with another passport, I secured mine and walked boldly out into the station, holding it up to the gendarme at the door; who, seeing me in undisturbed possession of it, naturally concluded that it was en règle. The rest of the journey to Paris was uneventful, but even more jolty than usual, owing to the line having been taken up in many places for strategic purposes, and relaid somewhat hurriedly. At the point where it crosses the Oise the bridge had been destroyed, and we were taken on a temporary line of rails down the steep bank to the level of the stream, and across on a highly temporary timber structure. We did not, I think, reach Paris very much later than the usual time in those days -about 7 A.M. We were met at the station by Mr. C, the friend above mentioned, and after a wash and breakfast at a little hotel, which he indicated to us, we started on a round of inspection. The first thing was to find a fiacre, not such an easy matter as it is in the normal condition of Paris, for the two sieges had terribly reduced the stock of horses. You cannot eat your horse and drive him too. However, a vehicle was found, and we drove about the town. As we went down the Boulevard Malesherbes, in which Mr. C- lived, he pointed to a doorway, on the posts of which bulletmarks were visible. "Two or three days ago," he said, "I saw some soldiers go into that house. They brought out a woman, set her against tue door-post, and shot her then and there." Similar incidents, it is to be feared, were not uncommon. Small wonder that every man and woman of the working classes whom I saw that day in Paris was casting on the soldiers with whom the city was swarming-one person in every three whom one met was in uniform-glances of such hatred as showed that "the red fool-fury of the Seine," though smothered for the time, was not in the least quenched. One thing by which we were struck was the care with which all the immediate traces of the carnage had been cleared away. Only a week ago men had been slaughtering each other by hundreds in some of the streets through which we passed. Barricades, or fragments of them, were still standing; blackened streaks beside every window on the upper floor, all pointing in the direction from which the troops had advanced, gave mute evidence of the resistance which had been offered to them; but throughout the day we saw nothing which could suggest the stain of blood. One most ghastly piece of testimony, however, to what had been going on we met with more than once. Now and again we crossed places where the pavé had obviously been taken up all across the street, to a breadth of six or seven feet, and hastily relaid, and where the roadway seemed to yield somewhat to the pressure of the wheels. "The other day," said Mr. C, “I chanced to turn over one of the stones at a place like this with my walking stick, and saw a human face gazing up at me.” Hundreds of the dead had been provisionally buried in this way, and at these spots the road was literally laid on corpses. When I was again in Paris, three weeks later, nothing of this was to be seen. A the intersection of the Rue Royale and Rue Saint-Honoré, all the corner houses had been burnt out. The upper floors seemed in some cases to have fallen in before the flames reached them, for here and there articles could still be seen hanging to the smoked walls far above. I particularly remember a frying pan and a crinoline, which had evidently formed part of the property of a resident on the fifth or sixth floor of one of these lofty buildings. that on mentioning to my colleagues There they swung helplessly on their where I had been since we parted on nails high up against the summer sky. the Saturday, I was met with remarks Of the Hôtel de Ville the blackened savoring of incredulity. There were no walls were standing; but the less solidly "club trains," it must be remembered, built Tuileries was a mass of débris, a quarter of a century ago. still smoking. The latter building could indeed well be spared. Its his torical memories were neither very ancient nor very splendid; and its removal, with the consequent opening up of the view from the gardens into the Place du Carrousel, was from a picturesque point of view a great improvement. As to the Ministry of Finance, about which there was some discussion at the time, each side trying to lay the blame of its destruction on the other, I can only say that, in spite of Ferré's famous despatch: "Faites flamber de suite finances," it had all the appearance of having been burnt from the top downwards. In most of the other buildings the débris lay in a heap within the walls, having fallen inwards, as the floors successively gave way; here it had all littered out into the street. It is a small matter enough, the Commune having fires in plenty on its conscience; but I felt convinced at the time that in the case of "finances" its intentions had been anticipated by a "Verseilleux" shell, probably from Mount Valérien. One curious little detail of Parisian life, during the first siege was pointed out to us by Mr. C. He took us into the Cercle des Chemins de Fer, of which he was a member, and showed us a book containing the daily bills of fare of the "club dinner." It is, or was, a tradition of this club that beef in some form should appear every day in its menu; and this custom appeared never to have been pretermitted for a single day, even at the time when the food supply of Paris was at the lowest. Of course we suggested that the animals which had yielded the so-called beef had never worn horns; but he assured us that it was not so, and that for those who knew where to go for it there never was a day throughout the siege when genuine beef was not obtainable. That night I returned to London, and made my appearance duly in Whitehall on Monday morning. I regret to say Three weeks later I started for my annual holiday, and was able to take rather more time in Paris. I spent a good deal of it in wandering about St. Cloud, Le Bourget, and other places of which the names were then in all men's mouths. At St. Denis, which was occupied by the Prussians, I wanted to obtain permission to see some of the forts which had held out so many months against the army which was now in temporary possession of them; and to this end I accosted a German soldier whom I met in the street, asking him to whom I must address my request. My German was scanty, his seemed scanter still. At last, after vain attempts to understand and be understood, he timidly inquired: "Können Sie besser Pölnisch sprechen?" I had to admit that my studies had not yet extended to the Slavonic tongues. However, I found the Commandantur at last, and was shown in to the Platz-Major, a courteous and mild-mannered officer. I never heard a "swear word" uttered with such a gentle intonation as the "Gottes Donnerwetter" with which he received some piece of intelligence brought in by an orderly while I was there. One could see that he used the expletive merely from a sense of what was proper to his position, and not in the least as an outlet for irritation.. He at once gave me the necessary permit. I have it to this day, but have never' succeeded in reading it. It procured me instant admission to some. of the battered forts, where I remember the soldiers were very anxious to have the names of the guns-for each gun bore a name, "Bijou," and the likeinterpreted to them. In Paris itself, as I have said, a won derful clearing-up had taken place in the last three weeks. The splintered trees, the shattered kiosques and other edifices on the boulevards-does any one remember Cham's sketch of the veteran boulevardier gazing sadly on the ruins of one of the latter, and sighing "Même Rambuteau"? - these still `showed how heavy the storm had been; and the tell-tale smoke-streaks still remained beside many windows. But in general life went on in Paris much as usual, and no one would have suspected that on one side the city was still halfgirdled at a distance of three or four miles by a foreign army, or that in the other direction prisoners by thousands were awaiting the short shrift of a court-martial. Theatres were reopening; indeed, I am not sure that they had ever closed; and though the pick of the Comédie Française was in London, enough of its members were left to draw a pretty full house with "L'Aventurière" on the evening of June 26. Whether it be milk or blood that is spilt your Parisian knows wetter than to cry over it. We were six, and we wanted to spend our summer holiday abroad. Not as tourists, always on the move, bound to make a record of churches in a given time, but as a family in easy summer quarters, free to embroider the margin of our idleness with the exertion of such convenient sight-seeing as the day's mood might dictate, or free to keep our laziness intact, as we chose. We knew our destination. Its advantages we had by heart, learnt off the card. In The Little Paradise, as our hotel in prospect was delightfully named, we should find a dining-room vast and beautiful, a piano, gardens, bosquets, a garage for bicyclettes, a gymnase, a dark-room for photography, renowned cooking, and the best cider in Normandy. The nightly summer service from Newhaven to Caen has within the last few years made Normandy so accessible that it will probably not long be possible to find unsophisticated resorts such as are still common on the Calvados coast, not twenty miles from magnificent Trouville-"Paris-sur-Mer," as they call it. It seemed too good to be true that we should find a resting-place without a casino, so close at hand; but so it proved. Reaching Newhaven, we stumbled drowsily along the dark quays, past the Dieppe boat, and found our steamer waiting. She was a new boat, just put on for the season, as fresh as a daisy in her white paint, and with a blameless record of four crossings over charmed waves, and a pretty young stewardess with a musical voice to assure our ladies that it was always so. We were already too tired to lie long awake, and only roused up when a six hours' voyage brought us at sunrise to Ouistreham, and we stopped, to enter the canal-lock. The sun shone caressingly, there was just a touch of six o'clock crispness in the air, poplars and willows fringed the banks, blue blouses came selling milk, three sportsmen with long guns and tasselled game-bags passed by, and a little gendarme gave the official touch to assure us this was France. The canal (or, rather, canalized river Crne) leads through eight miles of gardens, orchards, sheltered, summery country-houses, with here and there a church or a château, to Caen. Here we landed, passed with flying colors the easily contented Douane, then, despatching our boxes per 'bus to St. Martin's, the station for the coast line, we turned deaf ears to the whip-cracking host of cabmen, and 'walked through the town. Once on board the queer, twostoried, slow-coach of a train, half an hour sufficed to bring us back to the sea. (We thus traced two sides of a triangle since we left it at Ouistreham.) Our route lay through nursery-gardens, golden harvest-fields, and orchards dotted with bright, small apples and pears. Vines hung in festoons over the high walls, and lines of greyish-green poplars were everywhere. The trees ceased as we came near the sea. The country resembled the northeast coasts of England, only that every inch was cultured; and though evidently wind-swept, it was not windstarved, as our own shores are. The The hotel was roofed with red tiles, shabby, white, three-storied, with plaster peeling off its walls, and sunblistered shutters fastened back from its white-screened, balconied windows. Shrimp-nets leant against the wall by the open doors of the long salle à manger, croquet-hoops were stuck in the sand, mallets and balls lay about, and rigged up from the house to the railings a new striped awning flapped in the wind and threw a patch of welcome shade at our feet. air was genial, and the trees, though of which the hotel was built. On the small, were not warped out of shape. fourth was the plage, seen through a Soil yellowish sand, no rocks to speak tall iron railing whose rusty gates stood of, but a low, crumbling beach-line of always half-open, deep in sand. chalk, full, as we found, of fossil shells. East and west stretched miles of level sands, from which the tides receded far. Crossing the main street of the village, leading down from the church to the sea, our train stopped at Langrune Station, and we gathered our possessions together and disembarked. A commissionaire was in waiting for us, and led the way. Down a narrow street, the street, we followed, enjoying the clean, strong, salt breeze on our faces. On either hand were low houses of all sizes, one with both vine and figtree flourishing in an enclosure not more than four feet square. Flowerboxed windows and balconies, tiny gardens crowded with bright blooms, and little shops, mingled together anyhow, made up the street. Far across the end of it was a deep-blue strip of sea. The shops began to display luxuries as we went on-gaily striped peignoirs and costumes, sun-hats, shrimping-nets, and dangling bunches of espadrillesthe indispensable shoes, with rope soles and canvas uppers, which make French bathing so comfortable. Turning to the left along a winding road, we suddenly came upon the hotel of The Little Paradise from the back, entering it on its inland or garden side. We were ushered into a garden gay with dazzling geranium beds, the vivid green of acacia-trees, and big bushes of broom, whose yellow flowers were as large as sweet-peas, filling the air with a strong sweet odor. Under the trees were the coffee tables and two swings (the gymnase!); on the low walls were various plats, and piles of plates gathered in readiness for the forthcoming déjeuner. it was now eleven o'clock, and several kitchen minions were running to and fro, too busy to heed us. However, a cook's cap popped for a moment from a doorway at the side of the garden. Madame Bertrand was shouted for, and soon made her appearance in the archway that led under the main building from the garden to the sea-front. She led us through the arch, and out into the sandy court, round three sides Favored pensionnaires had possession of the ground-floor rooms, each with its own broad doorstep, on which sandy espadrilles lay about drying. The upper rooms were reached by steep narrow staircases. At the top of one of these, in a set of tiny rooms much resembling bathing-boxes, we were lodged. Quarters so primitive rather dismayed us at first. The roofs were low; the wall-papers were hideous; the boards were bare, though snowy-white, and with their island bits of carpet were kept liberally sanded by the wind. (At Langrune everything is sandy.) The scanty furniture was old and odd, of that seaside species that is equally unwilling to open or to shut. And the beds? The beds were comfort itself. Roomy, downy, spotlessly fresh and clean; no English lodging we had ever known could provide such bowers of dreamless ease as we found there. We had scarcely time to look round us before one urgent bell after another summoned us to the first of the two public events of the day-déjeuner. From the beach, from the garden, from lower rooms opening off the court, from upper rooms opening off a long wooden balcony (now gay with peignoirs and bathing-dresses, hung to dry in the sun and wind), people came trooping across the deep sands of the court, into the diningroom, vast and beautiful, which we had so often pictured to ourselves. It proved to be the flimsiest of long dinner-boxes. On one side three doorways gave access from the court, and air; on the wall opposite were pinned two |