The streets next day were full of hearses; but even the number of funerals that took place were insignificant, in comparison to the stacks of corpses which were cast into deep trenches without shroud or coffin, and covered with quicklime. I went to the Morgue in the afternoon, and found that dismal charnel-house fully tenanted. Every one of the fourteen beds had a corpse; some, dead with gunshot wounds; some, sabred; some, horribly mutilated by cannon-balls. There was a _queue_ outside of at least two thousand people, laughing, talking, smoking, eating apples, as though it was some pleasant spectacle they were going to, instead of that frightful exhibition. Yet, in this laughing, talking, smoking crowd, there were fathers who had missed their sons; sons who came there dreading to see the corpses of their fathers; wives of Socialist workmen, sick with the almost certainty of finding the bodies of their husbands. The bodies were only exposed six hours; but the clothes remained—a very grove of blouses. The neighboring churches were hung with black, and there were funeral services at St. Roch and at the Madeleine.
And yet—with this Golgotha so close; with the blood not yet dry on the Boulevards; with corpses yet lying about the streets; with five thousand soldiers bivouacking in the Champs Elysées; with mourning and lamentation in almost every street; with a brutal military in almost every printing-office, tavern, café; with proclamations threatening death and confiscation covering the walls; with the city in a siege, without a legislature, without laws, without a government—this extraordinary people was, the next night, dancing and flirting at the Salle Valentino, or the Prado, lounging in the _foyers_ of the Italian Opera, gossiping over their _eau-sucrée_, or squabbling over their dominoes outside and inside the cafés. I saw Rachel in “Les Horaces;” I went to the _Variétés_, the _Opéra Comique_, and no end of theatres; and as we walked home at night through lines of soldiers, brooding over their bivouacs, I went into a restaurant, and asking whether it had been a ball which had starred the magnificent pier-glass before me, got for answer, “Ball, sir!—cannon-ball, sir!—yes, sir!” for all the world as though I had inquired about the mutton being in good cut, or asparagus in season!