One of my friends assures me that half-an-hour after the fusillade he was fired at, as he was coming out from a _porte-cochère_,[18] by National Guards in ambuscade.
At four o'clock, at the corner of the Rue de la Paix and the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, an old man, dressed in a blouse, still lay where he had fallen across the body of a _cantinière_, and beside him a soldier of the line, the staff of a tricolour flag grasped in his dead hand. Is this soldier the same of whom my friend Monsieur A---- J---- speaks in his account of the first demonstration, and who was said to be an employé at Siraudin's?
There were many other victims--Monsieur de Péne, the editor of _Paris-Journal_, dangerously wounded by a ball that penetrated the thigh; Monsieur Portel, lieutenant in the Eclaireurs Franchetti, wounded in the neck and right foot; Monsieur Bernard, a merchant, killed; Monsieur Giraud, a stockbroker, also killed. Fresh names are added to the funereal list every moment.
Where will this revolution lead us, which was begun by the murder of two Generals and is being carried on by the assassination of passers-by?
[Footnote 18: Porte-cochère (carriage gateway).]
In the midst of all this horror and terror I saw one little incident which made me smile, though it was sad too; an idyl which might be an elegy. Three hired carriages descended the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. It was a wedding. In the first carriage was the bride, young and pretty, in tears; in the second, the bridegroom, looking anything but pleased. As the horses were proceeding slowly on account of the hill, I approached and inquired the cause of the discontent. A disagreeable circumstance had happened, the _garçon d'honneur_ told me. They had been to the _mairie_ to be married, but the _mairie_ had been turned into a guard-house, and instead of the _mairie_ and his clerks, they found soldiers of the Commune. The sergeant had offered to replace the municipal functionary, but the grands-parents had not consented to such an arrangement, and they were forced to return with the connubial knot still to be tied. An unhappy state of things. "Pooh!" said an old woman who was passing by, "they can marry to-morrow.--There is always time enough to commit suicide."
