The majority of the White Blouses and their friends escaped unhurt, and the police and the guards chiefly expended their vigour on the spectators of the original disturbance. Whether this had been secretly engineered by the authorities for one of the purposes I previously indicated, must always remain a moot point. In any case it did not incline the Parisians to vote for the Government candidates. Every deputy returned for the city on that occasion was an opponent of the Empire, and in later years I was told by an ex-Court official that when Napoleon became acquainted with the result of the pollings he said, in reference to the nominees whom he had favoured, "Not one! not a single one!" The ingratitude of the Parisians, as the Emperor styled it, was always a thorn in his side; yet he should have remembered that in the past the bulk of the Parisians had seldom, if ever, been on the side of constituted authority.
Later that year came the famous affair of the Pantin crimes, and I was present with my father when Troppmann, the brutish murderer of the Kinck family, stood his trial at the Assizes. But, quite properly, my father would not let me accompany him when he attended the miscreant's execution outside the prison of La Roquette. Some years later, however, I witnessed the execution of Prévost on the same spot; and at a subsequent date I attended both the trial and the execution of Caserio--the assassin of President Carnot--at Lyons. Following Troppmann's case, in the early days of 1870 came the crime of the so-called Wild Boar of Corsica, Prince Pierre Bonaparte (grandfather of the present Princess George of Greece), who shot the young journalist Victor Noir, when the latter went with Ulrich de Fonvielle, aeronaut as well as journalist, to call him out on behalf of the irrepressible Henri Rochefort. I remember accompanying one of our artists, Gaildrau, when a sketch was made of the scene of the crime, the Prince's drawing-room at Auteuil, a peculiar semi-circular, panelled and white-painted apartment furnished in what we should call in England a tawdry mid-Victorian style. On the occasion of Noir's funeral my father and myself were in the Champs Elysées when the tumultuous revolutionary procession, in which Rochefort figured conspicuously, swept down the famous avenue along which the victorious Germans were to march little more than a year afterwards. Near the Rond-point the _cortège_ was broken up and scattered by the police, whose violence was extreme. Rochefort, brave enough on the duelling-ground, fainted away, and was carried off in a vehicle, his position as a member of the Legislative Body momentarily rendering him immune from arrest. Within a month, however, he was under lock and key, and some fierce rioting ensued in the north of Paris.