Monday, May 29, found the city in the hands of the Versaillais. The Provisional Government and its Parliament were victorious. The army, defeated at Sedan, had conquered its insurgent countrymen. All that remained of the Commune was wreck and devastation. The Tuileries, the Column of the Place Vendôme, the Treasury, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the Hôtel-de-Ville, or City Hall, were destroyed, besides two theatres, the Law Courts, or Palais de Justice, the offices of the Council of State and the Court of Accounts, the State Safe Deposit (Caisse des Dépôts et de Consignations), the Library of the Louvre, the manufactory of Gobelin's tapestry, the Prefecture of Police, eight whole streets, and innumerable scattered private houses. The vengeance of the soldiers as they made their way from street to street, from barricade to barricade, was savage and indiscriminate. Every man arrested whose hands were black with powder was carried to a street corner or a courtyard, and summarily shot. Of course many wholly innocent persons perished, for the troops of the Commune had been of two kinds,--the National Guard and the Volunteers. Most of the latter were devils incarnate. Among them were the _Vengeurs de Flourens_, who were foremost in executions, and bands called by such names as _Les Enfants du Père Duchêne_ and _Les Enfants Perdus_. The National Guards were of three classes,--genuine Communists, workmen whose pay was their only resource for the support of their families, and pressed men, forced to fight, of whom there were a great many. I have before me three narratives written by gentlemen who either suffered or participated in the Great Revenge. One was a resident in Paris who had taken no part either for or against the Commune; one had served it on compulsion as a soldier; and one was an officer of the Versailles army, who on May 21 led his troops through a breach into the city, and fought on till May 27, when all was over. It seems to me that such accounts of personal experience in troubled times give a far more vivid picture of events than a mere formal narration. I therefore quote them in this chapter in preference to telling the story in my own words. The first is by Count Joseph Orsi,[1] whose visit to Raoul Rigault's office at the Prefecture of Police has already been told. He was left unmolested by the Commune, most probably because in early life he had been a member of those secret societies in Italy to which Louis Napoleon himself belonged. He says,-- [Footnote 1: Published in Fraser's Magazine, 1879.]