There were some uniforms, but mostly they were made up of humble blouses and the civilian caps of what we should call street arabs—the _titis_ of old Paris. The owners, as the cabman said, were all rotting in the Fosse Commune; he himself was full of belated valour. “If there had only been ten men like me,” he protested, “ten determined stalwarts, a horror like the Commune would have been impossible.” I asked him what he did. “Mon Dieu! Monsieur! Que pouvais-je faire contre tous ces brigands? J’étais tout seul. Je me suis refugié dans la cave.” The next day a worthy shopkeeper held just the same language. Ten men such as himself could have held the Rue de la Paix and kept the Communards at bay. He tried to persuade his neighbours, but they would not join with him, so, regretfully, he, too, hid in the cellar. It was strange to listen to these bourgeois who had shown such courage and determination and endurance during the siege, when the Prussians were battering them out of existence. They could face the Prussians gallantly; before the Commune they quailed. The Rue de Rivoli was a piteous sight. The Ministère des Finances was burnt and gutted; the roof had fallen in, the windows were all gaping, and out of one of them there was a bit of charred blind fluttering dismally in the light summer air like the ghost of a flag. The Tuileries were nothing but a pile of charred stones, hardly the skeleton of a palace left; but the Louvre was luckily to all intents and purposes unharmed. It was enough to make a man weep to see the havoc, the ruins, and everywhere the signs of murder and violence. The Communards and pétroleuses had done their work thoroughly. We dropped the luggage at the hotel, dismissed the cabman, still fully convinced of the potentiality of his own valour, and started forth for a morning stroll on foot. When we came to the Place Vendôme, the great column, the bronze record of the past glories of the French army, was lying prone on a bed of straw, torn down by the sacrilege of Gustave Courbet, the Ministre des Beaux-Arts under the Commune. It had been badly smashed, and some small fragments had been carried away as souvenirs, but many of these were, I was told, recovered. As we drew near to look at the cruel misdeed, a _peloton_ of soldiers came along with a civilian in their midst, whom they were carrying off to a guard-room hard by. It was Courbet himself, whom I knew well by sight. I was not the only man to recognize him. An elderly gentleman with a little boy of about fourteen years was passing by. When he saw the prisoner he dashed forward, and before the guards could stop him, knocked off Courbet’s hat, shouting out: “Au moins, scélérat, tu te découvriras devant la colonne que tu as fait tomber.” Courbet, dazed by this fury of explosive patriotism, picked up his hat and said nothing, while the gentleman, well pleased with himself, walked on with his little son, and the guard grinned satisfaction, but took no further notice.