Of all the crimes and cruelties which disgraced the Commune, none excited greater horror than the murder of Monseigneur Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, and the priests who with him and many others were seized as hostages. The flames of the Tuileries and other monuments, the hell-fire orgies of the mob and the pétroleuses drunken with the lust of blood and incendiarism—when the very firemen pumped petrol instead of water on to the burning buildings—were almost forgotten in the execration of that sacrilege. Upwards of sixty hostages, all innocent peaceable men, against no one of whom could any misdeed be alleged, were put to death. They were imprisoned in La Roquette, and on the 24th of May the Archbishop and the Abbé de Guerry, the Curé of the Madeleine, with Monsieur Bonjean, the president of the Cour de Cassation, and three Jesuit priests (Fathers Ducondray, Allard and Clair), after a sham trial, were led into the courtyard of the prison and shot. The Archbishop, who was the second of the victims to suffer, met his death like the hero and Christian martyr that he was. He stepped to the front, and praying to God for the forgiveness of his murderers, gave them his pastoral blessing. Two of the firing party, less hardened than the others, knelt down and asked his pardon. When the butchery was over the ruffians stripped the Archbishop’s honoured body, and that no degradation might be wanting, carted it off to be thrown like the carrion of a malefactor into the Fosse Commune. Even decent burial was to be denied to him. After the last desperate fight at the cemetery of Père la Chaise, in which men and women fought like tigers and tigresses, neither giving nor asking for quarter, all mad to kill, and kill, and kill, the body was recovered and carried to the archiepiscopal palace, where it lay in state, with those of the other priests. All Paris flocked to do homage to one of God’s saints, and take a last look at the beloved old man. Those who could afford it were in deep mourning, but all were weeping from the richest down to the poorest and humblest, as I saw them march past the body. The Archbishop, lying mitred and robed, looked like a waxen image. There was no sign of pain in his face, no trace of the cruel sorrow and long suspense by which his last days must have been racked; on it was written only that divine peace which passeth all understanding.