The hour-glass had been turned and the sands of the Commune had run out. The prison of La Roquette, the scene of so many horrors, was now in the hands of the Versaillais, and the cells of the hostages were more fitly tenanted by the murderers who but a few days before, when to be respectable was a deadly crime, had ruled Paris with a rod of terror. Passing by the prison, after leaving the Archbishop’s palace, we saw that the great gates were open, and a crowd was gathered outside eagerly watching and craning necks to see what was going on within. I asked what the people were waiting for? A batch of prisoners was to be led out to the fortifications to be shot. Next to me was standing a rather pretty young girl of about fifteen or sixteen years, nicely but very simply dressed, evidently the daughter of well-to-do bourgeois parents. In charge of her was a bonne, an elderly woman wearing a linen cap, and the typical tartan fichu pinned across her breast. Presently the excitement began. First came three omnibuses, their usual function, as their placards showed, being to take pleasure-seekers to the Jardin des Plantes; they were driven by soldiers, other soldiers or gendarmes sitting on the top and acting as conductors. Inside an evil-looking crew of scowling ruffians, some of them wounded, all dirty, unshaven and truculent-looking—villains who knew that for them even hope was dead. The omnibuses were followed by litters, in which other soldiers were carrying men who had been seriously wounded, some of them terribly mangled. In one of the litters lay a dark, fierce-looking man, with a shock mass of black hair. His head and face, pale and haggard, with a beard of three or four days’ growth, were tied up with blood-stained linen bandages. His eyes were closed, and he seemed hardly conscious, too feeble to move, too tired to care. He was respectably, even well dressed in a frock coat. Evidently a man in a superior position to that of those who had gone before. As he came, and owing to some obstruction, his bearers paused for a minute, the girl near me gave a piercing shriek, and crying out: “Papa! Ah, Papa, c’est Papa!” fell sobbing into the arms of her nurse. She had come on the chance of one last look, and had, as the bystanders said, been waiting for hours.