[114] "The general commanding the department and the procureur-general, aware that I had for thirty years been the friend of the man who commanded the Commune at Narbonne, came to solicit my intervention to induce him to submit. It was arranged that if I did not succeed I should immediately send a telegram to General Robinet, in order that the military authorities might act in consequence. At midnight I sent the telegram.... You do not know me; it is thanks to my personal influence that order was maintained at Carcassonne."--_Speech of M. Marcou to the Assembly in answer to M. de Gavardie, Sitting of the 27th January 1874._ CHAPTER XIV. THE GREAT RESOURCES OF THE COMMUNE--THE GREAT WEAKNESS OF THE COUNCIL--NOMINATION OF CLUSERET--DECREE CONCERNING THE HOSTAGES--THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE--THE BANK. COMMITTEE--THE BANK. After an armistice of seventy days, Paris again took up the struggle for France single-handed. It was no longer the territory only which she strove for, but the very ground-work of the nation. Victorious, her victory would not be sterile as those of the battlefield; regenerated, the people would set to the great work of remaking the social edifice; vanquished, all liberty would be quenched, the bourgeoisie turn its whips into scorpions, and a generation glide into the grave. And Paris, so generous, so fraternal, did not shudder at the impending civil war. She stood up for an idea that exalted her battalions. While the bourgeois refuses to fight, saying, "I have a family," the workman says, "I fight for my children." For the third time since the 18th March Paris had but one soul. The official despatches, the hireling journalists established at Versailles, pictured her as the pandemonium of all the black-legs of Europe, recounted the thefts, the arrests _en masse_, the endless orgies, detailed sums and names. According to them, honest women no longer dared venture into the streets; 1,500,000 persons oppressed by 20,000 ruffians were offering up ardent prayers for Versailles. But the traveller running the risk of a visit to Paris, found the streets and boulevards tranquil, presenting their usual aspect. The pillagers had only pillaged the guillotine, solemnly burnt before the mairie of the eleventh arrondissement. From all quarters the same murmur of execration rose against the assassination of the prisoners and the ignoble scenes at Versailles. The incoherence of the first acts of the Council was hardly noticed while the ferocity of the Versaillese was the topic of the day. Persons coming full of indignation against Paris, seeing this calm, this union of hearts, these wounded men crying "Vive la Commune!" these enthusiastic battalions; there Mont-Valerien vomiting death, here men living as brothers, in a few hours caught the Parisian malady.