He who has breathed in thy life that fiery fever of contemporaneous history, who has panted on thy boulevards and wept in thy faubourgs, who has sung to the morns of thy revolutions and a few weeks after bathed his hands in powder behind thy barricades, he who can hear from beneath thy stones the voices of the martyrs of sublime ideas and read in every one of thy streets a date of human progress, even he does less justice to thy original grandeur than the stranger, though a Philistine, who came to glance at thee during the days of the Commune. The attraction of rebellious Paris was so strong that men hurried thither from America to behold this spectacle unprecedented in the world's history--the greatest town of the European continent in the hands of the proletarians. Even the pusillanimous were drawn towards her. In the first days of May one of our friends arrived--one of the most timid men of the timid provinces. His kith and kin had escorted him on his departure, tears in their eyes, as though he were descending into the infernal regions. He said to us, "What is true in all the rumours bruited about?" "Well, come and search all the recesses of the den." We set out from the Bastille. Street-arabs cry Rochefort's _Mot d'Ordre_, the _Pere Duchene_, Jules Valles' _Cri du Peuple_, Felix Pyat's _Vengeur_, _La Commune_, _L'Affranchi_, _Le Pilori des Mouchards_. The _Officiel_ is little asked for; the journalists of the Council stifle it by their competition. The _Cri du Peuple_ has a circulation of 100,000. It is the earliest out; it rises with chanticleer. If we have an article by Valles this morning, we are in luck; but in his stead, Pierre Denis, with his autonomy _a outrance_, makes himself too often heard. Only buy the _Pere Duchene_ once, though its circulation is more than 60,000. Take Felix Pyat's article in the _Vengeur_ as a fine example of literary intoxication. The bourgeoisie has no better helpmates than these vain and ignorant claptrap-mongers. Here is the doctrinaire journal _La Commune_, in which Milliere sometimes writes, and in which Georges Duchene takes the young men and the old of the Hotel-de-Ville to task with a severity which would better fit another character than his. Do not forget the _Mot d'Ordre_, whatever the romanticists may say. It was one of the first to support the Revolution of the 18th March, and darted terrible arrows at the Versaillese.