In the kiosques are the caricatures. Thiers, Picard, and Jules Favre
figure as the Three Graces, clasping each other's paunches. This fine
fish, the _maquereau_, with the blue-green scales, who is making up a
bed with an imperial crown, is the Marquis de Gallifet. _L'Avenir_, the
mouthpiece of the _Ligue_. _Le Siecle_, become very hostile since the
arrest of Gustave Chaudey; and _La Verite_, the Yankee Portalis's paper,
are piled up, melancholy and intact. Many reactionist papers have been
suppressed by the prefecture, but for all that are not dead; for a lad,
without any mystery about him, offers them to us.
Read, search, find one appeal to murder, to pillage, a single cruel line
in all these Communard journals excited by the battle, and then compare
them with the Versaillese papers, demanding fusillades _en masse_ as
soon as the troops shall have vanquished Paris.
Let us follow those catafalques that are being taken up the Rue de la
Roquette, and enter with them into the Pere Lachaise cemetery. All those
who die for Paris are entombed with obsequies in the great
resting-place. The Commune has claimed the honour of paying for their
funerals; its red flag blazes from the four corners of the hearse,
followed by some comrades of the battalion, while a few passers-by
always join the procession. This is a wife accompanying her dead
husband. A member of the Council follows the coffin; at the grave he
speaks not of regrets, but of hope, of vengeance. The widow presses her
children in her arms, and says to them, "Remember and cry with me, 'Vive
la Republique! Vive la Commune!'"[176]
On retracing our steps, we pass by the mairie of the eleventh
arrondissement. It is hung with black, the mourning of the last
Imperialist plebiscite, of which the people of Paris was innocent and
became the victim. We cross the Place de la Bastille, gay, animated by
the ginger-bread fair. Paris will yield nothing to the cannon; she has
even prolonged the annual fair for a week. The swings move to and fro,
the wheels-of-fortune turn, booth-keepers cry their sixpenny wares, the
mountebanks allure spectators, and promise half their receipts to the
wounded.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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