At the Hotel-de-Ville the members of the Committee of Public Safety had at last assembled. Billioray alone had vanished not to appear again. They knew nothing of the number and position of the troops, but knew that under the cover of night the enemy had entered Passy. Staff officers sent to the Muette to reconnoitre came back with the most reassuring news. Thereupon, at eleven o'clock, a member of the Council, Assi, entered the Rue Beethoven, where the lights had been put out. Soon his horse refused to advance; it had slipped down in large pools of blood, and National Guards seemed to lie asleep along the walls. Suddenly men sprang forward. They were the Versaillese waiting in ambush; these sleepers were murdered Federals. The Versaillese were slaughtering within the walls of Paris, and Paris knew it not. The night was clear, starlit, mild, fragrant; the theatres were crowded, the boulevards sparkling with life and gaiety, the bright cafes swarming with visitors, and the cannon were everywhere hushed--a silence unknown for three weeks. If "the finest army that France ever had" were to push straight on by the quays and boulevards, entirely free of barricades, with one bound, without firing a shot, it would crush the Commune of Paris. The volunteers held out on the railway line till midnight; then, exhausted, left without any reinforcements, they fell back upon La Muette. General Clinchant followed them, occupied the Auteuil gate, passed by that of Passy, and marched on the headquarters of Dombrowski. Fifty volunteers for some time still kept up a skirmish in the chateau, but outflanked on the east, about to be closed in from the Trocadero, at half-past one in the morning they beat a retreat on the Champs-Elysees. On the left bank General Cissey had the whole evening massed his forces at about 200 yards from the enceinte. At midnight his sappers crossed the moat, scaled the ramparts, without even falling in with a sentinel, and opened the gates of Sevres and Versailles. At three o'clock in the morning the Versaillese inundated Paris through the five gaping wounds of the gates of Passy, Auteuil, St. Cloud, Sevres, and Versailles. The greater part of the fifteenth arrondissement was occupied, the Muette taken; taken all Passy and the heights of the Trocadero, taken too the powder-magazine of the Rue Beethoven, immense catacombs running underneath the sixteenth arrondissement, crammed with 3,000 barrels of powder, millions of cartridges, thousands of shells. At five o'clock the first Versaillese shell fell upon the Legion d'Honneur. As on the morning of the 2nd December, Paris was asleep. FOOTNOTES: [178] The original of this document has been lost, but we have been able to re-establish the text with the evidence of Dombrowski's brother and of a great number of members of the Council present at this sitting. CHAPTER XXVII.