A few steps from Montmartre the catastrophe was not known. At the Place Blanche the women's barricade held out for several hours against Clinchant's soldiers; they then retreated towards the Pigalle barricade, which fell at about two o'clock. Its chief was led before a Versaillese chief of battalion. "Who are you?" asked the officer. "Leveque, mason, member of the Central Committee." The Versaillese discharged his revolver in his face; the soldiers finished him. On the other bank of the Seine our resistance was more successful. The Versaillese had been able since morning to occupy the Babylone Barracks and L'Abbaye-au-Bois, but Varlin stopped them at the cross-roads of the Croix-Rouge. This cross-road will remain celebrated in the defence of Paris. All the streets that open into it had been powerfully barricaded, and this stronghold was only abandoned when fire and shells had reduced it to a heap of ruins. On the banks of the river, the Rues de l'Universite, St. Dominique, St. Germain, and De Grenelle, the 67th, 135th, 138th, and 147th battalions, supported by the _enfants perdus_ and _les tirailleurs_, resisted obstinately. In the Rue de Rennes and on the contiguous boulevards the Versaillese exhausted their strength. In the Rue Vavin, where Lisbonne conducted the defence, the resistance was prodigious; for two days this advanced sentinel kept back the invasion from the Luxembourg. We were less secure on our extreme left. The Versaillese had early in the day invested the Mont-Parnasse Cemetery, which we held with a handful of men. Near the restaurant Richefeu, the Federals, allowing the enemy to approach, unmasked their mitrailleuses; but in vain, for the Versaillese were numerous enough to surround the few defenders of the cemetery on all sides, and soon stormed it. From there, passing by the ramparts of the fourteenth arrondissement, they arrived at the Place St. Pierre. The fortifications of the Avenue d'Italie and of the Route de Chatillon, long since carefully prepared, but always against the ramparts, were taken in the rear by the Chaussee du Maine, and the whole defence of the cross-roads of the Quatre-Chemins was concentrated round the church. From the top of the steeple about a dozen Federals of Montrouge supported the barricade that barred two-thirds of the Chaussee du Maine, held by thirty men for several hours. At last, their cartridges exhausted, the tricolor flag was hoisted at the mairie, at the same hour that it floated above the Buttes Montmartre. Henceforth the route to the Place d'Enfer was open, and the Versaillese arrived there after having undergone the fire from the Observatoire, where some Federals had made a stand.