They were taken to the exercise-ground. Darboy stammered out, "I am not the enemy of the Commune. I have done all I could. I have written twice to Versailles." He recovered a little when he saw death was inevitable. Bonjean could not keep on his legs. "Who condemns us?" said he. "The justice of the people." "Oh, this is not the right one," replied the president. One of the priests threw himself against the sentry-box and uncovered his breast. They were led further on, and, turning a corner, met the firing-party. Some men apostrophised them; the delegate at once ordered silence. The hostages placed themselves against the wall, and the officer of the platoon said to them, "It is not we whom you must accuse of your death, but the Versaillese, who are shooting the prisoners." He then gave the signal and the guns were fired. The hostages fell back in one line, at an equal distance from each other. Darboy alone remained standing, wounded in the head, one hand raised. A second volley laid him by the side of the others.[189] The blind justice of revolutions punishes in the first-comers the accumulated crimes of their caste. At eight o'clock the Versaillese closed in upon the barricade of the Porte St. Martin. Their shells had long since set the theatre on fire, and the Federals, pressed by this conflagration, were obliged to fall back. That night the Versaillese bivouacked in front of the Strasbourg Railway, the Rue St. Denis, the Hotel-de-Ville (occupied towards nine o'clock by Vinoy's troops), the Ecole Polytechnique, the Madelonnettes, and the Monsouris Park. They presented a kind of fan, of which the fixed point was formed by the Pont-au-Change, the right side by the thirteenth arrondissement, the left by the streets of the Faubourg St. Martin and the Rue de Flandre, the arc by the fortifications. The fan was about to close at Belleville, which formed the centre. Paris continued to burn furiously. The Porte St. Martin, the St. Eustache Church, the Rue Royale, the Rue de Rivoli, the Tuileries, the Palais-Royal, the Hotel-de-Ville, the Theatre-Lyrique, the left bank from the Legion d'Honneur up to the Palais de Justice and the Prefecture de Police, stood out bright red in the darkness of night. The caprices of the fire displayed a blazing architecture of arches, cupolas, spectral edifices. Great volumes of smoke, clouds of sparks flying into the air, attested formidable explosions; every minute stars lit up and died out again in the horizon. These were the cannon of the fort of Bicetre, of the Pere Lachaise, and the Buttes Chaumont, which fired on the invaded quarters. The Versaillese batteries answered from the Pantheon, the Trocadero, and Montmartre. Now the reports followed each other at regular intervals; now there was a continuous thunder along the whole line. They aimed at random, blindly, madly. The shells often exploded in the midst of their career; the whole town was enveloped in a whirl of flame and smoke.