But very few read or obeyed. The shells from Montmartre, which from the day before crushed Belleville and Menilmontant, the cries, the sight of the wounded, dragging themselves from house to house in search of succour, the too evident signs of the approaching end, precipitated the ordinary phenomena of defeat. The people became fierce and suspicious. Any individual without a uniform ran the risk of being shot if he had not a well-known name to recommend him. The news that came from all points of Paris augmented the anguish and despair. It was known that the soldiers gave no quarter; that they despatched the wounded, killing even doctors;[199] that every individual taken in a National Guard's uniform, shod with regulation boots, or whose clothes showed traces of stripes recently unstitched, was shot in the street or in the yard of his house; that the combatants who surrendered, under the promise of having their lives spared, were massacred; that thousands of men, women, children, and aged people were taken to Versailles bareheaded, and often killed on the way; that it sufficed to be related to a combatant, or to offer him a refuge in order to share his fate; the numberless executions of so-called petroleuses were recounted. About six o'clock forty-eight gendarmes, ecclesiastics, and civilians marched up the Rue Haxo between a detachment of Federals. At first they were supposed to be prisoners recently taken, and defiled in the midst of perfect silence. But the rumour spread that they were the hostages of La Roquette, and that they were being led to death. The crowd grew larger, followed, apostrophised, but did not strike them. At half-past six the cortege reached the Cite Vincennes; the gates closed upon them, and the crowd dispersed in the neighbouring grounds. The escort tumultuously pushed the hostages against a kind of trench at the foot of a wall. The chassepots were being levelled, when a member of the Council said, "What are you doing? There is a powder-magazine here; you will blow us up." He thus hoped to delay the execution. Others, quite distracted, went from group to group, attempting to discuss, to appease the wrath. They were repulsed, menaced, and their notoriety hardly sufficed to save them from death. The chassepots went off on all sides; by degrees the hostages fell. Outside the crowd applauded. And yet for two days the soldiers taken prisoners passed through Belleville without exciting a murmur; but these gendarmes, these spies, these priests, who for fully twenty years had trampled upon Paris, represented the Empire, the bourgeoisie, the massacres under their most hateful forms.