"Sergeants were heard to say: '_Pitch into the Bedouins; hit them hard!_' 'In the uncle's time,' says a witness, 'the soldiers used to call the civilians _pekins_. At present, we are Bedouins; the soldiers massacred the people to the cry of "_Give it to the Bedouins_."' "At the Frascati Club, where many of the regular frequenters of the place were assembled, among them an old general, they heard the thunder of musketry and artillery, and could not believe that the troops were firing ball. They laughed, and said to one another: 'It's blank cartridges. What a _mise-en-scene_! What an actor this Bonaparte is!' They thought they were at the Circus. Suddenly the soldiers entered, mad with rage, and were about to shoot every one. They had no idea of the danger they were running. They continued to laugh. One of the eye-witnesses said to us: '_We thought that this was part of the buffoonery._' However, seeing that the soldiers continued to threaten them, they at last understood.--'_Kill them all!_' cried the soldiers. A lieutenant, who recognized the old general, prevented them from carrying out their threat. In spite of this, a sergeant said: 'Hold your d----d tongue, lieutenant; this isn't your affair, it's ours.' "The troops killed for the mere sake of killing. A witness says: 'In the courtyards of the houses, they shot even the horses and dogs.' "In the house next Frascati's, at the corner of Rue Richelieu, the soldiers were coolly going to shoot even the women and children, who were already drawn up in a mass before a platoon for that purpose when a colonel arrived. He stopped the massacre, boxed up these poor trembling creatures in the Passages des Panoramas, where he locked them in, and saved them. A celebrated writer, Monsieur Lireux, after having escaped the first balls, was led about, during an hour, from one guard-house to another, preparatory to being shot. It required a miracle to save him. The celebrated artist, Sax, who happened to be in the musical establishment of M. Brandus, was about to be shot, when a general recognized him. Everywhere else the people were killed indiscriminately. "The first person killed in this butchery--history has in like manner preserved the name of the first person killed at the massacre of Saint Bartholomew--was one Theodore Debaecque, who lived in the house at the corner of Rue du Sentier, where the carnage began. VII "When the slaughter came to an end,--that is to say when it was black night, and it had begun in broad day,--the dead bodies were not removed; they were so numerous that thirty-three of them were counted before a single shop, that of M. Barbedienne. Every square of ground left open in the asphalt at the foot of the trees on the boulevards was a reservoir of blood. 'The dead bodies,' says a witness, 'were piled up in heaps, one upon another, old men, children, blouses and paletots, assembled pell-mell, in an indescribable mass of heads, arms, and legs.'