The Rue de Venise, one of the most ancient Paris streets, is not far away. It is now a low, bad-smelling lane inhabited by vagabonds of both sexes. Women, whose age it is impossible to tell, trail and traipse in front of alleys within which loom greasy, black staircases. Mended linen hangs from the windows; acrid smoke issues from between thick bars protecting old mansions now degenerated into mere dens, defended, however, by heavy doors studded with rusty nails. It is hideous, yet quaint, as indeed all this quarter, which is made up besides of the Rue Pierre-au-Lard, the Rue Brise-Miche, and the Rue Taille-Pain; not forgetting Saint-Merri's cloister, the name being that of the old church whose tocsin so often sounded the alarm during the riots in the reign of Louis-Philippe. At the least popular excitement, this inextricable labyrinth of small streets used to bristle with barricades. At the crossing of the Rue Saint-Martin and the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher was raised the terrible barricade defended by Jeanne and his intrepid companions. Following on the burial of General Lamarque, who died while pressing to his lips the sword offered to him by the Bonapartist officers of the Hundred Days, an immense revolutionary movement had galvanized Paris. The old soldiers of the Empire, the survivors of the Terror and those of 1830, allied in their common hatred of Louis-Philippe's government, had joined the malcontents of all parties and the members of the then numerous secret societies. In the evening of the 5th of June 1832, the centre of Paris was covered with barricades; and both troops and National Guard had been obliged to reconquer, one by one, the positions that had been lost. Slaughter had been going on the whole night. When the dawn of the 6th of June tinged the house-roofs with pink, the large Saint-Merri barricade was seen to be holding out; its defenders, a handful of heroic men, had sworn to bury themselves under its ruins. Already they had repulsed ten furious assaults; now they were awaiting death; and the loud tones of the Saint-Merri tocsin, unceasingly sounding above their heads, seemed to be tolling their funeral knell! Part of the Paris army had to be utilised to vanquish these dauntless insurgents. Firing went on from windows, cellars, the pavement. Round the barricades, dead bodies of National Guards and soldiers, riddled with balls, crushed beneath blocks of stone hurled from roof-tops, testified to the frightful savagery of this intestine struggle. For long afterwards, the ground was red with blood! What numbers of balls and bullets, what quantities of grapeshot all these old house-fronts have received in the haphazard of riots, frequent during the reign of Louis-Philippe. The drums no sooner beat than the citizens armed and hurried to defend order ... or to attack it; anxious women, cowering behind closed shutters, watched for the biers.