The fighting, all over Paris, abounded in scenes which were either fantastic, heroic, or lamentable. The Marquis d'Antichamp had taken up his post, seated on a chair under the colonnade of the Louvre, opposite Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois. Bent under the burden of his years, and hardly able to sustain his tottering frame, he encouraged the Swiss to the fight by his presence, and sat with folded arms gazing on the terrible spectacle before him with stoical insensibility. A band of insurgents attacked the powder magazine at Ivry on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital, broke the gate in with hatchets and pole-axes, rushed into the courtyard, and obliged the people of the place to throw them packages of powder out of the windows. The insurgents, with all the hot-headed recklessness of the moment, continued with their pipes in their mouths to catch the packages as they fell, and carried them off in their arms. The debtors confined in Sainte-Pélagie, using a beam for a battering-ram, burst the gates, and then went and joined the guards on duty outside to prevent the escape of the criminal prisoners. A sanguinary encounter took place in the Rue de Prouvaires, and exhibited the spectacle, common enough in civil wars, of brothers fighting in opposite ranks. Throughout the whole city a sort of moral intoxication beyond all description had seized upon the inhabitants. Amidst the noise of musketry, the rolling of the drums, the cries and groans of the combatants, a thousand strange reports prevailed and added to the universal bewilderment. A hat and feathers were carried about in some parts of the town, said to be those of the Duke of Ragusa, whose death was reported. The audacity of some of the combatants was incredible. A workman, seeing a company of the 5th regiment of the line advancing upon the Place de la Bourse, ran straight up to the captain and struck him a blow on the head with an iron bar. He reeled, and his face was bathed in blood; but he had still strength enough left to throw up his soldiers' bayonets with his sword as they were about to fire on the aggressor. The leaders of the people added the most perfect self-denial to their intrepidity; and they ranged themselves by preference under the orders of those combatants whose dress proclaimed that they belonged to the more favoured classes of society. Furthermore, the young men found at every step guides for their inexperience in the persons of old soldiers who had survived the battles of the Empire--a warlike generation whom the Bourbons had for ever incensed in 1815. [Illustration] [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE.] CHAPTER XVII. THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE. Its History--The Roman Comique--Under Louis XV.--During the Revolution--Hernani.