curiosity, and aware that the entrance of the enemy had occasioned no disorder, decided to come out in the streets." The next day the Germans wished to visit the Louvre and the Invalides, but the sight of Prussian uniforms under the colonnade of the Louvre produced such an effect on the populace, it is said, that the French general Vinoy informed the German general von Kammecke that if his soldiers entered the Invalides he would not be responsible for the public peace,--and the Prussian officer abandoned the attempt. If the Prussians had remained in Paris, the public peace would have been much better preserved. On the heels of their withdrawal came the Commune, and within three weeks the condition of the city had become such that the following is the official report of a quiet night, made to the Comité Central by "a Sieur Garnier d'Aubin, 'général de brigade, commandant de place du 18e arrondissement'": "REPORT OF THE 20TH AND 21ST OF MARCH. "Nothing new. "I have received the reports of the different chiefs of the posts. The night has been calm and without incident. "At five minutes past ten, two sergents de ville, disguised as bourgeois, were brought in by the francs-tireurs and immediately shot. "At twenty minutes past midnight, a police officer, accused of having fired his revolver, was shot. "At seven o'clock, a gendarme, brought in by the guard of the 28th, was shot." "'The night was calm and without incidents,'" comments M. Gourdon de Genouillac, from whom we borrow many of these details, "and only four men were shot!" The quality of the officers of this inchoate government may be judged from another contemporary document, inserted in _L'Officiel_ of the 18th of May: "Those officers of the general staff of the National Guard who have neglected their duties to banquet with _filles de mauvaise vie_, at the restaurant Peters, were arrested yesterday by order of the Committee of Public Safety. They have been sent to the Bicêtre, with spades and picks, to work in the trenches. The women have been sent to Saint-Lazare to make sacks for containing earth." One of the strongest characteristics of the Commune was its hatred and persecution of the clergy, manifested in a hundred acts, and culminating in the murder of the archbishop and the hostages. On the morning after the arrest of all the clergy of Montmartre, the following notice was posted on the doors of the church of Saint-Pierre: "_Whereas_, the priests are bandits, and the haunts in which they have morally assassinated the masses, by bowing France under the claws of the infamous Bonaparte, Favre, and Trochu, are the churches, "The civil delegate of the Carrières of the ex-prefecture of police orders that the church of Saint-Pierre (Montmartre) shall be closed and decrees the arrest of the priests and the Ignorantins."