Paris under the Commune: The Seventy-Three Days of the Second Siege; with Numerous Illustrations, Sketches Taken on the Spot, and Portraits (from the Original Photographs)Leighton, John
History
Paris under the Commune: The Seventy-Three Days of the Second Siege; with Numerous Illustrations, Sketches Taken on the Spot, and Portraits (from the Original Photographs)
Leighton, John
Paris (France) -- History -- Commune, 1871
Another, and a sadder scene happened in the Avenue des Ternes. A
funeral procession was passing along. The coffin, borne by two men, was
very small, the coffin of a young child. The father, a workman in a
blouse, walked behind with a little knot of other mourners. A sad
sight, but the catastrophe was horrible. Suddenly a shell from Mont
Valérien fell on the tiny coffin, and, bursting, scattered the remains
of the dead child upon the living father. The corpse was entirely
destroyed, with the trappings that had surrounded it. Massacring the
dead! Truly those cannons are a wonderful, a refined invention!
LXII.
At last the unhappy inhabitants of Neuilly are able to leave their
cellars. For three weeks, they have been hourly expecting the roofs of
their houses to fall in and crush them; and with much difficulty have
managed during the quieter moments of the day to procure enough to keep
them from dying of starvation. For three weeks they have endured all
the terrors, all the dangers of battle and bombardment. Many are
dead—they all thought themselves sure to die. Horrible details are
told. A little past Gilet’s restaurant, where the omnibus office used
to be, lived an old couple, man and wife. At the beginning of the civil
war, two shells burst, one after another, in their poor lodging,
destroying every article of furniture. Utterly destitute, they took
refuge in the cellar, where after a few hours of horrible suspense, the
old man died. He was seventy, and the fright killed him; his wife was
younger and stronger, and survived. In the rare intervals between the
firing she went out and spoke to her neighbours through the cellar
gratings—“My husband is dead. He must be buried; what am I to
do?”—Carrying him to the cemetery was of course out of the question; no
one could have been found to render this mournful duty. Besides, the
bearers would probably have met a shell or a bullet on the way, and
then others must have been found to carry them. One day, the old woman
ventured as far as the Porte Maillot, and cried out as loud as she
could, “My husband is dead in a cellar; come and fetch him, and let us
both through the gates!”—The sentinel facetiously (let us hope it was
nothing worse) took aim at her with his rifle, and she fled back to her
cellar. At night, she slept by the side of the corpse, and when the
light of morning filtered into her dreary place of refuge, and lighted
up the body lying there, she sobbed with grief and terror. Her husband
had been dead four days, when putrefaction set in, and she, able to
bear it no longer, rushed out screaming to her neighbours: “You must
bury him, or I will go into the middle of the avenue and await death
there!”—They took pity on her, and came down into her cellar, dug a
hole there and put the corpse in it. During three weeks she continued
there, resting herself on the newly-turned earth. To-day, when they
went to fetch her she fainted with horror; the grave had been dug too
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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