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
human beings. We crunch broken glass beneath our feet at every step;
there is not a whole pane in all the windows. Here and there are houses
which the bullets seemed to have delighted to pound to atoms, and from
which dense clouds of red and white dust are wafted towards us. Well,
Parisians, what do you say to that? Do you not think that Citizen
Cluseret, although an American, is an excellent patriot, and “In
consideration of Neuilly being in ruins, and of this happy result being
chiefly due to the glorious resistance organized by the delegate
Citizen Cluseret, decrees: That the destroyer of Neuilly, Citizen
Cluseret, has merited the gratitude of France and the Republic.”
[Illustration: The Inhabitants of Neuilly Entering Paris During The
Armisctice of the 18th of April.]
The firing ceased from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon,
when Paris cabs, furniture-vans, ambulance-waggons, band-barrows, and
all sorts of vehicles were requisitioned to bring in the sad remains
and dilapidated household goods of the suburban bombardés. They entered
by the gate of Ternes—for that of Porte Maillot was in ruins and
impassable. Many went to the Palais de l’Industrie, in the Champs
Elysées, where a commission sat to allot vacant apartments in Paris. On
this occasion some robberies were committed, and refractories escaped:
it is even said that hard-hearted landlords wished to prevent their
lodgers from departing—an object in which the proprietors were not very
successful. The poor woman perched on the top of her relics, saved from
the cellar in which she had lived in terror for fourteen days, deplores
the loss of her husband and the shapeless mass of ruin and rubbish she
once called her happy home; whilst her boys bring in green stuff from
the surburban gardens, and a middle-aged neighbour stalks along with
his pet parrot, the bird all the while amusing himself with elaborate
imitations of the growl of the mitrailleuse and the hissing of shells
ending with terrific and oft-repeated explosions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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