Following the soldiers came four men, bearing a litter, on which a dead body lay stretched; and it was with this sad procession that I re-entered Paris. From time to time the men deposited their load on the ground, and went into a wine-shop to drink. I took advantage of one of these moments when the corpse lay abandoned, to lift the cloak that had been spread over it. It was the body of a young man, almost a lad; his wound was hidden, but the collar of his shirt was dyed crimson with blood. When the men returned for the third time, their gait was so unsteady that it was with difficulty they raised the poor boy’s bier, and then went off staggering. At the turning of a street the corpse fell, and I ran up as it was being picked from the ground; one of the drunken men was shedding tears, and maudling out, “My poor brother!” NOTES: [74] Mégy, the famous governor of the Fort of Issy, was implicated in the last, supposed, plot against the life of Napoleon III. Having shot one of the police agents charged with his arrest, he was tried and condemned to death. He was, however, delivered from prison on the fourth of September, and appointed to the command of a battalion of National Guards, with which he marched against the Hôtel de Ville on the thirty-first of October and the twentieth of January. He was named a member of the Commune on the eighteenth of March, and set fire to the Cour des Comptes and the Palace of the Légion d’Honneur on the twenty-third of May, 1871. LXXI.