Did they sleep, I wonder, on the night before the 20th of May, when that dark thunder of vengeance was gathering to break? Many slept well the next night, and still sleep; for "then began a murder grim and great,"--a murder whose painted image, even after these forty years have risen and sunk upon it, sends the blood shuddering backward, and sets the teeth in uttermost horror and hate. MacMahon placarded the streets with peace and sent his troops to make it; in the name of that Peace, Gallifet, an incarnation of hell, set his men the example and rode up and down the streets of Paris, dashing out children's brains. Did a hand appear at a shutter, the window was riddled with bullets. Did a cry of protest escape from any throat, the house was invaded, its inhabitants driven out, lined against the walls, and shot where they stood. The doctors and the nurses at the bedsides of the wounded, the very sick in the hospitals, themselves were slaughtered where they lay. Such was MacMahon's peace. After the street massacres, the organized massacres at the bastions, the stakes of Satory, the huddled masses of prisoners, the grim visitor with the lantern, the ghastly call to rise and follow, the trenches dug by the condemned in the slippery, blood-soaked ground for their own corpses to fall in. Thirty thousand people butchered! Butchered by the sateless vengeance of authority and the insane blood-lust of the professional soldier! Butchered without a pretence of reason, a shadow of inquiry, merely as the gust of insensate rage blew! After the orgy of fury, the orgy of the inquisition. The gathering of the prisoners in cellar holes, where they must squat or lie upon damp earth, and see the light daily only for some short half hour when an unexpellable sun ray shot through some unstopped crevice. The shifting of them day and night across the country, sometimes in stock yard wagons, stifled, starved, and jammed together, as even our butchering civilization is ashamed to jam pigs for the slaughter; sometimes by dreadful marches, mostly by night, often with the rain beating on them, the butts of the soldiers' muskets striking them, as they lagged through weakness or through lameness. Then the detention prisons, with their long-drawn agonies of hunger, cold, vermin, and disease, and the ever-looming darkness of waiting death. Follow the tortures of friends and relatives of Communards or suspected Communards, to make them betray the whereabouts of their friends. Could they who had seen these things "forgive and forget"? They who had seen ten year old children lashed to make them tell where their fathers were? Women driven mad before the terrible choice of giving up their sons who had fought, or their daughters who had not, to the brutality of the soldiery.