The national guards of Bercy that I had seen the night before were models of civilization and distinction compared with these. Some were rather boys than men. They appeared to be only sixteen or seventeen years of age. As proud as they were surprised to carry a gun, they only sought for an opportunity or a pretext to use it. Those who have witnessed the revolutions of Paris know that armed children are capable of atrocious misdeeds. Sprung from the lowest grades of society, destitute of all moral sense, they care but little what cause they have to defend or what enemy to attack: their highest ambition is to display their audacity and to fire off their guns. As I am only relating the things I witnessed myself, I shall not speak of the fiendish part taken, according to some spectators, by a boy in the fusillade which had just shot down too great a number of pacific and honorable citizens. Many of the insurgents were in a state of overexcitement, proceeding less from their political and social opinions than from a too copious absorption of wine and other liquors: this is on days of revolutionary storms another category of insurgents capable of everything because they have lost all moral sense. There was but little care and uniformity about their accoutrements. Some had on only a part of the uniform of the national guards: others wore a képi and a blouse. A great number of the képis were not numbered. Here and there were to be seen some red sashes. In this nameless multitude might also be remarked men of fifty or sixty years, whose ferocious and degraded faces excited the worst suspicions respecting their moral instincts and their previous relations with the legal authorities. I at once saw that many of them were foreigners, particularly Italians and Poles. What a contrast between such insurgents, hardly to be found in June, 1848, in the lowest parts of Paris, and the imposing architectural splendor of one of the finest squares in the world! I could not express the effect of this mingling of poetic beauty and foul deformity upon me. Another contrast no less sad rent my heart. The side of the Place Vendôme toward the Rue de la Paix was sprinkled with blood; now and then the wounded and dead were carried by; and over these spots of human blood, by the side of these unfortunate victims of civil war, a great number of insurgents, perhaps the very ones who without any motive or provocation had shot them down, were laughing, eating, drinking, and amusing themselves, as if they were celebrating the happiest event of their lives.