Most of those who founded the Comite du Salut Public have been taken.
The Insurgents are being shot by hundreds. In the Faubourg St. Antoine
great numbers of men and women were found carrying petroleum, and at
once shot.
The _Moniteur_ says that Felix Pyat and Paschal Grousset left Paris
yesterday in a balloon, which passed over Niort towards the sea.
MAY 29th.
By Saturday evening the various Corps of the Versailles troops, steadily
converging on the Insurgents from the North, South, and West, had forced
them into their last strongholds of Pere-Lachaise, and at the Buttes
Chaumont, in Belleville; and M. THIERS on Saturday announced that the
final attack would be made on Sunday morning. But the troops waited no
longer to finish their terrible work. On Saturday Pere-Lachaise was
taken by General VINOY; in the evening the Buttes Chaumont were carried
by General LADMIRAULT. The two corps united, and the remaining
Insurgents were forced into narrow space at the edge of the _enceinte_,
where they are hemmed in between the Versailles troops and the
Prussians, and must surrender or be killed. They have also been driven
out of all the Forts except Vincennes, and those who hold that Fort have
asked the Bavarian troops outside to permit their escape. At five
o'clock yesterday all fighting had ceased.
"The Revolution is crushed;" but at what a cost, and amid what horrors!
"Peace," says M. THIERS, "is about to be restored, but it will not
succeed in relieving all honest and patriotic hearts of the profound
sorrow with which they are afflicted." We know not, indeed, how or when
such relief is to come; for ruin has been wrought and crimes have been
perpetrated which will leave on Paris and on Frenchmen an ineffaceable
brand. After the first appalling news of the great conflagrations, a
faint hope had arisen that the ultimate result might prove less
disastrous than had been apprehended, and it is true that a few of the
noble buildings which were thought doomed have escaped. But the almost
universal wreck would of itself almost obliterate for the moment the
sense of relief, and the material ruin now constitutes the least horror
in the scene. It is sufficiently distressing to picture every Quarter of
the great Capital, which but the other day was the beauty of the world,
scarred by conflagrations, torn by shells, pitted with musketry, and
stained with blood. It is terrible to think that in a city "like Paris"
fire and sword, and instruments of destruction still more hellish, have
swept from West to East, and from South to North; that most of its noble
palaces are but gaunt and blackened walls, and its finest streets laid
in heaps of as utter ruin as the mounds of Nineveh. The mind is
overwhelmed by the mere physical spectacle of this whirlwind of blazing
destruction suddenly bursting over a noble city so near us, which we
knew so well, and the inhabitants of which were but yesterday our
neighbours and our friends. But even this is overpowered by the awful
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