'The insurrection was certainly at this time very far from being a communistic movement, as from a natural confusion of names it was thought to be by foreigners. There was a burning jealousy in Paris of the "Rurals," and a real fear, not ill-founded, that a Royalist conspiracy was on foot. The irritations of the siege, however, played the largest part. The National Guard, who had fought very well at Buzenval on January 19th, profoundly moved by the capitulation, had carried off their guns to their own part of Paris in February, and it may be said that the insurrection dated from that time, and was historically a protest against the peace, for M. Thiers temporized with the insurrection until the old seasoned soldiers were beginning to return to him from their captivity in Germany. The fighting began with the sudden attempt of the Government to remove by force the guns which had been taken to Montmartre, followed as it was by the murder of two Generals by the mob. [Footnote: General Lecomte and Clément Thomas, the Commandant of the National Guard, were shot on March 18th, 1871, under conditions of peculiar brutality.] A number of men threw themselves into the movement from love of fighting for fighting's sake, like the Garibaldian Poles. Some joined it from ambition, but the majority of the men who later on died on the walls or in the streets in the Federalist ranks died, as they believed, for the Republic, and had no idea of the plunder of the rich. Ricciotti Garibaldi was near Dijon "in observation," as he afterwards told me. He said that he wanted to march upon Versailles with his excellent little army, which would have followed him, and fought well, and would certainly have taken the new capital, although it would have been crushed later on. He telegraphed to Garibaldi, and "Papa" telegraphed to him not to move, Garibaldi being wiser, perhaps, in his son's case than he would have been had it been his own, for he was not remarkable for wisdom. It was a strange moment: the Prussians watching the fighting from those of the forts which were still in their hands, and a careless, idle Paris crowd of boys and women watching it from the walls.