“Worms, don’t try to understand what I am saying to your wife! You are utterly incapable of conceiving the Beautiful in any form whatever. Harmonious lines and noble thoughts will always be written in an unknown tongue as far as you are concerned.” M. Worms-Clavelin shrugged his shoulders: “Shut up, you old communard!” said he. Georges Frémont actually was an old communard. A Parisian, the son of a furniture maker in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and a pupil at the Beaux-Arts, he was twenty at the time of the German invasion, and had enlisted in a regiment of _francs-tireurs_ who never saw service. For this slight Frémont had never forgiven Trochu. At the time of the capitulation he was one of the most excited, and shouted with the rest that Paris had been betrayed. But he was no fool, and really meant that Paris had been badly defended, which was true enough, of course. He was for war to the knife. When the Commune was proclaimed, he declared for it. On the proposition of one of his father’s old workmen, a certain citizen Charlier, delegate for the Beaux-Arts, he was appointed assistant sub-director of the Museum of the Louvre. It was an honorary appointment and he performed his duties booted, with cartridges in his belt, and on his head a Tyrolese hat adorned with cock feathers. At the beginning of the siege the canvases had been rolled up, put into packing-cases and carried away to warehouses from which he never succeeded in unearthing them. The only duty that remained to him was to smoke his pipe in galleries that had been transformed into guard-rooms and to gossip with the National Guard, to whom he denounced Badinguet for having destroyed the Rubens pictures by a cleaning process which had removed the glaze. He based his grounds for this accusation on the authority of a newspaper article, backed up by M. Vitet’s opinion. The federalists sat on the benches and listened to him, with their guns between their legs, whilst they drank their pints of wine in the palace precincts, for it was warm weather. When, however, the people of Versailles forced their way into Paris by the broken-down Porte du Point-du-Jour and the cannonade approached the Tuileries, Georges Frémont was much distressed to see the National Guard of the federalists rolling casks of petroleum into the Apollo gallery. It was with great difficulty that he at length succeeded in dissuading them from saturating the wainscoting to make it blaze. Then, giving them money for drink, he got rid of them. After they had gone, he managed, with the assistance of the Bonapartist guards, to roll these dangerous casks to the foot of the staircase and to push them as far as the bank of the Seine. When the colonel of the federalists was informed of this, he suspected Frémont of betraying the popular cause and ordered him to be shot. But as soon as the Versailles mob was approaching and the smoke of the blazing Tuileries rising into the