PARIS ON FIRE.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VI, Issue 185, 7 August 1871, Page 2

PARIS ON FIRE.

[EXTRACTS FROM THE " TIMES* " SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.] (Continued.) I turn from the spectacle sad and sick, to be sickened yet further by another spectacle. The Yersaillists troops collected about the foot of the Rue St. Honore, were enjoying the fine game of Communist hunting. The Parisians of civil life are caitiffs to the Inst drop of their thin, sour, white blood. But yesterday they had cried Vive la Commune ! and submitted to be governed by this said Commune. To-day they rubbed their hands with livid currish joy to have it in their power to denounce a Communist and reveal his hiding-place. Very eager at this work are tbe dear creatures of women. They know the rat-holes into which the poor devils have got, and they guide to them with a fiendish glee which is a phase of the many-sided sex. Voila ! the braves of France returned to a triumph after a

shameful captivity! "They have found " him, the misernlile ! Yes, they drag him out from one- <A thepurliens whichHaussmann had r of ti-trs to sareep away, and a guar! of six of them hem him round as they march him into the Rue St. Honore. A tall, pale, hatless man, with something not ignoble iv his carriage. His lower lip is trembling, but his brow is firm, and the eye of him has some pride and defiance in it. They yell — the crowd — For remainder of news see fourth page.

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" Shoot him, shoot him ! " — the demon women must clamor of course. An arm goes: into the air; there are on it the Stripes of a non-commissioned officer, and tliere is a stick in the fist. The stick falls on the head of the pale man in black. Ha ! the infection has caught; men club their rifles and bring them down on that head, or club them into splinters in their lust for murder. He is down; he is up again; he is down again; the thud of the gun stocks on him sounding just as lhe sound when a man beats a cushion with a stick. A certain British impulse, stronger than consideration for self, prompts me to run forward. But it is useless. They are firing into the flaccid carcase now, tbrongiug about it like blowflies on a piece of meat. His brains spurt on my boots, and plush into the gutter, whither the carrion is bodily chucked, presently to be trodden on and rolled ou by the feet of multitudes ond wheels of gun-carriages. Womankind, then, is not quite dead in that band of Bedlamites who had clamored, " Shoot him." Here is one in hysterics ; another, with wan, scarred face, draws out of the press an embryo Bedlamite, her offspring, and, let us hope, goes home. But surely all manhood is dead in the soldiery of France to do a de6d like this. An officer — one with a bull throat and the eyes of 'Algiers — stood by and looked on at the sport, sucking a cigar meanwhile. Particeps crimifiis surely was he, if there is such a word as disciple in the French ranks ; if there is not, and I question whether there be, he might have been pitied if he had not smiled his smug-faced approval. The merry game goes on. Denouncing becomes fashionable, and denouncing is followed in the French natural sequence by braining. Faugh ! let us get away from the truculent cowards and the bloody gutters, and the yelling women and the Algerian-eyed officers. Here is the Place Vendome, held, as I learn on credible authority, by twenty-five Communists and a woman against all that Versailles found it in his heart to do for hours. In the shatterred Central Palace Versaillist sentries are stalking about the ruins of the columu. They have accumulated, too, some forces in the rat-trap. There is one corpse in the gutter, buffeted and besmirched — the corpse, as I learn, of the Communist Captain of a barricade, who held it for half-an-hour single-handed against the braves of France, and then shot himself. The braves have, seemingly, made sure of him by shooting him and the clay, which was once a man, over aud over again. And in the Place is another corpse, that of the Hecate, who fought on the Rue de la Paix barricade with such persistence and fury. They might have shot her ; yes, when a womau takes to war, she forgets her immunities ; but they might at least have pulled her scanty rags over the bare limbs that outrage decency, if the word be not an exotic in Paris. And now, here is the Rue Royale, burning right royally. Alas ! for the lovers of a draught of pure English beer, the English beer house is a chaotic ruin, diversified with jets of fire. . The same applies to the whole side of the Rue between the Place de la Madeleine and the Rue dv Faubourg St. Honore. Tbe other side of the way is nearly as bad, and the fire has been down the Rue St. Honore, up the Faubourg, and working its swift, hot will iv the Rue Boissy. In all the Rue Faubourg St. Honore the gutters are full of blood. There is a barricade at every street corner. There will be an Montholon. And for these the way of retreat is open backwards into Belleville. Canny folks these Versaillists! The Prussians would, no doubt, let them into Belleville from the rear, as they let them into La Chapelle, but Belleville, front or rear, is not pleasant unto the discreet cut of! from the Garde dv Nord and La Chapelle, the Reds still cling to a barricade in the Rue Lafayette, near the square item in the estimates next year for the smash in the British Embassy, which is very severe. The ball-room is not now quite in a state to take the chalk. The garden walls are pierced, for via them the Versaillists worked their strategic progress round tbe barricades, respecting ■- much the wholeness of their skins. And now about the chained wild-cats in the Hotel de Ville ? Their backs are to the wall and they are fighting now, not for life, but that they may do as. much evil as they can before their hour comes — as come it will before the hand of my watch makes many more revolutions. The Versaillists do not dare to .rush at the barricadea around the Hotel de Ville; they are at once afraid of their skins and explosions. But they are mining, circumventing, burrowing, and they will be inside the cordon soon. Meanwhile the holders of the Hotel de Ville are pouring out death and destruction oyer Paris in miscellaneous wildness. "Now" it isa shell in the Champs Elysees j now oo<? in, the already shattered Haussman j now 7'one%braeWnere%bo,uV the Avenue. 77iUine5Hbrtehsel ' ( Afid although they are 7-' ■ ;7 ,

hearts of the Versaillists. So there maybe, fighting nhout there for days yet, till the last Red is exterminated. It .is between the devil and deep sea with tbe people in the Hotel de Ville. One enemy with weapons iQ his hand is outsile ; another (ire, and the fire kindled by themselves is inside. Will they roast or seek death on the bayonet point ? ******** There is a yellow, ghastly look in the atmosphere so charged with the smoke of burning houses and public buildings that the suns hines feebly through it. The Tuilleries is a mere shell. The smoke from the Ministry of Finance and the magnificent public buildiDgs ac the corner of the Rue Royal and Rue de Rivoli is still rising from their ruins, and to the celebrated bonnet-maker's, Madame Drouart, No. 3, Rue de Rivoli, well known to many of your lady readers ; a number of women employed there took refuge in the cellars, and are now stifled beneath a pile of rubbish 20ft or 30 feet high. The Rue Royal, which I could only see a portiou of, is like a Ninevitish mould of rubbish and the fire is still extending. Turning back by the Boulevard Haussmann, I reached the Grand Opera, a mass of barricades, and too full of soldiers to be a pleasant resort, especially as petroleum shells were falling on the Boulevard des Italiens. All those palaces which made Paris the wonder aud admiration of modern times are heaps of smouldering ruins — "her finest boulevards shattered, her gardens laid waste, her gutters running with blood, and an awful pall settling down heavily over her dying agonies as she completes in compliance with " the inexorable logic of the facts " which has formed her only religion, her own suicide.