PARIS IN MAY LAST.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VI, Issue 190, 12 August 1871, Page 4

PARIS IN MAY LAST.

A correspondent writing on May 26, says : — "Death stalks everywhere, and it is impossible almost to take a step without coming upon traces of popular revenge. It appears that it was discussed by the members of the Commune whether it were preferable to burn or blow up Paris. Mercifully, the former plan was chosen, but mines have been discovered leading from the Hotel de Ville to the Louvre, which seem to point to the idea of finally concluding their reign with an explosion as soon as their great stronghold should become untenable. Plans, too, have been discovered among their papers for laying wires in the great sewers which should, by a complicated arrangement of galvanic batteries, communicate with dep6ts of picrate of potass, and blow up the whole of the great city at the same instant. People have loug said that there was a presentiment of danger in the air, but it remained for the members of the Commune to show us how vast and diabolical a scheme of destruction they were capable of inventing, but fortunately not of putting into execution. Another correspondent writing on May 28, says : — I have just seen 2000 prisoners led off by the cavalry of General de Gallifet. Most of them were soldiers — or at least wore the red trowsers of the army. They linked their arms four and four, and walked through the streets bareheaded and dejected. Some of the prisoners were women ; but 1500 were of the army, and the crowds who stood in the streets had the most perfect confidence that they would be shot. Yet they cheered, clapped their hands, and hooted, as if they were in a theatre seeing a farce. The work of denunciation is going on here with terrible ferocity. M. Nadar, the photographer and aeronaut, has been arrested for his supposed sympathies with the Commune ; and an old man of far more humble position, but also well known to the frequenters of the boulevards — the tobacconist under Nadar's atudio — has also been carried away lor the same reason. Anybody may denounce you, and you are lucky if you are not Bhot forthwith. Women have as bad a chance as the men, for they are very ferocious, and are known to be guilty of the most horrid treachery. They fire out of windows with sly revolvers, and are great in the use of petroleum and vitriol. The most intimate friends and the oldest acquaintances betray each other in the most cowardly fashion. An old grudge will spring up that has slept for years, and you are denounced without cause as a bad fellow and a possible friend of the Commune. A linendraper of the Rue d'Amsterdam was denounced to some soldiers as having supported the Commune. The soldiers instantly entered his house, and bid the poor linendraper follow them. He asked to be allowed to finish his toilet and to fetch his papers. He received the reply that the completion of his toilet was quite unnecessary, that he would not be detained long, and that all the papers in the world were useless. He was taken to the first convenient spot, and shot. Almost all the members of the Commune are aaid to have been shot.

Three thousand prisoners were taken to Versailles on May 29."