FRANCE.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VIII, 12 May 1852, Page 4

FRANCE.

A correspondent of the ' Times, Captain Jesse, ja British officer, in describing the late scenes in Paris, gives the following, appalling 'account of ! the events of Thursday :—: — '"Opposite my apartment 'is the Restaurant Bonneloy, and 'leaving this : about balf-past ten, a 'countryman on a horse was pointed out to me as having just ha a* his waggon taken from him, to' form a barricade near the Porte St. Denis. The 'circulation of'carriages in that direction very soon ceased, and at eleven the shopkeepers commenced putting up their shutters. Between this hoar and one o'clock I was. at > the Minister of the Interior's, R^& de "Grenelle, and both going there and returning everything seemed quiet"; there was no-apparento -apparent movement amongst the troops within the iron railings of the Tuileries, or on the Carousel ; the shops, however, w.ere closed in the Rue Richelieu. At two o'clock, when approaching <tbe extremity of the Rue Vivienne, I observed the troops passing along'tbe Boulevards, which, they cleared, driving the peopie into the side-s.tr leqts;,.;rhp 1 eqts;,.;rhp : -jj > aQ down it crying

out " Sauveavouii" I sought refuge with my w.ife in & shop, and, subsequently reached my own house. At three o'clock, returning from the Dace de la Bourse, it was with great difficulty I got buck again. The guns had been distinctly heard for some time in the direction of the Faubourg St. Denis, and the .passage of troops that w,ay continued (or a quarter of an hour after I came back. Having written a note, I went to the balcony at which my wife was standing, and remained there watching, the r trpops. The whole Boulevard as far as the eye could reach (1,000 yards) was crowded with them, principally infantry, in sub-divisions at quarter distance, with Ihere and there a batch ot twelve-pounders and howitzers, some of 'which occupied the rising iground on the Boulevard Poissonniere. The windows were crowded with people, principally women,- tradesmen, servants,, and children, or, like ourselves, the occupants of apartments. The mounted officers were smoking their cigars — a custom introduced into the array, as I have understood, by the Princes <of the Orleans family — not a very soldier-like one, but, at such a moment, particularly reassuring, as it forbad the idea that their services were likely to be called icto immediate requisition. Of the Boulevard dcs Italians I. could see but little, on account of an angle, but in the direction of the Porte St. Denis I could see distinctly as far as the end of the Boulevard Nouvelle. , Suddenly, and while I was latently looking with my glass at the troops in the distance eastward, a few musket shots were ifired at the 'head of the column, which consisted lof about 3,000 men. In a few, moments it spread, and after hanging a little, came down the Bculeva;d in a waving sheet of flame." So regular, however, was the fire, that I thought it was a feu-de-joie lor some barricade taken in advance, or to signal tbeir position to some other division, land i?was not until it came within fifty yards of me that I recognized the sharp ringing report of ball cartridge ; but even then I could scarcely believe the evidence of ray ears, for as to my eyes, I could not discover any enemy to fire at, and 1 continued looking at the men until the company below me were actually raising their firelocks, and one vagabond^ sharper than the rest — a mere Had, without either whisker or moustache — had covered me. In an instant I dashed my wife, who had just stepped back, against the pier between the windows, when a shot struck the ceiling almost immediately over our heads, and covered us with dust and broken plaster. In a second after I placed her upon the floor, and in another a volley came against the whoje. front of the house, the] balcony, and windows ; one shot broke the imirror over the chimney-piece, another the shade of the clock ; every pane of glass but one was smashed ; the curtains and window frames cut ; the room, in shoit, was riddled.' The iron balcony, though rather low, was a great protection ; still five balls entered the room, and in the pause for reloading, I drew my wife to the door, and took refuge in the back part of the house. The rattle of musketry was incessant for more than a Quarter of an hour after this, and in a very few minutes the guns were unlimbered, and poiDtpd at the magasin of Mr. Salandrouze, five houses to the right. What the object or meaning of all this might be was a perfect enigma to' every individual jn_ = Uie.. house, French or foreigner ; some , tnou|»lit tlie troops" had turned round and joined the Reds, others suggested that they must have been fired upon somewhere, though they certainly i bail' .not from our house, or from any other on the Boulevard Montmartre, or we must have seen it "from the balcony. Besides which, in the temper in which the soldiers proved to be, had that been ■ the case, they would never have waited for any signal from ;he head of the column 800 yards off. This wanton fusillade must have been the result of a panic, lest the windows should have been lined with concealed enemies, and they wanted to secure their skins by the first fire, or it was a sanguinary impulse — either motive •beingequally discreditable to them, as soldiers in the one case, or citizens in the other. As a military man, it is with the deepest regret that I feel compelled to enteitain the latter opinion. The men, as I have already stated, fired volley ,upon volley for more than a quarter of an hour, without any return ; they shot down many of the unhappy individuals who remained on the Boulevard and could not obtain an entrance into any house — some persons were killed close to our door, and their blood lay in 4he hollows round the trees the next morning when we passed at '.twelve o'clock. The soldiers entered houses 'whence no shots ever came, and though La Patrie, the newspaper of the Ely*6e, pretended to specify them by name, it was,, , in a subsequent 'number, obliged to deny its own scandalous imputations. • * • * The loss of innocent life must -have ,been great, very great, more than ever will be known, for the press is more free now in Russia than in France. The Boulerards and the adjacent streets were in some points a perfect shamble, but I do not mean to state what I have heard and ascertained of that loss, for'lido not wish to make the picture darker than it needle."

The following melancholy- incidents are related by the ! correspon<ient.of the Chronicle :■*—' "On the fatal Thursday, a party of six, four 1 of whom w,ere English, breakfasted together at. the house : of one of the latter. The English, party consisted of the -roaster of the establishment and his wife, -of his brother, .and of her, brother, the French gentlemen being also allied to them by the marriage o c f relative^ After breakfast,, the gentlemen separated ontbeirbusiness, 'fijeing understood that the host's brother and bnSUier-in-law would : returu to dinner. 'The honr" arrived, and passed. Seven ■o'clock came— 3 eight— nine— ten— nothing was heard of the two, relatives^ The events of the time made every; one frightfully anxious, but nothing could be 1 'done, -At eleven o'clock the lady w.as J called to' 'the door, to receive a wild, savage-looking mes-, senger, w ( bo placed in her hand a, piece of 'torn I paper soiled and stained with blood, and on which some pencilled words were just decipherable. They were from her broihpr, who told her :that he had been badly wounded, and was lying in a place to which his messenger would conduct i her. She instantly set off with "her husband, and! in a filthy portion of the city found her unfortunate brother, lying in a dismal stable upon some. we,t straw, His Thigh had been "broken by a shot, and he was - severely wouirded in the foot! iandelsewhere. This was not the worst. The 1 husband's brother had been torn down l»y a cannou shot, -and his . body was at that moment.

among a heap of corpses in another part of the stable. The terrified lady had to assist her busband in turning over twenty-five or thirty bodies of slaughtered men before they could discover bis ill-fated brother. Both the French gentlemen of the party were killed on that same dreadful Thursday, — of the manner of their deaihs I have not been informed, but both were buried yesterday. Such was the sequel to the bi eat fast party. The names are of course known to me, but there, is no reason for mentioning them here. " Almost as sad an event, and one which in itself is enough, for the theme of a melancholy tale, occurred in the case of a young Russian nobleman who had arrived in Paris with his newly married wife, two or three days only before the coup d'&at. He went oat from his hotel in the mot n ing of one of the days of the massacre, and never returned. His bride, halffrantic, watched for him through hour after hour of agony. But he never came. On the fourth day the poor young creature was summoned to Montmartre to claim the corpse of her bridegroom from among a ghastly row of victims to ' the noble army which saved the Slate.' "