THE WOMEN OF THE COMMUNE.

Tuapeka Times, Volume III, Issue 188, 14 September 1871, Page 7

THE WOMEN OF THE COMMUNE.

" On my return homewards," says a correspondent who had gone out to look upon the devastation caused by the fires, " I met many parties of prisoners being conducted to pi-ison — a great many of them well-dressed men, with silver-headed walking sticks and patent leather boots. There was one group defiling down the Rue de la Paix that was of peculiar interest, calling down even a greater amount of curses and hisses than uasually accompanies their progress. It consisted of some 20 or 30 girls well dressed and pretty shopwomen of a sewing machine establishment, who were accused of having inveigled a company of soldiers within their doors, and, after dallying with them like Judiths, of having poisoned them all in wine. The young ladies tripped along surrounded by a cordon of guards, smiling on the crowd that was execrating them, and marching g lily f"o the Place Vendome, where they probably were shot. The women of Paris have appeared late upon the scene, but their appearance was inevitable. Many have been killed on barricades, some in openstreet combats, but their special work has been the organisation of the system of fires, which has, unfortunatly, answered but too well. Three hundred women, dressed in National Guard uniform, have been taken down the Scene in boats, and it is said that many of the sham sailors who defended the Ru e Roy ale so bravely were women in disguise. Near the Pare Monceau a melancholy episode occurred. A husband and wife were seized, and ordered to march forward towards the Place Vendome, a distance of a mile and a half. They were both of them invilids, and unable to walk so far. The woman sat down on- a kxrbstone and declined to more a step, in spite of her husband's entreaties that she would try. She per sisteel in her refusal, and they both knelt down together, begging the gendarmes who accompanied them to shoot them at once, if shot there were to be. Twenty revolvers were fired, but they still breathed and it was only at the second discharge that they sank down dead. Ths gendarmes then rode away, leaving the bodies as they had fallen. . . . T observed a slender figure walking alone in the costume pf tho

National Guard, with, long, fair hair, floating over the shoulders, a bright eye, and a handsome, bold joung face that seemed to know neither shame nor fear. When thefemele spectators detected at a glance that this seeming young National Guardsman was, indeed, a woman, their indignation found vent in strong language, for the torrent of excration seems to flow more freely from feminine lips when the object is a woman than if it be one of the opposite sex ; but the only response of the victim was to glare right and left with heightened colour and flashing eyes, in marked contrast to the cowardly crew that followed her. If the French nation was composed only of French women what a terrible nation it would be?"

A correspondent who took a walk down Rue Eivoli, on May 26, towards the Hotel de Ville, to judge of the amount of damage, suddenly became ' aware of the approach of a great crowd of people, yelling and shaking their fists. The cortege was headed by a company of mounted gendarmes, behind whom came two artillerymen dragging between them a soiled bundle of rags that tottered and stuggled, and fell down under the blows that were showered upon it by all who were within reach. It was a woman, who had been caught in the act of spreading petroleum. Her face was bleeding and her hair streaming denvn hpv back, from which her clothing had been torn. On they dragged her, followed by a hooting mob, till they reached the corner of the Louvre, and there they propped her up against a wall. The crowd ranged itself in a circle, of which the grasping, shrinking figure was the centre. The infuriated mob, who could scarce be kept from tearing her in pieces, waved their arms, crying, " Al'eau, a l'eau ! " On one side of this exciting picture was a barricade, still strewn with broken guns and hats — a dead National Guard lying in the fosse — behind a group of mounted gendarmes, and then a perspective of ruined streets and blackened houses, culminating in the extreme distance in the still burning Hotel de Ville. Presently two revolvers were discharged, aud the bundle of rags fell dead in a pool of blood.