His pale face appeals to God for mercy.
Vengeance is yet to come. The clergy are now hunted in the streets!
Plunder and rapine reign! Orgies and wild wassail hold a mocking
sway in the courts of death. Unsexed women, liberated thieves, and
bloodthirsty tramps prey on the unwary, the wounded, or the feeble.
On April 3Oth, the great fort of Issy falls into the hands of the
government. Blazing shells rain, in the murky night air, down on
Paris. Continuous fighting from April 2d until May 21st makes the
regions of Auteuil, Neuilly, and Point du Jour a wasted ruin.
Frenzied fiends drag down the Colonne Vendome where the great Corsican
in bronze gazed on a scene of wanton madness never equalled. Not
even when drunken Nero mocked at the devastation of the imperial
city by the Tiber, were these horrors rivalled.
Down the beautiful green slopes into the Bois de Boulogne, the
snaky lines of sap and trench bring the octopus daily nearer to
the doomed modern Babylon. Flash of rifle gun and crack of musketry
re-echo in the great park. It is now shorn of its lovely trees,
where man and maid so lately held the trysts of love. A bloody dew
rains on devoted Paris.
A fateful Sunday is that twenty-first of May when the red-mouthed
cannon roar from dawn till dark.
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