This morning, the 23rd, after a combat of three hours, the barricade of
the Place de Clichy has not yet yielded. Yet two battalions of National
Guards had, at the beginning of the fight, reversed their arms, and
were fraternising with the soldiers on the Place de la Maine, a hundred
and fifty yards from the scene of the fray. The cracking of the rifles,
the explosion of shells, and the sound of mitrailleuses filled the air.
The smell of powder was stifling. Dreadful cries arose from the poor
wounded wretches; and the whizzing projectiles from Montmartre rent the
air above in their fiery course. “Beneath us,” said an inhabitant of
Batignolles who gave me these particulars, “beneath us the city lay
like a seething caldron.”
The beating of drums and the sharp trumpet-calls mixed in this
monstrous din, and were every now and then lost in the tremendous noise
of the firing.
About half-past one the sounds grew quieter; the barricade was taken.
The insurgents were retreating to La Chapelle and Belleville in
disorder; the soldiers of the line rushed like a torrent into the
Avenue de Clichy, leaving a tricolour flag hoisted upon the dismantled
barricade.
Here and there, in the streets, the struggle had not ceased. In the Rue
Blanche a rifle-shot proceeded from a ground-floor; the man was taken
and executed outside his own door. The artillery was moving up the Rue
Chaptal towards Montmartre and La Chapelle. The day was very hot; pails
of water were thrown over the guns to quench their burning thirst. All
the young men who were found in the streets were provisionally put
under arrest, for they feared everyone, even children, and horrible
vengeance and thirst for blood had seized upon all. Suddenly an
isolated shot would be heard, followed a minute or two after by five or
six others. One knew reprisal had been done.
At about four o’clock in the afternoon, when the quarters of Belleville
and Clichy were pretty well cleared of troops, two insurgents were
walking, one behind the other, in the Rue Léonie. The one who walked
last lifted his rifle and fired carelessly in the direction of the
windows; the report sounded very loudly in the silent street, and a
pane of glass fell in fragments to the ground. The insurgent who was in
front did not even turn his head; these men seem to have become quite
reckless and deaf to everything.
What the troops feared the most were the sharp-shooters hidden in the
houses, aiming through little holes and cracks; suddenly a snap would
be heard, and the officers would lift their glassed to their eyes; more
often nothing was to be seen at all, but if the slightest shadow were
visible behind a window curtain, the order was, “Search that house!”
The executions did not take place in the apartments. Now and then an
inhabitant or two were brought down into the street, and those never
returned!