In a little the Nationals were thirsty.  Ho, a wine-shop!  There was one with the shutters up, probably a beast of a German—­or a Jew.  It is the same thing.  So with the still bloody butts of their chassepots they made an entrance.  They found nothing, however, but a few empty bottles and stove-in barrels.  This so annoyed them that they wrought wholesale destruction, breaking with their guns and with their feet everything that was breakable.

So in time we came to the Prison of Mazas, which in ordinary times would have been strongly guarded; but now, save for a few National Guards loafing about, it was deserted—­the criminals all being liberated and set plundering and fighting—­the hostages all fusiladed.

When we arrived at the gate, there came out a finely dressed, personable man in a frock-coat, with a red ribbon in his button-hole.  The officer in charge of the motley crew reported that he held a prisoner, the citizen commonly called Pere Felix.

“Pere Felix?” said the man in the frock-coat, “and who might he be?”

“A member of the Revolutionary Government of Forty-eight,” said the old man with dignity, speaking from the midst of his captors; “a revolutionary and Republican before you were born, M. Raoul Regnault!”

“Ah, good father, but this is not Forty-eight!  It is Seventy-one!” said the man on the steps, with a supercilious air.  “I tell you as a matter of information!”

“You had better shoot him and have the matter over!” he added, turning away with his cane swinging in his hand.

Then, with a swirl of his sword, the officer marshalled us all into the courtyard—­for I had followed to see the end.  I could not help myself.

It was a great, bare, barren quadrangle of brick, the yard of Mazas where the prisoners exercise.  The walls rose sheer for twenty feet.  The doorway stood open into it, and every moment or two another company of Communists would arrive with a gang of prisoners.  These were rudely pushed to the upper end, where, unbound, free to move in every direction, they were fired at promiscuously by all the ragged battalions—­men, women, and even children shooting guns and pistols at them, as at the puppet-shows of Asnieres and Neuilly.

The prisoners were some of them running to and fro, pitifully trying between the grim brick walls to find a way of escape.  Some set their bare feet in the niches of the brick and strove to climb over.  Some lay prone on their faces, either shot dead or waiting for the guards to come round (as they did every five or ten minutes) to finish the wounded by blowing in the back of their heads with a charge held so close that it singed the scalp.

As I stood and looked at this horrible shooting match, a human shambles, suddenly I was seized and pushed along, with the young girl beside me, towards the wall.  Horror took possession of me.  “I am Chief Servitor at the Hotel de Ville,” I cried.  “Let me go!  It will be the worse for you!”