A STRANGE PROCESSION IN PARIS.

Evening Post, Volume XLVII, Issue 88, 14 April 1894, Page 2 (Supplement)

A STRANGE PROCESSION IN PARIS.

On Sunday, the 28th day of May, the last defences of the Commune were stormed by the Yersaillaise, and the insurrection came to its end. That afternoon 6000 prisoners, in one column, .guarded by several regiments of cavalry, were brought along the Boulevards on their way to Versailles. . We stood, to see them pass, at the top of the Hue de la Paix, in an enormous crowd — all Paris had come out, exploding with satisfaction, to hoot the captives. I have looked on at many scenes of grievous misery and degradation, but never have I beheld any sight so strangely painful as that march past. The exceptional aspect of that mass of wretches arose from an altogether special cause. It was produced neither by the prostrate condition of many of the prisoners (several of whom could scarcely" drag tberaselvoa along), nor by the hiilcoua expression of most of their fact- s, nor by the merciless brutality with which

they were treated by both the soldiers and the mob : it sprang from a totally different characteristic of the sight — a characteristic that nobody had ever beheld before, nor perhaps ever imagined. Every one of them had. been forced to turn his coat inside out I It was the astonishing effect of that livery of shame, worn by 6000 men. at once, that rendered the scene somatchlessly abject We two almost shivered as we stared at that spectacle' of ignominy. We h.i I not conceived, it possible that vile dishonour could, express itself so poignantly. Even, the grotesqueness of the particoloured sleeve linings — many of thepairs being of different stuffs and colours, and nearly all of them in rags — was lamentable, not laughablei — Blackwood's Magazine.