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Updated: August 21, 2024
This, with the rarity of the event, and that terrible allurement of blood which distinguishes all populaces, brought out all the excitable folk of the town; and at dusk, on the night before the expiation, the whole neighborhood of La Roquette was crowded with men and women.
I saw the blank windows of the Tuileries red with the light of flames fed from five hundred years of history, and the flagged courtyard of La Roquette running deep in the blood of Frenchmen spilt by France, while the common enemy smoked and laughed, leaning on the ramparts of St. Denis. Fort Garry, 10th October, 1870. W. F. Butler, Esq., 69th Regiment.
To reach the spot to which everybody goes, one must follow the road that everybody follows: Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Rue de la Roquette, to that mammoth toll-gate open so wide into the infinite. And dame! it is pleasant to see that noblemen like Mora, dukes and ministers, all take the same road to the same destination. That equality in death consoles one for many unjust things in life.
My father came to Paris to set himself up in business as a marble worker for tombstones and so forth, just at the top of the Rue de la Roquette. It was there I grew up. I began as a workman, and all my childhood was spent among the masses, in the streets, without ever a thought coming to me of setting foot in a church. So few Parisians think of doing so nowadays.
"You know it is, and you would also say: 'Baron de Heidelmann-Bruck, I shall not only take this fortune from you and make you very poor instead of very rich, but I shall denounce you as a murderer and shall do my best to have you marched out from a cell in the Roquette prison some fine morning, about dawn, between a jailer and a priest, with your legs roped together and your shirt cut away at the back of the neck and then to have you bound against an upright plank and tipped forward gently under a forty-pound knife' you see I know the details and then, phsst! the knife falls and behold the head of De Heidelmann-Bruck in one basket and his body in another!
On the one hand, the only lofty houses were far away, at the point where the Rue St. Maur intersects the Rue de la Roquette; while, on the other, they stood at the corners of the Rue Merlin and the Rue de la Folie Regnault, so that it was almost impossible to distinguish anything of the execution even from the best placed windows.
At la Roquette two hundred and twenty-seven miserable wretches, gathered in here and there by the drag-net of the police, were collected in a huddle, and the soldiers fired volley after volley into the mass of human beings until there was no further sign of life.
By this time the insurgents held little more of Paris than the heights of Belleville, Père la Chaise, and the neighborhood of La Roquette, which is not far from the Place de la Bastille. The Communal Government had quitted the Hôtel-de-Ville and taken refuge not far from La Roquette, in the Mairie of the Eleventh Arrondissement.
The besieged put mattresses before their windows for protection. The man who led the mob was one Pasquier, a murderer who had been in a condemned cell in La Roquette till let out by the general jail-delivery of the Commune. Two barricades were built like that on the floor below.
After these executions a large number of so-called "hostages," ecclesiastics, soldiers of the line, sergents de ville, and police agents remained shut up in La Roquette. It was Saturday, May 27, the day before Whit Sunday. Says the Abbé Lamazou, "It was a few minutes past three, and I was kneeling in my cell saying my prayers for the day, when I heard bolts rattling in the corridor.
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