Note 65 — Chapter 4 (continued 2)

Pardigan was seized during the June days and flung into one of the cellars of the Tuileries; there were as many as five thousand men in them. Among them there were the wounded, the cholera-stricken and the dying. When the Government sent Cormenin to investigate their condition, he and the doctors sprang back at the stifling pestilential stench. The prisoners had been forbidden to approach the tiny windows of the soupirail. Pardigan, almost swooning for want of air, stretched up his head to breathe at one of them; a sentinel of the National Guard noticed this and told him to move away or he would shoot him. Pardigan did not do so at once, and the worthy bourgeois let fly a shot at him; the bullet tore his lower jaw and part of his cheek away, and he fell. In the evening, some of the prisoners were taken to the forts; among them they lifted up the wounded man, bound his hands and led him away.

On their way the famous panic in the Place du Carrousel occurred, in which the National Guards fired at one another in terror; the wounded Pardigan dropped, exhausted; he was flung on the floor in the police guard-house and remained with his hands bound, lying on his back, swallowing the blood from his wound. So he was found by a Polytechnic student, who swore at the cannibals and made them carry the sick man to the hospital. I have described this incident in my Letters from France and Italy ... but there is no harm in repeating it, that men may not forget what the cultured Parisian bourgeoisie was like.—(Author’s Note.)