Note 25 — XX.

The result of the voting was made known at four o’clock on the 28th March. The papers devoted to the Commune asserted, on the following day, that two hundred and fifteen battalions were assembled on that day, and that the average strength of each corps was one thousand men. Who could have believed that the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville was capable of accommodating so many! This farcical assertion of the two hundred and fifteen battalions has passed into a proverb.