He then advanced under a hot fire, and
placed a ladder against the façade of a
pillar on the Grève side. The lad's
courage reanimated the citizens, and they
returned at once to the charge; but, at the
first volley of the Swiss, the poor boy
rolled off the ladder, dead, into the Seine.
Forgetting everything at that sight, the
people, screaming with rage, rushed
forward, drove back the troops, and turned
their own cannon upon them. Several
hundred horse and guards were slain. The
people had already lost twelve hundred,
killed or wounded.

In every street where soldiers were likely
to come, the old men and children
hammered the paving-stones into missiles, and
prepared bottles and flower-pots to throw
down upon the gendarmes. The gates and
doors were always thrown open, to shelter
the people when the cavalry charged. The
tradesmen's daughters cast and distributed
bullets, or attended the wounded. The
Bourse was turned into a prison for
captured soldiers, and many small parties
of Swiss disarmed by the crowds who
compelled them to throw them their muskets,
were then good-naturedly marched off to
the Bourse: a long loaf being thrust under
the arm of each prisoner. The
Polytechnique lads directed all the evolutions,
and drilled the people during the lulls
in the fighting. When the bridges were
raked by the cannon the people retreated to
the colonnades, and enfiladed the regiments
as they crowded over the captured bridges.
By this time the houses at the corner of
the Quai Pelletier and the Place de Grève
were riddled, chipped, and starred with
bullets, and the corners and fronts were
destroyed. At the end of the Rue St. Denis,
the people made a bonfire of the window-
shutters of the printer of a court paper.
Whenever a middle-aged bourgeois
appeared in the old blue uniform with the red
facings, the stained belt, and rusty firelock,
of the old National Guard, he was loudly
cheered.

When the fifth regiment stationed on the
boulevard was ordered to "make ready,"
they obeyed the order; but, on the cry
"present," they turned their muskets on
the colonel, coolly waiting for the word
"fire." The colonel instantly broke his
sword across his knee, tore off his epaulettes,
and retired. The delighted people threw
themselves into the arms of the soldiers,
and embraced them, shouting, "Vive la
Ligne!" When the cavalry of the Guard
charged for the first time, an officer at the
head of a squadron, with tears in his eyes,
cried to the people:

"In the name of Heaven, and for the
love of God, go back to your houses!"

The gardes du corps, when ordered to
fire at the mob, from the windows of their
hotel on the Quai d'Orsai, evidently aimed
above the heads of the people; for no one
was wounded. In the streets, the soldiers of
the line stood gloomy and complaining. The
officers looked pensive and uneasy, and at
every louder volley shrugged their shoulders
and cast up their eyes. The Swiss posted
themselves at the corners of the streets,
out of reach of the bullets; and, advancing
by turns, fired down the road at every
one they saw. The people fired from
every loop of vantage. Many of the cuirassiers
were dreadfully burnt by aquafortis
and vitriol, thrown on them by the women
from the upper windows. The lancers of the
Guard, who had been peculiarly ferocious,
were specially obnoxious to the people.

Several women fought in the mob and
displayed great courage. As for the boys,
they were to the front as usual. One boy,
quietly waited with folded arms for a
fierce officer of the lancers who rode at
him; and the moment the officer came
up, the boy shot him dead. Another lad,
at the approach of some gendarmes, dived
under the foremost horse, and, coming up
to the surface again, turned and shot the
rider. A third boy (a mere child) crept
under the horses of a troop of cavalry until
he found room to rise between two
dragoons; he then emerged with a pistol in each
hand, stretched out his arms, and brought
to the ground his right and left enemy. A
Blouse, in a snug corner at a barricade in
the Rue Richelieu, discharged his rifle
eighteen times at a close column of Swiss.
Eighteen times he killed his man, and
then retired, apparently for want of
cartridges. Among French insurgents, there
is, of course, always a large percentage of
retired soldiers.

M. Staffel, a bootmaker, in the Passage
du Teumon, with others, disarmed and
saved ten men of the Royal Guard, who
would have been massacred. M. Gorgot,
an old grenadier, an ancient director of
military, in the street St. Germaine l'Auxerrois,
seeing a young man of the faubourgs
awkward with his musket, begged the use
of it for a moment, and, keeping behind a
corner of the Café Secrétaire, fired on a
column of Swiss that were debouching upon
the Place de Châtelet. A Swiss fell. The
whole column fired in return at Gorgot,