As soon as the Government had moved to Versailles, the diplomatic corps followed. Mr. Washburne hired a large room in the Rue de Mademoiselle (the sister of Louis XIV.—all Versailles bears the impress of the reign of that monarch). This room had to do for office, bedroom, and sitting-room; for Versailles was crowded, and we were lucky to get any thing so comfortable. As we had far more to do at Paris than at Versailles, and Paris was then, as always, the seat of attraction, Mr. Washburne spent four days of the week in that city, and three at Versailles, and I alternated with him. We had passes from both sides. I made the trip twice a week, and sometimes under considerable difficulties. I have traveled more than thirty miles to reach Paris from Versailles, a distance of nine miles, partly in a diligence, partly on foot, partly in flat-boats to cross the Seine where the French had most unnecessarily blown up their own beautiful bridges, and partly by rail. I suppose that I am better acquainted with the westerly environs of Paris than any foreigner but a medical student. Some of the drives in the months of April and May, especially one by Sceaux and Fontaine-les-Roses, and up the valley of the BiÈvre, are very lovely.

But after a while we had a regular organized line by St. Denis. The Germans occupied this town, and insisted upon keeping open the railroad into Paris, the Chemin de Fer du Nord. They said that under the treaty they had a right to draw certain supplies from France, and that Paris was the most convenient place to draw them from, and from Paris they meant to draw them; and that if the Communists did not keep the Porte St. Denis open, they would. The Commune always had a wholesome fear of the Germans; this was all that restrained them from even greater outrages than they perpetrated; and they hated the Germans less than they did their own countrymen at Versailles. In going to Versailles we took the train to St. Denis; there we hired a carriage, or took the public conveyance, and so drove to our destination, a trip of about three hours in all: or we drove out by the Porte St. Denis, and so all the way to Versailles. This was generally my route, for a number of American and French friends asked me to bring their horses and carriages from the ill-fated city. If the Communist officers at the gates were close observers, they must have thought that I was the owner of one of the largest and best-appointed stables in Paris.

There was very little to do at Versailles, and perhaps less to eat. The Government was there, and the Assembly, and the Corps Diplomatique, and consequently the crowd of people who had business with these bodies, thronged to that city. At the restaurants it was a struggle to get any thing; and when you got it, it was not precisely in the CafÉ Anglais style. I found two or three pleasant American families who had wintered here very quietly during the German occupation. They had had no occasion to complain of their treatment. At the HÔtel de France I found Dr. Hosmer, the intelligent and cultivated principal correspondent of the Herald. That enterprising journal had its staff of couriers, who were always at our service during those days of irregular postal communication. At the HÔtel des RÉservoirs several German princes, officers of the army, were lodged—intelligent, agreeable, cultivated gentlemen. They were only too glad to have the pleasure of the society of American ladies, for of course they could not visit the French; and no class of men long for and appreciate ladies' society like educated officers on campaign in an enemy's country. They eagerly accepted invitations to dine with my friends for a double reason, the pleasure of their society, and that of a good dinner; for the French cook never could manage, though of course he did his best, to cook a good dinner for the Germans, and the landlord was always just out of that favorite brand of Champagne.

The day after my first arrival at Versailles I made an excursion to the battle-field at Clamart, near Meudon. The Communists had been defeated there the day before. I had "assisted" at the battle from the Paris side. In attempting to reach Versailles in that direction, I found myself in the midst of the insurgents, and under the fire of the troops. The manner in which the insurgents behaved had not given me a very exalted idea of their soldierly qualities. It was all confusion, talking, drinking, and panic. A mob of them surged up to the gate, and demanded admission. It was refused, and they were ordered back to their regiments. But the crowd increased, and became more clamorous. The principles of fraternity forbade the guard to keep their brethren out in the cold, where the naughty Versaillais might pounce upon them; so the draw-bridge fell, the gates opened, and the runaways entered.

When I visited the battle-field, many of the dead still lay unburied, while the soldiers lounged about with their hands in those everlasting pockets, and looking with the most perfect indifference upon their dead countrymen. The class hatred which exists in France is something we have no idea of, and I trust that we never shall. It is bitter, relentless, and cruel; and is, no doubt, a sad legacy of the bloody Revolution of 1789, and of the centuries of oppression which preceded it. At the beginning of the war the peasants in one of the villages not far from Paris thrust a young nobleman into a ditch, and there burned him to death with the stubble from the fields. They had nothing particular against him, except that he was a nobleman. In Paris the mob threw the gendarmes, when they caught them, into the Seine, and when they attempted to struggle out upon the banks hacked off their hands. On the battle-field I have referred to, the frÈres chrÉtiens, a most devoted and excellent body of men, were moving about on their errands of mercy. Seeing these unburied bodies, they went to the commanding officer, and begged him to detail a party to bury them. He did it to oblige them. As the soldiers lifted one of the dead, a young American who accompanied me said, "Why, he hasn't a bad face after all!" At once the soldiers looked at him with suspicion, the officer asked him who he was, and, upon being told, advised him not to express any such sentiments again.

Our principal occupation at Versailles was keeping a post-office for Americans in Paris. M. Rampont, the directeur des postes, had escaped, with all his staff, and established the office at Versailles. The archives of the bureau of the Avenue JosÉphine were placed in our Legation. The Communists were angry enough to find themselves cut off from all postal communication with the departments. It diminished their chances of success. The only means Americans had of communicating with their friends in Paris was to send their letters to the care of the Legation at Versailles. We have received as many as fifty in one day. Two or three times a week we took or sent them to Paris. They were there mailed by the Legation, and distributed by the rebel post-office. It cost Uncle Samuel a penny or two, but he and his representatives at Washington did not grumble.

The only episode of interest that occurred at Versailles was our attempt to save the life of the Archbishop of Paris. He had been arrested by the Commune, and held as a hostage for the release of some of their own rag, tag, and bobtail. One day the Pope's Nuncio called to see Mr. Washburne. He was in Paris. The Nonce thereupon explained his business to me, and afterward sent two canons of the Metropolitan Church to see me. They came to beg Mr. Washburne to do all in his power to save the life of the Archbishop, which they considered to be in imminent danger. They had already tried one or more European embassies, but were met with the answer that they could have nothing to do with the Commune. They handed me their papers, and I went at once to Paris. Mr. Washburne took up the matter with his accustomed energy and kindliness. He got permission to see the prisoner. He took him books and newspapers and old wine. He did all in his power to negotiate an exchange with Blanqui, a veteran agitator held by the Government. The Commune consented, but the Versailles authorities would not. M. Thiers consulted his ministers and his council of deputies. They were unanimously of opinion that they could hold no dealings with the Commune. It was then proposed to let Blanqui escape, and that thereupon the Archbishop should escape too, and that there need be no negotiations whatever. This M. Thiers declined.

Matters were complicated by the conduct of the Vicar-general Lagarde. He had been a prisoner with the Archbishop, and had been released for the purpose of bringing letters to Versailles with a view to negotiate the proposed exchange, and on condition that he should return. Once safely at Versailles, he declined to go back. His pretext was that M. Thiers's letter in reply to the Archbishop's was sealed, and that he could not carry back a sealed letter in reply to one unsealed. I remember the sad and resigned, but not bitter tone, in which the Archbishop wrote of this desertion, and the exceedingly cautious terms in which the Pope's Nuncio referred to it.

But Mr. Washburne's untiring efforts were in vain. He had to contend with the vis inertia of French bureaucracy, and he who can move this mass must be ten times a Hercules.

The Archbishop was murdered; but Blanqui, whom the French Government held with so relentless a grip, was condemned to a year or two's imprisonment only.

I thought at that time, and think still, that no determined effort was made to save the Archbishop's life, except by two or three canons of his Church, and by the Minister of the United States. The French authorities certainly were lukewarm in the matter. The Archbishop was a Gallican, a liberal Catholic, notably so. Had he been an Ultramontane, I think that the extreme Right of the Assembly—the Legitimists—would have so exerted themselves that his life would have been saved. M. Thiers occupied a difficult position. He was suspected by the Legitimists of coquetting with the radicals, and of having no serious intention of putting down the insurrection. The suspicion was, of course, unfounded; but it may have prevented him from entering upon those informal negotiations which would probably have resulted in the release of the prisoner.

I once expressed these views to a lady in Paris, herself a liberal Catholic. She would not admit them to be true. Some weeks later, I met her again, and she told me that she believed that I was right; that she had heard such sentiments expressed by Legitimist ladies, that she was satisfied that there was an influential, if not a large, class of Ultramontanes, to whom the death of the Archbishop was not unwelcome. He has been succeeded by a noted Ultramontane.

Meantime the army was being rapidly reorganized. The Imperial Guard, and other corps d'Élite, had returned from Germany, where they had been prisoners of war. Marshal MacMahon took command. Why M. Thiers did not then assault the city, and carry it, as he undoubtedly could have done, was a matter of surprise to every one, and especially to those whose lives and property lay at the mercies of the Commune. But Thiers had built the fortifications of Paris. He looked upon them with a paternal eye. To him they were not like other men's fortifications. They were impregnable to ordinary assault, and could only be taken by regular approaches. How I wished that Guizot had built them! We might have been saved a month of danger, loss, and intense anxiety.

On my weekly visit to Paris I had a better opportunity to observe the progress of events than if I had staid there without interruption, while my residence of three days gave me ample occasion to appreciate the full pleasures of the bombardment. It must always be a mystery why the French bombarded so persistently the quarter of the Arch of Triumph—the West End of Paris—the quarter where nine out of ten of the inhabitants were known friends of the Government. They had their regular hours for this divertissement, for so they seemed to regard it. They took a turn at it before breakfast, to give them an appetite; and at five o'clock in the morning I was waked by the shells from Mont ValÉrien bursting and crashing in the Place de l'Etoile. About noon they went at it again, and when I went home to breakfast (anglice lunch), I had to dodge round corners, and take refuge behind stone columns. Then, just before sunset, they always favored us with an evening gun, for good-night. The days, too, were so confoundedly long at that season of the year—April and May—and the weather provokingly fine. How I longed for a delicious London fog!

I remember one day, as I dodged behind a stone pillar in the Rue de Presbourg to avoid a coming shell, the concierge called me in. I went into his loge, but declined to go into the cellar, where his wife and children had taken refuge. He had two loges, and I strongly advised him to move into the unoccupied one as the safer of the two, for I had observed that the shells generally passed easily enough through one stone wall, but were arrested by a second. He took my advice. The next day a shell from one of their evening guns fell into the window of the loge he had left, passed through the floor into the cellar, and there exploded, and tore every thing to pieces.

My own apartment was struck eight times by fragments of shells. Fortunately but one exploded in the house, and that two stories above me. It shattered the room into which it fell fearfully, but, strange to say, did no damage in the adjoining rooms. Happily the apartment was unoccupied. The tenants, a few days before, had taken advantage of a law of the Commune which released all tenants from their rent if they found it inconvenient to pay it, and had decamped, furniture and all.

Mr. Washburne advised me to change my residence, as it was not safe. But I felt that the dignity of the great American people would not permit even one of its subordinate representatives to leave the building while a Frenchman remained in it. Mr. Washburne's practice, too, was not in accordance with his precepts. If we heard of any part of Paris where shells were likely to burst and bullets to whistle, Washburne was sure to have important business in that direction.

I was not in my house when the shell exploded. I generally came home to dinner after dark. If there is any thing thoroughly disagreeable, it is to have shells tumbling and bursting about you when you are at dinner. It is bad enough at breakfast, but the dinner-hour should be sacred from vulgar intrusion.

I recollect one day after my midday breakfast, as I left my house, I saw a knot of men standing on the corner of the Avenue de l'ImpÉratrice and the Rue de Presbourg; I thought that I would go and see what was up. Mont ValÉrien was blazing away at a great rate. As I joined the group, one of them said, "They'll fire at us soon, seeing half a dozen people here." He had hardly said so, when there was a flash, and a puff of smoke, and in a minute we heard the huge shell hurtling through the air. It missed us, of course, and fell in the Place, and exploded. All these men were friends of the Government, and they were looking to Mont ValÉrien for help, longing for the troops to come in. This was the protection the Government gave its friends, "the protection which the vulture gives the lamb, covering and devouring it."

About once a week I was called in by some neighboring concierge to note the damage done by shells in apartments belonging to Americans. Shells are strangely capricious. One end of No. 8 Rue de Presbourg, opposite my own residence, was nearly torn to pieces; the other end was untouched. At No. 12, shell after shell penetrated the kitchen departments, while the salons were uninjured. I was called to see the damage done to the premier of No. 8, a beautiful apartment belonging to a New York lady. A shell had entered the salon and exploded. I have never seen more thorough destruction. The mirrors were shattered; the floors and ceilings rent and gaping; sofas, chairs, and tables upset and broken. In the midst of all this destruction stood a little table with a lady's work-basket upon it, the needle in the work, the thimble and scissors on the table, as if she had left them five minutes before—the only objects unhurt in the room. It was a touching souvenir of peaceful domestic life in the midst of the worst ravages of war.

Mr. Washburne and Lord Lyons complained to Jules Favre of this persistent bombardment, for the property destroyed and the lives endangered were largely American and English. He replied that it was "bad shooting," but he smiled as he said so, and evidently did not believe it himself. It was sheer wantonness, that irrepressible desire of artillery-men, of which I have before spoken, to hit something—an enemy if possible, a friend if no enemy offers.

It was singular that while so many shells fell in the immediate neighborhood of the Arch of Triumph, so little serious injury was done to it. I remarked a curious circumstance in this connection. The bas-reliefs on the arch facing the Avenue de la Grande ArmÉe are Peace and War—on the right, as you face the Arch, War; on the left, Peace. War was very much injured; Peace was scarcely touched.