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None escaped. The guns and pistols were fired at close quarters.
New Year's-day was not far off, some shops were full of New Year's
gifts. In the passage du Saumon, a child of thirteen, flying before the
platoon-firing, hid himself in one of these shops, beneath a heap of
toys. He was captured and killed. Those who killed him laughingly
widened his wounds with their swords. A woman told me, "The cries of the
poor little fellow could be heard all through the passage." Four men
were shot before the same shop. The officer said to them, "This will
teach you to loaf about." A fifth named Mailleret, who was left for dead,
was carried the next day with eleven wounds to the Charité. There he
died.
They fired into the cellars by the air-holes.
A workman, a currier, named Moulins, who had taken refuge in one of
these shot-riddled cellars, saw through the cellar air-hole a passer-by,
who had been wounded in the thigh by a bullet, sit down on the pavement
with the death rattle in his throat, and lean against a shop. Some
soldiers who heard this rattle ran up and finished off the wounded man
with bayonet thrusts.
One brigade killed the passer-by from the Madeleine to the Opera,
another from the Opera to the Gymmase; another from the Boulevard Bonne
Nouvelle to the Porte Saint Denis; the 75th of the line having carried
the barricade of the Porte Saint Denis, it was no longer a fight, it was
a slaughter. The massacre radiated--a word horribly true--from the
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