When we arrived at the gate, there came out a finely dressed, personable
man in a frock-coat, with a red ribbon in his button-hole. The officer
in charge of the motley crew reported that he held a prisoner, the
citizen commonly called Père Félix.

"Père Félix?" said the man in the frock-coat, "and who might he be?"

"A member of the Revolutionary Government of Forty-eight," said the old
man with dignity, speaking from the midst of his captors; "a
revolutionary and Republican before you were born, M. Raoul Regnault!"

"Ah, good father, but this is not Forty-eight! It is Seventy-one!" said
the man on the steps, with a supercilious air. "I tell you as a matter
of information!"

"You had better shoot him and have the matter over!" he added, turning
away with his cane swinging in his hand.

Then, with a swirl of his sword, the officer marshalled us all into the
courtyard--for I had followed to see the end. I could not help myself.

It was a great, bare, barren quadrangle of brick, the yard of Mazas
where the prisoners exercise. The walls rose sheer for twenty feet. The
doorway stood open into it, and every moment or two another company of
Communists would arrive with a gang of prisoners. These were rudely
pushed to the upper end, where, unbound, free to move in every
direction, they were fired at promiscuously by all the ragged
battalions--men, women, and even children shooting guns and pistols at
them, as at the puppet-shows of Asnières and Neuilly.