The blight of defeat lay on everything.

In May, preceding Foch's advent, the communards--led by a miserable
little shoemaker who talked about shooting all the world--took
possession of the buildings belonging to the Polytechnic, and were
dislodged only after severe fighting by Marshal MacMahon's Versailles
troops.

The cannon of the communards, set on the heights of Pére-Lachaise (the
great city of the dead where the slumber of so many of earth's most
illustrious imposed no respect upon the "Bolsheviki" of that cataclysm)
aimed at the Pantheon, shot short and struck the Polytechnic. One
shell burst in the midst of an improvised hospital there, gravely
wounding a nurse.

At last, on May 24, the Polytechnic was taken from the revolutionists
by assault, and many of the communards were seized.

In the days following, the great recreation court of the school was the
scene of innumerable executions, as the wretched revolutionists paid
the penalty of their crimes before the firing squad. And the students'
billiard room was turned into a temporary morgue, filled with bodies of
those who had sought to destroy Paris from within.

The number of Parisians slain in those days after the second siege of
Paris has been variously estimated at from twenty thousand to
thirty-six thousand. And all the while, encamped upon the heights
round about Paris, were victorious German troops squatting like Semitic
creditors in Russia, refusing to budge till their account was settled