have remembered that in the past the bulk of the Parisians had seldom, if
ever, been on the side of constituted authority.

Later that year came the famous affair of the Pantin crimes, and I was
present with my father when Troppmann, the brutish murderer of the Kinck
family, stood his trial at the Assizes. But, quite properly, my father
would not let me accompany him when he attended the miscreant's execution
outside the prison of La Roquette. Some years later, however, I witnessed
the execution of Prevost on the same spot; and at a subsequent date I
attended both the trial and the execution of Caserio--the assassin of
President Carnot--at Lyons. Following Troppmann's case, in the early days
of 1870 came the crime of the so-called Wild Boar of Corsica, Prince
Pierre Bonaparte (grandfather of the present Princess George of Greece),
who shot the young journalist Victor Noir, when the latter went with
Ulrich de Fonvielle, aeronaut as well as journalist, to call him out on
behalf of the irrepressible Henri Rochefort. I remember accompanying one
of our artists, Gaildrau, when a sketch was made of the scene of the
crime, the Prince's drawing-room at Auteuil, a peculiar semi-circular,
panelled and white-painted apartment furnished in what we should call in
England a tawdry mid-Victorian style. On the occasion of Noir's funeral my
father and myself were in the Champs Elysees when the tumultuous
revolutionary procession, in which Rochefort figured conspicuously, swept
down the famous avenue along which the victorious Germans were to march
little more than a year afterwards. Near the Rond-point the _cortege_ was
broken up and scattered by the police, whose violence was extreme.
Rochefort, brave enough on the duelling-ground, fainted away, and was
carried off in a vehicle, his position as a member of the Legislative Body
momentarily rendering him immune from arrest. Within a month, however, he
was under lock and key, and some fierce rioting ensued in the north of
Paris.