Page:Ernest Belfort Bax - A Short History of the Paris Commune (1895).djvu/71

by the arch-villain Thiers at Versailles with brazen impudence as "without respect to the laws of war." On Friday evening, the 26th, at sunset, poor Delescluze, half dead with illness and fatigue, seeing all was hopeless, walked out of the Mairie of the 11th Arrondissement with his scarf round his waist and a cane in his hand, and mounted the barricade at the Château d'Eau, only a moment afterwards to fall under the hail of bullets directed against it. He could not survive another defeat, he had said a few hours before, referring to the June days of '48. Thus this noble old Revolutionist died, in death, as in life, true to his faith. Delescluze perhaps never quite intellectually grasped the meaning of modern Socialism. But his true instincts throughout his disinterested public career more than made up for any lack of intellectual clearness. Let us hope that one day the Place du Château d'Eau, where he died, may bear his statue—the day when Paris is one of the centres of a Socialist Europe.