2 Si ORIGIN OF THE WAR OF 1S53 chap. If the officers in general abstained from order- XIV " ins the slaughter, Colonel Eochefort did not fob low their example. He was an officer in the Lan- cers, and lie had already done execution with his horsemen amongst the chairs and the idlers in the neighbourhood of Tortoni's ; but afterwards imagining a shot to have been fired from a part of the Boulevard occupied by infantry, he put himself at the head of a detachment, which made a charge upon the crowd ; and the military his- torian of these events relates with triumph that about thirty corpses, almost all of them in the clothes of gentlemen, were the trophies of this exploit.* Along a distance of a thousand yards, ffoin" eastward from the Eue Biehelieu. the dead bodies were strewed upon the foot-pavement of the Boulevard, but in several spots they lay in heaps. Some of the people mortally struck would be able to stagger blindly for a pace or two until they were tripped up by a corpse, and this, perhaps, is why a large proportion of the bodies lay heaped one on the other. Before one shop - front they ' having been a spectator and nearly a victim when the French ' troops fired against harmless people on the Boulevards, and ' having been standing, until forced to leave it, on the balcony ' of my club at the corner of the Rue de Grammont— which club ' was struck thirty-seven times, six balls entering the drawing- ' room — I can vouch for the correctness of your description of ' it.' Letter dated 9th March 1803.— Note to Uh Edition, 1863.
- This was in the Boulevard Poissoniere. Mauduit, pp.
217, 218. Mauduit speaks of these thirty killed as armed men, but it is well proved that there were no armed men in the Boulevard Poissoniere, and I have therefore no difficulty in rejecting that part of his statement.
