" He turned round on his seat in a fury. "Ah, ca!" he roared,
thee-thou-ing me as an expression of his direst rage and power of
insult, "where hast thou come out of, then, that thou hast no sense
left thee at the last?" Yes, I am morally certain he helped burn the
Tuileries, that fellow!
Others of the former demons who howled in the Commune mobs are now
doing the congenial work of thievery which they did before the Commune
days, and especially during them. They are not the worst-looking of
the demons. A thief is generally a rather sleek-looking person in his
station. Rich thieves treat themselves to the best of broadcloth and
the shiniest of tall hats. Poor thieves usually at least shave their
faces, and try to look unforbidding. If they wear a blouse, it is
because they belong on a social scale which does not dream of wearing
a coat. The blousard of Paris may be either a thief or a working-man:
he is always the one or the other, and sometimes he is both.
The great mass of those who rioted in the Commune--the rank and file
of that turbulent army--may be found wherever there are blouses in
Paris. Occasionally, arrests are made, even now, of men who were
prominently active, unduly noisy, in that terrible time: the French
police has got a list of such, and will go on tracking them down and
bringing them to punishment for years to come, or until the next
revolution arrives.
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