When it reached the church they found the door closed, and yet the money for the mass had been paid the night before, and the hour for the ceremony fixed. One of the women went forward towards the door of the vestry, where she was met by a National Guard, who told her with a superfluity of oaths that she must not go in, that the ---- curé, the sacristan, and all the d---- fellows of the church were locked up, and that they would no longer have anything to do with patriots. Then the mother approached and said, "But who will bury my poor child if the curé is in prison?" and then she began to weep bitterly at the thought that there would be no prayers put up for the good of the little spirit, and that no holy water would be sprinkled on its coffin. Yes, members of the Commune, she wept, and she wept longer and more bitterly later at the cemetery, when she saw them lower the body of her child into the grave, without a prayer or a recommendation to God's mercy. You must not scoff at her, you see she was a poor weak woman, with ideas of the narrowest sort; but there are other mothers like her, quite unworthy of course to bear the children of patriots, who do not want their dear ones to be buried like dogs; who cannot understand that to pray is a crime, and to kneel down before God an offence to humanity, and who still are weak enough to wish to see a cross planted on the tombs of those they have loved and lost! Not the cross of the nineteenth century--a red flag![41]
[Footnote 41: Early in April the Commune forbade divine service in the Pantheon. They out off the arms of the cross, and replaced it by the red flag during a salute of artillery.]
Communal fraternity is decidedly in the ascendant; it is putting into practice this admirable precept, "Arrest each other." They say M. Delescluze has been sent to the Conciergerie. Yesterday Lullier was arrested, to-day Assy. It was not sufficient to change Executive Committees--if I may be allowed to say so--with no more ceremony than one would change one's boots; the Commune conducts itself, in respect to those members that become obnoxious to it, absolutely as if they were no more than ordinary archbishops.
[Illustration: PLACING THE RED FLAG ON THE PANTHEON. (The hole in the dome was occasioned by a Prussian shell.)]