3-039-244 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Fighting in Paris: a street incident, 1871. 'In conducting some of the prisoners taken on an earlier day from the western quarter of Paris, near the Park Monçeau, a very sad incident took place. A husband and wife were seized and ordered to march forward towards the Place Vendome, a distance of a mile and a half. They were both of them invalids, and unable to walk so far. The woman sat down on the kerbstone and declined to move a step, in spite of her husband's entreaties that she would try. She persisted in her refusal, and they both knelt down together, begging the gendarmes who accompanied them to shoot them at once, if shot they were to be. Twenty revolvers were fired, but they still breathed; and it was only at the second discharge that they finally sank down dead. The gendarmes then rode away, leaving the bodies as they had fallen'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.