Français Square, the Pigalle Square, and many other places were used for hasty burial, in fear of pestilence. "There are," stated that paper, "streets in Paris in which the dead bodies are being accumulated and in every house of which a number of corpses are awaiting interment." … "On the Saint Michel Boulevard, stages are driven to each barricade and may then be seen slowly filling up as with a tide of cadavres. The sight of limbs hanging out of these stages is ghastly beyond expression." Numbers of those who had been shot at the Loban barracks and other places in proximity to the river were expeditiously thrown into it. The reporter of a conservative paper, says Camille Pelletan, took the trouble of counting those he had seen floating in the course of a short walk along the quay: he called that "la pêche au fédéré." The Petite Presse noticed a long and persistent streak of blood in the river, passing under the second arch of the Tuilleries bridge and running swiftly far out of sight.
In his testimony before the legislative Commission of Inquiry, instituted with a view to whitewashing the Versailles government, the bourgeois senator Cambon had to declare that in his opinion the number of prisoners shot by the troops had been greater than the actual number of fighting men behind the barricades.
The last stand of the Parisian proletariat was at the Père la Chaise cemetery. In commenting on this final scene of the great drama, the Temps said two days later: "More than ten thousand Federals, killed at that place and in its immediate neighborhood, have already been buried. Many corpses are still lying piled up in family chapels." They were not all, of course, killed in battle. Many prisoners—men, women, and children—had been taken, two hundred at the time, to the foot of a wall now known as the Mur des Fédérés (the Federals' Wall), and been shot with mitrailleuses, their bodies immediately falling into a deep, wide, and long trench dug in front of them. On the day following the adjournment of the International Congress of 1900, the delegates went in a procession to the Mur des Fédérés. But the Millerand-Galliffet-Waldeck police cut the procession into several small bodies and would not allow more than one speech to be delivered.
The London Daily News of June 8, 1871, printed the following from its Paris correspondent:—
