THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
no more than that I had gone to Paris for the purpose of putting myself into communication with the German refugees living there, to write some letters about the situation of things in the French capital for his newspaper, and that I perhaps would spend some time in historical studies. In fact, all I had in view was to sit still in a secure place until the trial of the Siegburg affair, with all its excitements, was over, and Kinkel had been transported back to Naugard or to some other penitentiary, so that I might find him fixed at a certain place, and there begin my venturesome work.
Some impressions I received on the day of my arrival in Paris will always remain indelible in my mind. I was well versed in the recent history of France with its world-moving revolutionary events. Since the days of March, 1848, I had studied them with especial interest, hoping thus to learn more clearly to judge what was passing in my own surroundings, and now I had arrived at the theater of these great revolutionary actions in which the elementary forces of society in wild explosions had demolished the old and opened the way to the new order of things. From the railway station I went to the nearest little hotel, and soon, map in hand, I set out to explore the city. Eagerly I read the names of the streets on the corners. Here they were, then, those battlefields of the new era, which my excited imagination peopled at once with historic figures—here the Square of the Bastile, where the people won their first victory—there the Temple, where the royal family had been imprisoned; there the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which on the days of great decision had sent the masses of the Blousemen upon the barricades into the bloody conflict; there the Carré Saint-Martin, where the first barricades of the February rising had been raised; there the Hôtel de Ville, where the commune had sat and where Robespierre
[ 259 ]
