Chapter XXVIII: Book XVI: I (1)

In proportion as power snatched from the hands of the king by the Assembly disappeared, it passed into the commune of Paris. The municipality, that first element of nations which are forming themselves, is also the last asylum of authority when they are crumbling to pieces. Before it falls quite to the people, power pauses for a moment in the council-chamber of the magistrates of the city. The Hôtel de Ville had become the Tuileries of the people; after La Fayette and Bailly, Pétion reigned there: this man was the king of Paris. The populace (which has always the instinct of position) called him _King Pétion_. He had purchased his popularity, first by his private virtues, which the people almost always confound with public virtues, and subsequently by his democratic speeches in the Constituent Assembly. The skilful balance which he preserved at the Jacobins between the Girondists and Robespierre had rendered him respectable and important. Friend of Roland, Robespierre, Danton, and Brissot, at the same time suspected of too close connection with Madame de Genlis and the Duc d'Orleans' party, he still always covered himself with the mantle of proper devotion to order and a superstitious reverence for the constitution. He had thus all the apparent titles to the esteem of honest men and the respect of factions; but the greatest of all was in his mediocrity. Mediocrity, it must be confessed, is almost always the brand of these idols of the people: either that the mob, mediocre itself, has only a taste for what resembles it; or that jealous contemporaries can never elevate themselves sufficiently high towards great characters and great virtues; or that Providence, which distributes gifts and faculties in proportion, will not allow that one man should unite in himself, amidst a free people, these three irresistible powers, virtue, genius, and popularity; or rather, that the constant favour of the multitude is a thing of such a nature that its price is beyond its worth in the eyes of really virtuous men, and that it is necessary to stoop too low to pick it up, and become too weak to retain it. Pétion was only king of the people on condition of being complaisant to its excesses. His functions as mayor of Paris, in a time of trouble, placed him constantly between the king, the Assembly, and the revolts. He bearded the king, flattered the Assembly, and pardoned crime. Inviolable as the capital which he personified in his position of first magistrate of the commune, his unseen dictatorship had no other title than his inviolability, and he used it with respectful boldness towards the king, bowed before the Assembly, and knelt to the malcontents. To his official reproaches to the rioters, he always added an excuse for crime, a smile for the culprits, encouragement to the misled citizens. The people loved him as anarchy loves weakness; it knew it could do as it pleased with him. As mayor, he had the law in his hand; as a man, he had indulgence on his lips and connivance in his heart: he was just the magistrate required in times of the _coups d'état_ of the faubourgs.

Pétion allowed them to make all their preparations without appearing to see them, and legalised them whenever they were completed.

II.

His early connection with Brissot had drawn him towards Madame Roland. The ministry of Roland, Clavière, and Servan obeyed him more than even the king, he was present at all their consultations, and although their fall did not involve him, it wrested the executive power from his grasp. The expelled Girondists had no need to infuse their thirst of vengeance into the mind of Pétion. Unable any longer to conspire legally against the king, with his ministers, he yet could conspire with the factions against the Tuileries. The national guards, the people, the Jacobins, the faubourgs, the whole city, were in his hands; thus he could give sedition to the Girondists to aid this party to regain the ministry; and he gave it them with all the hazards--all the crimes that sedition carries with it. Amongst these hazards was the assassination of the king and his family: this event was beforehand accepted by those who provoked the assembly of the populace, and their invasion of the king's palace. Girondists, Orleanists, Republicans, Anarchists, none of these parties perhaps actually meditated this crime, but they looked upon it as an eventuality of their fortune. Pétion, who doubtless did not desire it, at least risked it; and if his intention was innocent, his temerity was a murder. What distance was there between the steel of twenty thousand pikes and the heart of Louis XVI.? Pétion did not betray the lives of the king, the queen, and the children, but he placed them at stake. The constitutional guard of the king had been ignominiously disbanded by the Girondists; the Duc de Brissac, its commander, was sent to the high court of Orleans, for imaginary conspiracies,--his only conspiracy was his honour; and he had sworn to die bravely in defence of his master and his friend. He could have escaped, but though even the king advised him to fly, he refused. "If I fly," replied he, to the king's entreaties, "it will be said that I am guilty, and that you are my accomplice; my flight will accuse you: I prefer to die." He left Paris for the national court of Orleans: he was not tried, but massacred at Versailles, on the 6th of September, and his head with its white hairs was planted on one of the palisades of the palace gates, as if in atrocious mockery of that chivalrous honour that even in death guarded the gate of the residence of his king.

III.

The first insurrections of the Revolution were the spontaneous impulses of the people: on one side was the king, the court and the nobility; on the other the nation. These two parties clashed by the mere impulse of conflicting ideas and interests. A word--a gesture--a chance--the assembling a body of troops--a day's scarcity--the vehement address of an orator in the Palais Royal, sufficed to excite the populace to revolt, or to march on Versailles. The spirit of sedition was confounded with the spirit of the Revolution. Every one was factious--every one was a soldier--every one was a leader. Public passion gave the signal, and chance commanded.

Since the Revolution was accomplished, and the constitution had imposed on each party legal order, it was different. The insurrections of the people were no longer agitations, but plans. The organised factions had their partisans--their clubs--their assemblies--their army and their pass-word. Amongst the citizens, anarchy had disciplined itself, and its disorder was only external, for a secret influence animated and directed it unknown even to itself. In the same manner as an army possesses chiefs on whose intelligence and courage they rely; so the _quartiers_ and sections of Paris had leaders whose orders they obeyed. Secondary popularities, already rooted in the city and faubourgs, had been founded behind those mighty national popularities of Mirabeau, La Fayette, and Bailly. The people felt confidence in such a name, reliance in such an arm, favour for such a face; and when these men showed themselves, spoke, or moved, the multitude followed them without even knowing whither the current of the crowd would lead; it was sufficient for the chiefs to indicate a spot on which to assemble, to spread abroad a panic terror, infuse a sudden rage, or indicate a purpose, to cause the blind masses of the people to assemble on the appointed spot ready for action.

IV.

The spot chosen was most frequently the site of the Bastille, the Mons Aventinus of the people, the national camp, where the place and the stones reminded them of their servitude and their strength. Of all the men who governed the agitators of the faubourgs, Danton was the most redoubtable. Camille Desmoulins, equally bold to plan, possessed less courage to execute. Nature, which had given this young man the restlessness of the leaders of the mob, had denied him the exterior and the power of voice necessary to captivate them; for the people do not comprehend intellectual force. A colossal stature and a sonorous voice are two indispensable requisites for the favourites of the people: Camille Desmoulins was small, thin, and had but a feeble voice, that seemed to "pipe and whistle in the wind" after the tones of Danton, who possessed the roar of the populace.

Pétion enjoyed the highest esteem of the anarchists, but his official legality excused him from openly fomenting the disorder, which it was sufficient that he desired. Nothing could be done without him, and he was an accomplice. After them came Santerre, the commander of the battalion of the faubourg St. Antoine. Santerre, son of a Flemish brewer, and himself a brewer, was one of those men that the people respect because they are of themselves, and whose large fortune is forgiven them on account of their familiarity. Well known to the workmen, of whom he employed great numbers in his brewery; and by the populace, who on Sundays frequented his wine and beer establishments--Santerre distributed large sums of money, as well as quantities of provisions, to the poor; and, at a moment of famine, had distributed three hundred thousand francs' worth of bread (12,000_l_.). He purchased his popularity by his beneficence; he had conquered it, by his courage, at the storming of the Bastille; and he increased it by his presence at every popular tumult. He was of the race of those Belgian brewers who intoxicated the people of Ghent to rouse them to revolt.

The butcher, Legendre, was to Danton what Danton was to Mirabeau, a step lower in the abyss of sedition. Legendre had been a sailor during ten years of his life, and had the rough and brutal manners of his two callings, a savage look, his arms covered with blood, his language merciless, yet his heart naturally good. Involved since '89 in all the Revolutionary movements, the waves of this agitation had elevated him to a certain degree of authority. He had founded, under Danton, the Cordeliers club, the club of _coups de main_, as the Jacobins was the club of radical theories; and he convulsed it to its very centre, by his eloquence untaught and unpolished. He compared himself to the peasant of the Danube. Always more ready to strike than to speak, Legendre's gesture crushed before he spoke. He was the mace of Danton. Huguenin, one of those men who roll from profession to profession, on the acclivity of troublous times, without the power to arrest his course; an advocate expelled from the body to which he belonged; then a soldier, and a clerk at the barrière; always disliked, aspiring for power to recover his fortune, and suspected of pillage. Alexandre, the commandant of the battalion of the Gobelins, the hero of the faubourg, the friend of Legendre. Marat, a living conspiracy, who had quitted his subterranean abode in the night; a living martyr of demagogism, revelling in excitement, carrying his hatred of society to madness, exulting in it, and voluntarily playing the part of the fool of the people as so many others had played at the courts the part of the king's fool. Dubois Crancé, a brave and educated soldier. Brune, a sabre, at the service of all conspiracies. Mormoro, a printer, intoxicated with philosophy. Dubuisson, an obscure writer, whom the hisses of the theatre had forced to take refuge in intrigue. Fabre d'Eglantine, a comic poet, ambitious of another field for his powers. Chabot, a capuchin monk, embittered by the cloister, and eager to avenge himself on the superstition which had imprisoned him. Lareynie, a soldier-priest. Gonchon, Duquesnois, friends of Robespierre. Carra, a Girondist journalist. An Italian, named Rotondo. Henriot, Sillery, Louvet, Laclos, and Barbaroux, the emissary of Roland and Brissot, were the principal instigators of the _émeute_ of the 20th of June.

V.

All these men met in an isolated house at Charenton, to concert in the stillness and secrecy of the night on the pretext, the plan, and the hour of the insurrection. The passions of these men were different, but their impatience was the same; some wished to terrify, others to strike, but all wished to act; when once the people were let loose, they would stop where destiny willed. There were no scruples at a meeting at which Danton presided; speeches were superfluous where but one feeling prevailed; propositions were sufficient, and a look was enough to convey all their meaning. A pressure of the hand, a glance, a significant gesture, are the eloquence of men of action. In a few words, Danton dictated the purpose, Santerre the means, Marat the atrocious energy, Camilla Desmoulins the cynical gaiety of the projected movement, and all decided on the resolution of urging the people to this act. A revolutionary map of Paris was laid on the table, and on it Danton traced the sources, the tributary streams, the course, and the meeting-place of these gatherings of the people.

The Place de la Bastille, an immense square into which opened, like the mouths of so many rivers, the numerous streets of the faubourg St. Antoine, which joins, by the quartier de l'Arsenale and a bridge, the faubourg St. Marceau, and which, by the boulevard, opened before the ancient fortress, has a large opening to the centre of the city and the Tuileries, was the rendezvous assigned, and the place whence the columns were to depart. They were to be divided into three bodies, and a petition to present to the king and the Assembly against the _veto_ to the decree against the priests and the camp of 20,000 men, was the ostensible purpose of the movement; the recall of the patriot ministers, Roland, Servan, and Clavière, the countersign; and the terror of the people, disseminated in Paris and the château of the Tuileries the effect of this day. Paris expected this visit of the faubourgs, for five hundred persons had dined together the previous day on the Champs Elysées.

The chief of the _fédérés_ of Marseilles and the agitators of the central quarters had fraternised there with the Girondists. The actor Dugazon had sung verses, denunciatory of the inhabitants of the Château; and at his window in the Tuileries the king had heard the applause and these menacing strains, that reached even to his palace. As for the order of the march, the grotesque emblems, the strange weapons, the hideous costumes, the horrible banners and the obscene language, destined to signal the apparition of this army of the faubourgs in the streets of the capital, the conspirators prescribed nothing, for disorder and horror formed a part of the programme, and they left all to the disordered imagination of the populace, and to that rivalry of cynicism which invariably takes place in such masses of men. Danton relied on this fact.

VI.

Although the presence of Panis and Sergent, two members of the municipality, gave a tacit sanction to the plan, the leaders undertook to recruit the sedition in silence, by small groups during the night, and to collect the fiercest _rassemblements_ of the quartier Saint Marceau and the Jardin des Plantes, on the bank of the Arsenale, by means of a ferry, then the only means of communication between the two faubourgs. Lareynie was to arouse the faubourg St. Jacques and the market of the place Maubert, where the women of the lower classes came daily to make their household purchases. To sell and to buy is the life of the lower orders, and money and famine are their two leading passions. They are always ready for tumult in those places where these two passions concentrate, and no where is sedition more readily excited, or in greater masses of people.

The dyer Malard, the shoemaker Isambert, the tanner Gibon, rich and influential artizans, were to pour from the sombre and foetid streets of the faubourg Saint Marceau their indigent population, who but rarely show themselves in the principal quartiers. Alexandre, the military tribune of this quarter of Paris, in which he commanded a battalion, was to place himself at its head on the place, before daybreak, to concentrate the people, and then give them the impulse that should lead them to the quays and the Tuileries. Varlet, Gonchon, Ronsin, and Siret, the lieutenants of Santerre, who had been employed in this system of tactics since the first agitations of '89, were charged with the execution of similar manoeuvres in the faubourg St. Antoine. The streets of this quarter, full of manufactories and wine and beer shops, the abiding place of misery, toil, and sedition, which extend from the Bastille to la Roquette and Charenton, contained in themselves alone an army that could invade Paris.

VII.

This army had known its leaders for four years. They posted themselves at the openings of the principal streets, at the hour when the workmen leave the _ateliers_; they procured a chair and table from the nearest and best _cabaret_, and mounting on these wine-stained tribunes, they called by name some of the passers by, who grouped round them; these stopped others, the street was blocked up by them, and this crowd was increased by all the men, women, and children, attracted by the noise. The orator addressed this motley assemblage, whilst wine or beer were gratuitously handed round. The cessation of work, the scarcity of money, the dearth of food, the manoeuvres of the aristocrats to starve Paris, the treacheries of the king, the orgies of the queen, the necessity of the nation's defeating the plots of an Austrian court, were the usual themes of their addresses. When once the agitation rose to fever heat, the cry of "_Marchons_" was heard, and the mob set itself in motion down every street. A few hours afterwards masses of workmen from the quartiers Popincourt, Quinze-Vingts de la Grève, Port au Blé, and the Marché St. Jean, poured from the rues du Faubourg St. Antoine, and covered the Place de la Bastille. There the tumult of the meeting of all these tributaries of sedition for a moment stayed the progress of this living torrent; but the impulse soon carried them on, and the columns instinctively divided themselves, and plunged into the vast outlets and main streets of Paris. Some took the line of the boulevards, others marched along the quays to the Pont Neuf, there encountered the column of the Place Maubert, and poured, in constantly increasing masses, on the Palais Royal, and the gardens of the Tuileries.

Such were the plans ordered on the night of the 19th of June, to be executed by the agitators in the different quartiers, and who separated with a rallying word, which gave the movement of the morrow the excitement and uncertainty of hope, and which, without commanding the consummation of crime, yet authorised the last excesses, "_To make an end of the Château_."

VIII.

Such was the meeting of Charenton, such were the unseen actors who were to set in motion a million of citizens. Did Laclos and Sillery, who were about to seek a throne for the Duc d'Orleans their master, in the faubourgs, distribute his gold there? It has been asserted and believed, but never proved, and yet their presence at this meeting is suspicious. History has the right of suspecting without evidence, but never of accusing without proof. The assassination of the king would give the crown, the next day, to the Duc d'Orleans; Louis XVI. might be assassinated by the weapon of some drunken man--he was not. This is the only justification of the Orleans' faction. Some of these men were disaffected, like Marat and Hébert; others, like Barbaroux, Sillery, Laclos, and Carra, were impatient malcontents; and others, like Santerre, were but citizens, whose love of liberty became fanaticism. The conspirators concerted together, and disciplined and organised the city. Individual and distorted passions kindled the mighty and virtuous love of the people for the triumph of democracy. It is thus that in a conflagration the most tainted substances oft light the fire; the combustible matter is foul, but the flames pure; the flame of the Revolution was liberty; the factious might dim, they could not stain, its brightness.

Whilst the conspirators of Charenton distributed their _rôles_ and recruited their forces, the king trembled for his wife and children at the Tuileries. "Who knows," said he, to M. de Malesherbes, with a melancholy smile, "whether I shall behold the sun set to-morrow?"

Pétion, by ordering the municipal forces and the national guards under his orders to resist, could have entirely put down the sedition. The directory of the department presided over by the unfortunate Duc de la Rochefoucauld, summoned Pétion in the most energetic terms to perform his duty. Pétion smiled, took all on himself, and justified the legality of the proposed meetings and the petitions presented _en masse_ to the Assembly.

Vergniaud in the tribune repelled the alarm felt by the constitutionalists, as calumnies against the innocence of the people. Condorcet laughed at the disquietude manifested by the ministers, and the demands for armed force they addressed to the Assembly. "Is it not amusing," said he, addressing his colleagues, "to see the executive power demanding the means of action from the legislators? let them save themselves, it is their trade." Thus derision was united to the plots against the unfortunate monarch; the legislators derided the power their hands had disarmed, and applauded the factious.

IX.

It was under these auspices that the 20th of June dawned. A second council, more secret and less numerous than the former, had assembled the men destined to put these designs into execution, and they only separated at midnight. Each of them went to his post, awoke his most trusty followers, and stationed them in small groups, to stop and assemble together the workmen, as they quitted their homes. Santerre answered for the neutrality of the national guard. "Do not fear," said he; "Pétion will be there." Pétion in reality had on the previous evening ordered the battalions of the national guard to get under arms, not to oppose the columns of the people, but to fraternise with the petitioners and swell the cortège of sedition. This equivocal measure at once saved the responsibility of Pétion to the department, and his complicity before the assembled people; to the one he said I watch; to the other, I march with you.

At daybreak the battalions were assembled, and their arms piled on all the _grandes places_. Santerre harangued his on the Place de la Bastille, whilst around him flocked an immense throng, agitated, impatient, ready to rush upon the city at his signal. Uniforms and rags were blended, and detachments of invalides, gendarmes, national guards, and volunteers, received the orders of Santerre, and repeated them to the crowd. An instinctive discipline prevailed amidst this disorder, and the half military half civil appearance of this camp of the people gave the Assembly rather the character of a warlike expedition than an _émeute_. This throng recognised leaders, manoeuvred at their command, followed their flags, obeyed their voice, and even controlled their impatience to await reinforcements and give detached bodies the appearance of a simultaneous movement. Santerre on horseback, surrounded by a staff of men of the faubourgs, issued his orders, fraternised with the citizens and insurgents, recommended the people to remain silent and dignified, and slowly formed the columns, ready for the signal to march.

X.

At eleven o'clock the people set out for the quartier of the Tuileries. The number of men who left the Place de la Bastille was estimated at twenty thousand; they were divided into three bodies, the first composed of the battalions of the faubourg, armed with sabres and bayonets, obeyed Santerre; the second, composed of the lowest rabble, without arms or only armed with pikes and sticks, was under the orders of the demagogue Saint-Huruge; the third, a confused mass of squalid men, women, and children, followed, in a disorderly march, a young and beautiful woman in male attire, a sabre in her hand, a musket on her shoulder, and seated on a cannon drawn by a number of workmen. This was Théroigne de Méricourt.

Santerre was well known: he was the king of the faubourgs. Saint-Huruge had been, since '89, the great agitator of the Palais Royal.

The Marquis de Saint-Huruge, born at Mâcon of a rich and noble family, was one of those men of tumult and disturbances who seem to personify the masses. Gifted by nature with a towering stature and a martial figure, his voice thundered above the roars of the crowd. He had his agitations, his fury, his moments of repentance, and sometimes even of cowardice; his heart was not cruel, but his brain was disturbed. Too aristocratic to be envious, too rich to be a spoliator, too frivolous to be a fanatic by principle, the Revolution turned his brain in the same manner as a rapidly flowing river carries with it the eye that in vain strives to gaze fixedly on it. His life seemed that of a maniac; he loved the Revolution when in motion because it was akin to madness. When yet very young he had sullied his name, ruined his fortune, and forfeited his honours by debauchery, women, and gaming. At the Palais Royal and the neighbouring quartiers, the scene of every disorder, he possessed the infamous celebrity of scandal and shame. All the world had heard of him; his family had procured his incarceration in the Bastille, from which the 14th of July had freed him. He had sworn to be avenged, and he kept his oath; a voluntary and indefatigable accomplice of every faction, he had offered his unpaid services to the Duc d'Orleans, Mirabeau, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, the Girondists, and Robespierre: always an adherent of the party who went the greatest lengths; always a leader of those _émeutes_ that promised the most havoc and ruin. Awake before daybreak, present at every club, he hastened at the slightest noise to swell the crowd; at the smallest tumult to stir men up to more violence. He himself was consumed by the common passion, ere he comprehended its nature; and his voice, his gestures, the expression of his features communicated it to others. He vociferated tales of terror; he disseminated the fever; he electrified the wavering masses; he urged on the current; he was in himself a sedition.

XI.

After Saint Huruge, marched Théroigne de Méricourt. Théroigne, or Lambertine de Méricourt, who commanded the third corps of the army of the faubourgs, was known among the people by the name of _La Belle Liégoise_. The French Revolution had drawn her to Paris, as the whirlwind attracts things of no weight. She was the impure Joan of Arc of the public streets. Outraged love had plunged her into disorder, and the vice, at which she herself blushed, only made her thirst for vengeance. In destroying the aristocrats she fancied she purified her honour, and washed out her shame in blood.

She was born at the village of Méricourt, near Liège, of a family of wealthy farmers, and had received a finished education. At the age of seventeen her singular loveliness had attracted the attention of a young _seigneur_, whose chateau was close to her residence. Beloved, seduced, and deserted, she had fled from her father's roof and taken refuge in England, from whence, after a residence of some months, she proceeded to France. Introduced to Mirabeau, she knew through him Siéyès, Joseph Chénier, Danton, Ronsin, Brissot, and Camille Desmoulins. Romme, a mystical republican, infused into her mind the German spirit of illumination. Youth, love, revenge, and the contact with this furnace of a revolution, had turned her head, and she lived in the intoxication of passions, ideas, and pleasures. Connected at first with the great innovators of '89, she had passed from their arms into those of rich voluptuaries, who purchased her charms dearly. Courtezan of opulence, she became the voluntary prostitute of the people; and like her celebrated prototypes of Egypt or of Rome, she lavished upon liberty the wealth she derived from vice.

On the first assemblage of the people she appeared in the streets, and devoted her beauty to serve as an ensign to the people. Dressed in a riding habit of the colour of blood, a plume of feathers in her hat, a sabre at her side, and two pistols in her belt, she hastened to join every insurrection. She was the first of those who burst open the gates of the Invalides and took the cannon from thence. She was also one of the first to attack the Bastille; and a sabre d'homme was voted her on the breach by the victors. On the days of October, she had led the women of Paris to Versailles, on horseback, by the side of the ferocious Jourdan, called "_the man with the long beard_." She had brought back the king to Paris: she had followed, without emotion, the heads of the gardes du corps, stuck on pikes as trophies. Her language, although marked by a foreign accent, had yet the eloquence of tumult. She elevated her voice amidst the stormy meetings of the clubs, and from the galleries blamed their conduct. Sometimes she spoke at the Cordeliers. Camille Desmoulins mentions the enthusiasm which her harangues created. "Her similes," says he, "were drawn from the Bible and Pindar,--it was the eloquence of a Judith." She proposed to build the palace of the representative body on the site of the Bastille. "To found and embellish this edifice," said she, "let us strip ourselves of our ornaments, our gold, our jewels. I will be the first to set the example." And with these words she tore off her ornaments in the tribune. Her ascendency during the _émeutes_ was so great, that with a single sign she condemned or acquitted a victim; and the royalists trembled to meet her.

During this period, by one of those chances that appear like the premeditated vengeances of destiny, she recognised in Paris the young Belgian gentleman who had seduced and abandoned her. Her look told him how great was his danger, and he sought to avert it by imploring her pardon. "My pardon," said she; "at what price can you purchase it? My innocence gone--my family lost to me--my brothers and sisters pursued in their own country by the jeers and sarcasms of their kindred; the malediction of my father--my exile from my native land--my enrolment amongst the infamous caste of courtezans; the blood with which my days have been and will be stained; that imperishable curse attached to my name, instead of that immortality of virtue which you have taught me to doubt. It is for this that you would purchase my forgiveness. Do you know any price on earth capable of purchasing it?" The young man made no reply. Théroigne had not the generosity to forgive him, and he perished in the massacres of September. In proportion as the Revolution became more bloody, she plunged deeper into it. She could no longer exist, without the feverish excitement of public emotion. However, her early leaning to the Girondist party again displayed itself, and she also wished to stay the progress of the Revolution. But there were women whose power was superior even to her own. These women, called the _furies_ of the guillotine, stripped the belle Liégoise of her attire, and publicly flogged her on the terrace of the Tuileries, on the 31st of May. This punishment, more terrible than death, turned her brain, and she was conveyed to a mad-house, where she lived twenty years, which were but one long paroxysm of fury. Shameless and blood-thirsty in her delirium, she refused to wear any garments, as a souvenir of the outrage she had undergone. She dragged herself, only covered by her long white hair, along the flags of her cell, or clung with her wasted hands to the bars of the window, from whence she addressed an imaginary people, and demanded the blood of Suleau.

XII.

After Théroigne de Méricourt came other demagogues, less widely known, but already celebrated in their own quartiers, such as Rossignol, the working goldsmith; Brièrre, a wine-seller; Gonor, the conqueror of the Bastille; Jourdan, surnamed _Coupe-tête_; the famous Polish Jacobin, Lozouski, afterwards buried by the people at the Carrousel; and Henriot, afterwards the confidential general of the convention. As the columns penetrated into Paris, they were swelled by new groups, that poured forth from the crowded streets that open on the boulevards and the quays. At each influx of these new recruits, a shout of joy burst from the columns, the military bands struck up the air of the _Ça Ira_, the Marseillaise of assassins, whilst the insurgents sang the chorus, and brandished their arms threateningly at the windows of those suspected of being aristocrates.

These weapons did not resemble the arms of regular troops, which excite at once terror and admiration; they were strange and uncouth arms, caught up by the people in the first impulse of fury or defence.[24] Pikes, lances, spits, cutlasses, carpenters' axes, masons' hammers, shoemakers' knives, paviours' levers, saws, wedges, mattocks, crow-bars, the commonest household utensils of the poor, and the rusty iron exposed for sale on the quays, were alike seized upon by the people; and these different weapons, rusted, black, hideous, each of which presented a different manner of inflicting a wound, seemed to increase the horror of death by displaying it in a thousand terrible and unwonted forms. The mixture of all sexes, ages, and conditions; the confusion of costumes and rags beside uniforms, old men beside young; even children, some carried in their mothers' arms, others holding their father's hand or his garments; common prostitutes, their silken dresses soiled and torn, indecency on their brow, and insult on their lips, hundreds of women of the lowest description, and from the dregs of the people, recruited to swell the cortège, and excite commiseration from the garrets of the faubourgs, clothed in tattered finery, pale, emaciated, their eyes hollow, and their cheeks sunken from misery, the personifications of want, in fact the people, in all the disorder, the confusion, the exposure of a city suddenly summoned from its houses, its workshops, its garrets, its scenes and haunts of debauch and infamy; such was the aspect of intimidation which the conspirators wished to give to this scene.

Here and there flags waved above the heads of the multitude. On one was written _Sanction or death_; on another, _The recall of the patriot ministers_; on the third, _Tremble tyrant, thine hour is come_. A man, his arms bared to the shoulders, bore a gibbet, from which hung the effigy of a crowned female, with the inscription, _Beware the lantern_. Farther on a group of hags raised a _guillotine_, with a card bearing the words, _National Justice on tyrants; death for Veto and his wife_. Amidst all this apparent disorder, a secret system of order was visible. Men in rags, yet whose white hands and shirts of the finest linen pointed them out as of superior rank, wore hats, on which signs of recognition were drawn with white chalk; the crowd regulated their march by them, and followed wherever they went.

The principal body thus marched by the Rue Saint Antoine, and the dark and central avenues of Paris, to the Rue Saint Honoré, the population of these quartiers swelling its numbers at each instant. The more this living torrent increased the more furious it became. Now a band of butchers joined it, each bearing a pike, on which was stuck the bleeding heart of a calf, with the words, _Coeur d'aristocrate_. Next came a band of Chiffoniers dressed in rags, and displaying a lance, from which floated a tattered garment, with the inscription, _Tremble tyrants, here are the sans culottes_. The insult which the aristocracy had cast at poverty, now, when adopted by the people, became the weapon of the nation against the rich.

This army defiled during three hours along the Rue Saint Honoré. Sometimes a terrible silence, only broken by the sound of thousands of feet on the pavement, oppressed the imagination, as the sign of concentrated rage of this multitude; then solitary voices, insulting speeches, and atrocious sarcasms, were mingled with the laughter of the crowd; then sudden and confused murmurs burst from this human sea, and rising to the roofs of the houses, left only the last syllables of their prolonged acclamations audible: _Long live the nation! Long live the sans culottes! Down with the veto!_ This tumult reached the salle du Manège, where the Legislative Assembly was then sitting. The head of the cortège stopped at the doors, the columns inundated the court of the Feuillants, the court of the Manège, and all the openings of the salle. These courts, these avenues, these passages, which then masked the terrace of the garden, occupied the space which now extends between the garden of the Tuileries and the Rue Saint Honoré--that central artery of Paris. It was mid-day.

XIII.

Roederer, the procureur syndic of the directory of the department, a post which in '92 corresponded with that of prefect de Paris, was at this moment at the bar of the Assembly. Roederer, a partisan of the constitution, of the school of Mirabeau and Talleyrand, was a courageous enemy of anarchy. He found in the constitution the point of reconciliation between his fidelity to the people and his loyalty to the king; and he sought to defend this constitution with every weapon of the law which sedition had not broken in his grasp. "Armed mobs threaten to violate the constitution, the Chamber of Representatives, and the dwelling of the king," said Roederer at the bar; "the reports of the night are alarming; the minister of the interior calls on us to march troops immediately to defend the château. The law forbids armed assemblies, and yet they advance--they demand admittance; but if you yourselves set an example by suffering them to enter, what will become of the force of the law in our hands? your indulgence will destroy all public force in the hands of the magistrates. We demand to be charged with the fulfilment of all our duties: let the responsibility also be ours, and let nothing diminish the obligation we are under of dying to preserve and defend public tranquillity." These words, worthy the chancellor L'Hôpital, or Mathieu Molé, were coldly listened to by the Assembly, and saluted by ironical laughter from the tribunes. Vergniaud affected to bow to them, and weakened their effect. "Yes, doubtless," said this orator, destined to be torn from the tribune, a year later, by an armed mob,--"Doubtless, we should have done better never to have received armed men, for if to-day patriotism brings good citizens hither, aristocracy may to-morrow bring its janissaries. But the error we have committed authorises that of the people. The Assembly, formed up to the present time, appears sanctioned by the silence of the law. It is true that the magistrates demand force to put them down: but what should you do in such circumstances? I think that it would be an excess of severity to be inflexible to a fault, the origin of which is in your decrees: it would be an insult to the citizens to imagine they had any evil designs. It is said that this Assembly wishes to present an address at the château: I do not believe that the citizens who compose it will demand to be presented with arms in their hands to the king: I think that they will obey the laws, and that they will go unarmed, and like simple petitioners. I demand that these citizens be instantly permitted, to defile before us." Dumolard and Raymond, indignant at the perfidy or the cowardice of these words, energetically opposed this weakness or complicity of the Assembly. "The best homage to pay the people of Paris," cried Raymond, "is to make them obey their own laws. I demand that before these citizens are introduced they lay down their arms." "Why," returned Guadet, "do you talk of disobedience to the law, when you have so often disobeyed it yourself? you would commit a revolting injustice; you would resemble that Roman emperor who, in order to find more guilty persons, caused the laws to be written in letters so obscure that no one could read them."

The deputation of the insurgents entered at these last words, amidst the bursts of applause and the indignant murmurs of the Assembly.

XIV.

The orator of the deputation, Huguenin, read the petition concerted at Charenton. He declared that the city had risen ready to employ every means of avenging the majesty of the people, whilst he deplored the necessity of staining their hands with the blood of the conspirators. "But," said he, with apparent resignation, "the hour has come; blood must be shed. The men of the 14th of July are not asleep, they only appeared to be; their awakening is terrible: speak, and we will act. The people is there to judge its enemies: let them choose between Coblentz and ourselves; let them purge the land of their enemies--the tyrants; you know them. The king is not with you: we need no other proof of it than the dismissal of the patriot ministers and the inaction of the armies. Is not the head of the people worth that of kings? Must the blood of patriots flow with impunity to satisfy the pride and ambition of the perfidious château of the Tuileries? If the king does not act, suspend him from his functions: one man cannot fetter the will of twenty-five millions of men. If through respect we suffer him to retain the throne, it is on condition that he observe the constitution. If he depart from this he is no longer anything. And the high court of Orleans," continued Huguenin, "what is that doing?--where are the heads of those it should have doomed to death?" These sinister expressions threw the constitutionalists into alarm, and caused the Girondists to smile. The president, however, replied with a firmness which was not sustained by the attitude of his colleagues. It was decided that the people of the faubourgs should be allowed to defile before them under arms.

XV.

Immediately after this decree was voted, the doors, besieged by the multitude opened, and admitted thirty thousand petitioners. During this long procession the band played the demagogical airs of the _Carmagnole_ and the _Ça Ira_, those _pas de charge_ of revolts. Females, armed with sabres, brandished them at the tribunes, who loudly applauded, and danced before a table of stone, on which were engraved the rights of man, like the Israelites before the Ark. The same flags and the same obscene inscriptions visible in the streets, disgraced the temple of the law. The tattered garments, hanging from their lances, the guillotine, and the _potence_, with the effigy of the queen suspended from it, traversed the Assembly with impunity. Some of the deputies applauded, others turned away their heads or hid their faces in their hands; some more courageous, forced the wretch who bore the _coeur saignant_, partly by entreaties, partly by threats, to retire with his emblem of assassination. Part of the people regarded with a respectful eye the salle they profaned; others addressed the representatives as they passed, and seemed to exult in their degradation. The rattling of the strange weapons of the crowd, the clatter of their nailed shoes and sabots on the pavement, the shrill shouts of the women, the voices of the children, the cries of _Vive la nation_, patriotic songs, and the sound of instruments, deafened the ear, whilst to the eye, these rags contrasted strangely with the marbles, the statues, and the decorations of the salle. The miasmas of this horde set in motion tainted the air, and stifled respiration. Three hours elapsed ere all the troop had defiled. The president hastened to adjourn the sitting, in the expectation of approaching excesses.

XVI.

But an imposing force was drawn up in the courts of the Tuileries and the garden, to defend the dwelling of the king against the invasion of the people. Three regiments of the line, two squadrons of gendarmes, several battalions of the national guard, and several pieces of cannon, composed the means of resistance; but the troops, undecided, and acted upon by sedition, were but an appearance of force. The cries of _Vive la nation_, the friendly gestures of the insurgents, the appearance of the women extending their arms towards the soldiers through the palisades, and the presence of the municipal officers, who displayed a disdainful neutrality towards the king, shook the feeling of resistance amongst the troops, who beheld on either side the uniform of the national guard; and between the population of Paris, in whose sentiments they participated, and the château, which was represented to them as full of treason, they no longer knew which it was their duty to obey. In vain did M. Roederer, a firm organ of the constitution, and the superior officers of the national guard, such as MM. Acloque and De Romainvilliers, present the text of the law, ordering them to repel force by force. The Assembly set the example of complicity; and the mayor, Pétion, by his absence avoided responsibility. The king took refuge in his inviolability; and the troops, abandoned to themselves, could not fail to yield to threats or seduction.

In the interior of the palace, two hundred gentlemen, at the head of whom was the old marshal De Mouchy, had hastened together at the first news of the king's danger. They were rather the voluntary victims of ancient French honour, than useful defenders of the monarchy. Fearing to excite the jealousy of the national guard and the troops, these gentlemen concealed themselves in the remote apartments of the palace, ready rather to die than to combat: they wore no uniform, and their arms were concealed under their coats--hence the name by which they were pointed out to the people of _Chevaliers du poignard_. Arriving secretly from their provinces to offer their services to the king unknown to each other; and only furnished with a card of entrance to the palace, they hastened thither whenever there was danger. They should have been ten thousand, and were but two hundred--the last reserve of fidelity; but they did their duty without counting their number, and avenged the French nobility for the faults and the desertion of the emigration.

XVII.

The mob, on quitting the Assembly, had marched in close columns to the Carrousel. Santerre and Alexandre, at the head of their battalions, directed the movement. A compact mass of the insurgents, followed by the Rue St. Honoré. The other branches of the populace, cut off from the main body, thronged the courts of the Manège and the Feuillants, and tried to make room for themselves by issuing violently by one of the avenues which communicated with the garden from these courts. A battalion of the national guard defended the approach to this iron gate. The weakness or complaisance of a municipal officer freed the passage, and the battalion fell back, and took up its ground beneath the windows of the Château. The crowd traversed the garden in an oblique direction, and passing before the battalions, saluted them with cries of _Vive la nation!_ bidding them take their bayonets from their muskets. The bayonets were removed, and the mob then passed out by the entrance of the Port Royal, and fell back upon the gates of the Carrousel, which shut off this place from the Seine. The guards at these wickets again gave way, to allow a certain number of the malcontents to enter, and then shut the doors. These men, excited by their march, songs, the acclamations of the Assembly, and by intoxication, rushed with furious clamours into the court-yards of the Château. They ran to the principal doors, pressed upon the soldiers on guard, called their comrades without to come to them, and forced the hinges of the royal entrance gate. The municipal officer, Panis, gave orders that it should be opened. The Carrousel was forced, and the mob seemed for a moment to hesitate before the cannon pointed against them, and some squadrons of _gendarmerie_, drawn up in a line of battle. Saint Prix, who commanded the artillery, separated from his guns by a movement of the crowd, sent to the second in command an order to let them fall back in the door of the Château. He refused to obey: "_The Carrousel is forced_," he said in a loud voice, "_and so must be the Château. Here, artillery men, here is the enemy!_" And he pointed to the king's windows, turned his guns, and levelled them at the palace. The troops following this desertion of the artillery, remained in line, but took the powder from the pans of their muskets in sight of the people, in sign of fraternity, and allowed a free passage to the malcontents.

At this movement of the soldiers, the commandant of the national guard, who witnessed it, called from the court to the grenadiers, whom he saw at the windows of the _Salle des Gardes_, to take their arms, and defend the staircase. The grenadiers, instead of obeying, left the palace by the gallery leading to the garden.

Santerre, Théroigne, and Saint-Huruge hastened by the gate of the palace. The boldest and stoutest of the men in the mob went under the vault which leads from the Carrousel to the garden, dashed the artillerymen on one side, and seizing one of the guns, unlimbered it, and carried it in their arms to the _Salle des Gardes_, on the top of the grand staircase. The crowd, emboldened by this feat of strength and audacity, poured into the apartment and spread like a torrent throughout the staircase and corridors of the Château. All the doors were burst in, or fell beneath the shoulders and axes of the multitude. They shouted loudly for the king; only one door separated them, and this door was already yielding beneath the efforts of levers and blows of pikes from the assailants.

XVIII.

The king, relying on Pétion's promises, and the number of troops with which the palace was surrounded, had seen the assemblage of the mob without uneasiness.

The assault suddenly made on his abode had surprised him in complete security. Retired with the queen, Madame Elizabeth, and his children to the interior apartments on the side of the garden, he had heard the distant thunder of the crowd without expecting that it was so soon to burst on him. The voices of his frightened servants, flying in all directions, the noise of doors burst open and falling on the floors, the shouts of the people as they approached, threw alarm suddenly amongst the family party, which had met in the king's bed-chamber. The prince, confiding, by his look, his wife, sister, and children to the officers and women of the household who surrounded them, went alone to the _Salle du Conseil_. He there found the faithful Marshal de Mouchy, who did not hesitate to offer the last days of his long life to his master; M. d'Hervilly, the commandant of the Constitutional Horse Guard, disbanded a few days previously; the governor Acloque, commandant of the battalion of the faubourg St. Marceau, at first a moderate republican, then, overcome by the private virtues of Louis XVI., was his friend, and ready to die for him; three brave grenadiers of the battalion of the faubourg St. Martin, Lecrosnier, Bridau, and Gossé, who alone remained at their post of the interior on the general defection, and ready to protect the king with their bayonets, men of the people, strangers at court, rallied round him by the sole sentiment of duty and affection, only defending the man in the king.

At the moment the king entered this apartment, the doors of the adjacent room, called the _Salle des Nobles_, were dashed in by the blows of the assailants. The king rushed forward to meet the danger. The door-panels fell at his feet, lance heads, iron-shod sticks, spikes were thrust through the opening. Cries of fury, oaths, imprecations accompanied the blows of the axe. The king, in a firm voice, ordered two devoted _valets de chambre_, who accompanied him, Hue, and de Marchais, to open the doors. "What have I to fear in the midst of my people?" said the prince, boldly advancing towards the assailants.