Chapter V. Paris.

I.--Pressure of the Assembly on the King.

His veto rendered void or eluded.--His ministers insulted and driven away.--The usurpations of his Girondist ministry.--He removes them.--Riots being prepared.

Previous to this the tree was so shaken as to be already tottering at its base.--Reduced as the King's prerogative is, the Jacobins still continue to contest it, depriving him of even its shadow. At the opening session they refuse to him the titles of Sire and Majesty; to them he is not, in the sense of the constitution, a hereditary representative of the French people, but "a high functionary," that is to say, a mere employee, fortunate enough to sit in an equally good chair alongside of the president of the Assembly, whom they style "president of the nation." The Assembly, in their eyes, is sole sovereign, "while the other powers," says Condorcet, "can act legitimately only when specially authorized by a positive law; the Assembly may do anything that is not formally prohibited to it by the law," 'in other words, interpret the constitution, then change it, take it to pieces, and do away with it. Consequently, in defiance of the constitution, it takes upon itself the initiation of war, and, on rare occasions, on the King using his veto, it sets this aside, or allows it to be set aside. In vain he rejects, as he has a legal right to do, the decrees which sanction the persecution of unsworn ecclesiastics, which confiscate the property of the émigrés, and which establish a camp around Paris. At the suggestion of the Jacobin deputies, the unsworn ecclesiastics are interned, expelled, or imprisoned by the municipalities and Directories; the estates and mansions of the émigrés and of their relatives are abandoned without resistance to the jacqueries; the camp around Paris is replaced by the summoning of the Federates to Paris. In short, the monarch's sanction is eluded or dispensed with.--As to his ministers, "they are merely clerks of the Legislative Body decked with a royal leash." In full session they are maltreated, reviled, grossly insulted, not merely as lackeys of bad character, but as known criminals. They are interrogated at the bar of the house, forbidden to leave Paris before their accounts are examined; their papers are overhauled; their most guarded expressions and most meritorious acts are held to be criminal; denunciations against them are provoked; their subordinates are incited to rebel against them; committees to watch them and calumniate them are appointed; the perspective of a scaffold is placed before them in every relation, acts or threats of accusation being passed against them, as well as against their agents, on the shallowest pretexts, accompanied with such miserable quibbling, and such an evident falsification of facts and texts that the Assembly, forced by the evidence, twice reverses its hasty decision, and declares those innocent whom it had condemned the evening before. Nothing is of any avail, neither their strict fulfillment of the law, their submission to the committees of the Assembly, nor their humble attitude before the Assembly itself; "they are careful now to treat it politely and avoid the galleys."--But this does not suffice. They must become Jacobins; otherwise the high court of Orleans will be for them as for M. Delessart, the ante-room to the prison and the guillotine. "Terror and dismay," says Vergniaud, pointing with his finger to the Tuileries, "have often issued in the name of despotism in ancient times from that famous palace; let them to-day go back to it in the name of law."

Even with a Jacobin Minister, terror and dismay are permanent. Roland, Clavières, and Servan not only do not shield the King, but they give him up, and, under their patronage and with their connivance, he is more victimized, more harassed, and more vilified than ever before. Their partisans in the Assembly take turns in slandering him, while Isnard proposes against him a most insolent address. Shouts of death are uttered in front of his palace. An abbé or soldier is unmercifully beaten and dragged into the Tuileries basin. One of the gunners of the Guard reviles the queen like a fish woman, and exclaims to her, "How glad I should be to clap your head on the end of my bayonet!" They supposed that the King is brought to heel under this double pressure of the Legislative Body and the street; they rely on his accustomed docility, or at least, on his proven lethargy; they think that they have converted him into what Condorcet once demanded, a signature machine. Consequently, without notifying him, just as if the throne were vacant, Servan, on his own authority, proposes to the Assembly the camp outside Paris. Roland, for his part, reads to him at a full meeting of the council an arrogant, pedagogical remonstrance, scrutinizing his sentiments, informing him of his duties, calling upon him to accept the new "religion," to sanction the decree against unsworn ecclesiastics, that is to say, to condemn to beggary, imprisonment, and transportation 70,000 priests and nuns guilty of orthodoxy, and authorize the camp around Paris, which means, to put his throne, his person, and his family at the mercy of 20,000 madmen, chosen by the clubs and other assemblages expressly to do him harm; in short, to discard at once his conscience and his common sense.--Strange enough, the royal will this time remains staunch; not only does the King refuse, but he dismisses his ministers. So much the worse for him, for sign he must, cost what it will; if he insists on remaining athwart their path, they will march over him.--Not because he is dangerous, and thinks of abandoning his legal immobility. Up to the 10th of August, through a dread of action, and not to kindle a civil war, he rejects all plans leading to an open rupture. Up to the very last day he resigns himself even when his personal safety and that of his family is at stake, to constitutional law and public common sense. Before dismissing Roland and Servan, he desires to furnish some striking proof of his pacific intentions by sanctioning the dissolution of his guard and disarming himself not only for attack but for defense; henceforth he sits at home and awaits the insurrection with which he is daily menaced; he resigns himself to everything, except drawing his sword; his attitude is that of a Christian in the amphitheatre.--The proposition of a camp outside Paris, however, draws out a protest from 8,000 Paris National Guards. Lafayette denounces to the Assembly the usurpations of the Jacobins; the faction sees that its reign is threatened by this reawakening and union of the friends of order. A blow must be struck. This has been in preparation for a month past, and to renew the days of October 5th and 6th, the materials are not lacking.

II.--The floating and poor population of Paris.

Disposition of the workers.--Effect of poverty and want of work.--Effect of Jacobin preaching.--The revolutionary army.--Quality of its recruits--Its first review.--Its actual effective force.

Paris always has its interloping, floating population. A hundred thousand of the needy, one-third of these from the departments, "beggars by race," those whom Rétif de la Bretonne had already seen pass his door, Rue de Bièvre, on the 13th of July, 1789, on their way to join their fellows on the suburb of St. Antoine, along with them "those frightful raftsmen," pilots and dock-hands, born and brought up in the forests of the Nièvre and the Yonne, veritable savages accustomed to wielding the pick and the ax, behaving like cannibals when the opportunity offers, and who will be found foremost in the ranks when the September days come. Alongside these stride their female companions "barge-women who, embittered by toil, live for the moment only," and who, three months earlier, pillaged the grocer-shops. All this "is a frightful crowd which, every time it stirs, seems to declare that the last day of the rich and well-to-do has come; tomorrow it is our turn, to-morrow we shall sleep on eiderdown."--Still more alarming is the attitude of the steady workmen, especially in the suburbs. And first of all, if bread is not as expensive as on the 5th of October, the misery is worse. The production of articles of luxury has been at a standstill for three years, and the unemployed artisan has consumed his small savings. Since the ruin of St. Domingo and the pillaging of grocers' shops colonial products are dear; the carpenter, the mason, the locksmith, the market-porter, no longer has his early cup of coffee, while they grumble every morning at the thought of their patriotism being rewarded by an increase of deprivation.

But more than all this they are now Jacobins, and after nearly three years of preaching, the dogma of popular sovereignty has taken deep root in their empty brains. "In these groups," writes a police commissioner, "the Constitution is held to be useless and the people alone are the law. The citizens of Paris on the public square think themselves the people, populus, what we call the universality of citizens."--It is of no use to tell them that, alongside of Paris, there is a France. Danton has shown them that the capital "is composed of citizens belonging one way or another to the eighty-three departments; that is has a better chance than any other place to appreciate ministerial conduct; that it is the first sentinel of the nation," which makes them confident of being right.--It is of no use to tell them that there are better-informed and more competent authorities than themselves. Robespierre assures them that "in the matter of genius and public-spiritedness the people are infallible, whilst every one else is subject to mistakes," and here they are sure of their capacity.--In their own eyes they are the legitimate, competent authorities for all France, and, during three years, the sole theme their courtiers of the press, tribune, and club, vie with each other in repeating to them, is the expression of the Duc de Villeroy to Louis XIV. when a child: "Look my master, behold this great kingdom! It is all for you, it belongs to you, you are its master!"--Undoubtedly, to swallow and digest such gross irony people must be half-fools or half-brutes; but it is exactly their capacity for self-deception which makes them different from the sensible or passive crowd and casts them into a band whose ascendancy is irresistible. Convinced that a street mob is entitled to absolute rule and that the nation expresses its sovereignty through its gatherings, they alone assemble the street mobs, they alone, by virtue of their conceit and lack of judgment, believe themselves kings.

Such is the new power which, in the early months of the year 1792, starts up alongside of the legal powers. It is not foreseen by the Constitution; nevertheless it exists and declares itself; it is visible and its recruits can be counted. On the 29th of April, with the Assembly consenting, and contrary to the law, three battalions from the suburb of St. Antoine, about 1500 men, march in three columns into the hall, one of which is composed of fusiliers and the other two of pikemen, "their pikes being from eight to ten feet long," of formidable aspect and of all sorts, "pikes with laurel leaves, pikes with clover leaves, pikes à carlet, pikes with turn-spits, pikes with hearts, pikes with serpents tongues, pikes with forks, pikes with daggers, pikes with three prongs, pikes with battle-axes, pikes with claws, pikes with sickles, lance-pikes covered with iron prongs." On the other side of the Seine three battalions from the suburb of St. Marcel are composed and armed in the same fashion. This constitutes a kernel of 3,000 more in other quarters of Paris. Add to these in each of the sixty battalions of the National guard the gunners, almost all of them blacksmiths, locksmiths and horse-shoers, also the majority of the gendarmes, old soldiers discharged for insubordination and naturally inclined to rioting, in all an army of about 9,000 men, not counting the usual accompaniment of vagabonds and mere bandits; ignorant and eager, but men who do their work, well armed, formed into companies, ready to march and ready to strike. Alongside of the talking authorities we have the veritable force that acts, for it is the only one which does act. As formerly the praetorian guard of the Caesars in Rome, or the Turkish guards of the Caliphs of Baghdad, it is henceforth master of the capital, and through the capital, of the Nation.

III.--Its leaders.--Their committee.--Methods for arousing the crowd.

As the troops are so are their leaders. Bulls must have drovers to conduct them, one degree superior to the brute but only one degree, dressed, talking and acting in accordance with his occupation, without dislikes or scruples, naturally or willfully hardened, fertile in jockeying and in the expedients of the slaughterhouse, themselves belonging to the people or pretending to belong to them. Santerre is a brewer of the Faubourg St. Antoine, commander of the battalion of" Enfants Trouvés," tall, stout and ostentatious, with stentorian lungs, shaking the hand of everybody he meets in the street, and when at home treating everybody to a drink paid for by the Duke of Orleans. Legendre is a choleric butcher, who even in the Convention maintains his butchering traits. There are three or four foreign adventurers, experienced in all kinds of deadly operations, using the saber or the bayonet without warning people to get out of the way. Rotonde, the first one, is an Italian, a teacher of English and professional rioter, who, convicted of murder and robbery, is to end his days in Piedmont on the gallows. The second, Lazowski, is a Pole, a former dandy, a conceited fop, who, with Slave facility, becomes the barest of naked sans-culottes; former enjoying a sinecure, then suddenly turned out in the street, and shouting in the clubs against his protectors who he sees put down; he is elected captain of the gunners of the battalion St. Marcel, and is to be one of the September slaughterers. His drawing-room temperament, however, is not rigorous enough for the part he plays in the streets, and at the end of a year he is to die, consumed by a fever and by brandy. The third is another chief slaughterer at the September massacres. Fournier, known as the American, a former planter, who has brought with him from St. Domingo a contempt for human life; "with his livid and sinister countenance, his mustache, his triple belt of pistols, his coarse language, his oaths, he looks like a pirate." By their side we encounter a little hump-backed lawyer named Cuirette-Verrières, an unceasing speaker, who, on the 6th of October, 1789, paraded the city on a large white horse and afterwards pleaded for Marat, which two qualifications with his Punch figure, fully establish him in the popular imagination; the rugged guys, moreover, who hold nocturnal meetings at Santerre's needed a writer and he probably met their requirements.--This secret society can count on other faithfuls. "Brière, wine-dealer, Nicolas, a sapper in the 'Enfants Trouvés' battalion, Gonor, claiming to be one of the victors of the Bastille," Rossignol, an old soldier and afterwards a journeyman-jeweler, who, after presiding at the massacres of La Force, is to become an improvised general and display his incapacity, debauchery, and thievery throughout La Vendée. "There are yet more of them," Huguenin undoubtedly, a ruined ex-lawyer, afterwards carabineer, then a deserter, next a barrier-clerk, now serving as spokesman for the Faubourg St. Honoré and finally president of the September commune; there was also, doubtless, St. Huruge alias Père Adam, the great barker of the Palais-Royal, a marquis fallen into the gutter, drinking with and dressing like a common porter, always flourishing an enormous club and followed by the riffraff.--These are all the leaders. The Jacobins of the municipality and of the Assembly confine their support of the enterprise to conniving at it and to giving it their encouragement. It is better for the insurrection to seem spontaneous. Through caution or shyness the Girondins, Pétion, Manual and Danton himself, keep in the background----there is not reason for their coming forward.--The rest, affiliated with the people and lost in the crowd, are better qualified to fabricate the story which their flock will like. This tale, adapted to the crowd's intellectual limits, form and activity, is both simple and somber, such as children like, or rather a melodrama taken from an alien stage in which the good appear on one side, and the wicked on the other with an ogre or tyrant in the center, some infamous traitor who is sure to be unmasked at the end of the piece and punished according to his deserts, the whole grandiloquent terms and, as a finale, winding up with a grand chorus. In the raw brain of an over-excited workman politics find their way only in the shape of rough-hewn, highly-colored imagery, such as is furnished by the Marseillaise, the Carmagnole, and the Ça ira. The requisite motto is adapted to his use; through this misshapen magnifying glass the most gracious figure appears under a diabolical aspect. Louis XVI. is represented here "as a monster using his power and treasure to oppose the regeneration of the French. A new Charles IX., he desires to bring on France death and desolation. Be gone, cruel man, your crimes must end! Damiens was less guilty than thou art! He was punished with the most horrible torture for having tried to rid France of a monster, while you, attempting twenty-five million times more, are allowed full immunity! Let us trample under our feet this simulacra of royalty! Tremble tyrants, Scoevolas are still amongst you!"

All this is pronounced, declaimed or rather shouted, publicly, in full daylight, under the King's windows, by stump-speakers mounted on chairs, while similar provocations daily flow from the committee installed in Santerre's establishment, now in the shape of displays posted in the faubourgs, now in that of petitions circulated in the clubs and sections, now through motions which are gotten up "among the groups in the Tuileries, in the Palais-Royal, in the Place de Grève and especially on the Place de la Bastille." After the 2nd of June the leaders founded a new club in the church of the "Enfants Trouvés" that they might have their special laboratory and thus do their work on the spot. Like Plato's demagogues, they understand their business. They have discovered the cries which make the popular animal take note, what offense offends him, what charm attracts him, and on what road he should be made to follow. Once drawn in and under way, he will march blindly on, borne along by his own involuntary inspiration and crushing with his mass all that he encounters on his path.

IV.--The 20th of June.

The programme.--The muster.--The procession before the Assembly.--Irruption into the Château.--The King in the presence of the people.

The bait has been carefully chosen and is well presented. It takes the form of a celebration of the anniversary of the oath of the Tennis-court. A tree of Liberty will be planted on the terrace of the Feuillants and "petitions relating to circumstances" will be presented in the Assembly and then to the King. As a precaution, and to impose on the ill-disposed, the petitioners provide themselves with arms and line the approaches.--A popular procession is an attractive thing, and there are so many workers who do not know what to do with their empty day! And, again, it is so pleasant to appear in a patriotic opera while many, and especially women and children, want very much to see Monsieur and Madame Veto. The people from the surrounding suburbs are invited, the homeless prowlers and beggars will certainly join the party, while the numerous body of Parisian loafers, the loungers that join every spectacle can be relied on, and the curious who, even in our time, gather by hundreds along the quays, following a dog that has chanced to tumble into the river. All this forms a body which, without thinking, will follow its head.

At five o'clock in the morning on the 20th of June groups are already formed in the faubourgs St. Antoine and St. Marcel, consisting of National Guards, pikemen, gunners with their cannon, persons armed with sabers or clubs, and women and children.--A notice, indeed, just posted on the walls, prohibits any assemblage, and the municipal officers appear in their scarves and command or entreat the crowd not to break the law. But, in a working-class brain, ideas are as tenacious as they are short-lived. People count on a civic procession and get up early in the morning to attend to it; the cannon have been hitched up, the maypole tree is put on wheels and all is ready for the ceremony, everybody takes a holiday and none are disposed to return home. Besides, they have only good intentions. They know the law as well as the city officials; they are "armed solely to have it observed and respected." Finally, other armed petitioners have already filed along before the National Assembly, and, as one is as good as another, "the law being equal for all," others must be admitted as well. In any event they, too, will ask permission of the National Assembly and they go expressly. This is the last and the best argument of all, and to prove to the city officials that they have no desire to engage in a riot, they request them to join the procession and march along with them.

Meanwhile, time passes. In a crowd irritated by delay, the most impatient, the rudest, those most inclined to commit violence, always lead the rest.--At the head-quarters of the Val-de-Grâce the pikemen seize the cannon and drag them along; the National Guards let things take their course; Saint-Prix and Leclerc, the officers in command, threatened with death, have nothing to do but to yield with a protest.--There is the same state of things in the Montreuil section; the resistance of four out of six of the battalion officers merely served to give full power to the instigator of the insurrection, and henceforth Santerre becomes the sole leader of the assembled crowd. About half-past eleven he leaves his brewery, and, followed by cannon, the flag, and the truck which bears the poplar tree, he places himself at the head of the procession "consisting of about fifteen hundred persons including the bystanders." Like a snowball, however, the troop grows as it marches along until, on reaching the National Assembly, Santerre has behind him from seven to eight thousand persons. Guadet and Vergniaud move that the petitioners be introduced; their spokesman, Huguenin, in a bombastic and threatening address, denounces the ministry, the King, the accused at Orleans, the deputies of the "Right," demands "blood," and informs the Assembly that the people "resolute" is ready to take the law in their own hands. Then, with drums beating and bands playing, the crowd defiles for more than an hour through the chamber under the eyes of Santerre and Saint-Huruge: here and there a few files of the National Guard pass mingled with the throng and lost in "the moving forest of pikes"; all the rest is pure rabble, "hideous faces," says a deputy, on which poverty and loose living have left their marks, ragamuffins, men "without coats," in their shirt-sleeves, armed in all sorts of ways, with chisels and shoe-knives fastened on sticks, one with a saw on a pole ten feet long, women and children, some of them brandishing a saber. In the middle of this procession, an old pair of breeches [culottes] borne on a pike with this motto: Vivent les Sans-Culottes! and, on a pitch-fork, the heart of a calf with this inscription: Coeur d'aristocrate, both significant emblems of the grim humor the imaginations of rag-dealers or butchers might come up with for a political carnival.--This, indeed, it is, they have been drinking and many are drunk. A parade is not enough, they want also to amuse themselves: traversing the hall they sing ça ira and dance in the intervals. They at the same time show their civism by shouting Vive les patriotes! A bas le Veto! They fraternise, as they pass along, with the good deputies of the "Left"; they jeer those of the "Right" and shake their fists at them; one of these, known by his tall stature, is told that his business will be settled for him the first opportunity. Thus do they flaunt their collaborators to the Assembly, everyone prepared and willing to act, even against the Assembly itself.--And yet, with the exception of an iron-railing pushed in by the crowd and an irruption on to the terrace of the "Feuillants," no act of violence was committed. The Paris population, except when in a rage, is rather voluble and curious than ferocious; besides, thus far, no one had offered any resistance. The crowd is now sated with shouting and parading; many of them yawn with boredom and weariness; at four o'clock they have stood on their legs for ten or twelve hours. The human stream issuing from the Assembly and emptying itself into the Carrousel remains stagnant there and seems ready to return to its usual channels.--This is not what the leaders had intended. Santerre, on arriving with Saint-Huruge, cries out to his men, "Why didn't you enter the château? You must go in--that is what we came here for." A lieutenant of the Val-de-Grâce gunners shouts: "We have forced open the Carrousel, we must force open the château too! This is the first time the Val-de-Grâce gunners march--they are not j.... f.... Come, follow me, my men, on to the enemy!--"Meanwhile, outside the gate, some of the municipal officers selected by Pétion amongst the most revolutionary members of the council, overcome resistance by their speeches and commands. 'After all," says one of them, named Mouchet, "the right of petition is sacred."--" Open the gate!" shout Sergent and Boucher-René, "nobody has a right to shut it. Every citizen has a right to go through it!" A gunner raises the latch, the gate opens and the court fills in the winkling of an eye; the crowd rushes under the archway and up the grand stairway with such impetuosity that a cannon borne along by hand reaches the third room on the first story before it stops. The doors crack under the blows of axes and, in the large hall of the Oeil de Boeuf, the multitude find themselves face to face with the King.

In such circumstances the representatives of public authority, the directories, the municipalities, the military chiefs, and, on the 6th of October, the King himself, have all thus far yielded; they have either yielded or perished. Santerre, certain of the issue, preferred to take no part in this affair; he prudently holds back, he shies away, and lets the crowd push him into the council chamber, where the Queen, the young Dauphin, and the ladies have taken refuge. There, with his tall, corpulent figure, he formed a sort of shield to forestall useless and compromising injuries. In the mean time, in the Oeil de Boeuf, he lets things take their course; everything will be done in his absence that ought to be done, and in this he seems to have calculated justly.--On one side, in a window recess, sits the King on a bench, almost alone, while in front of him, as a guard, are four or five of the National Guards; on the other side, in the apartments, is an immense crowd, hourly increasing according as the rumor of the irruption spreads in the vicinity, fifteen or twenty thousand persons, a prodigious accumulation, a pell-mell traversed by eddies, a howling sea of bodies crushing each other, and of which the simple flux and reflux would flatten against the walls obstacles ten times as strong, an uproar sufficient to shatter the window panes, "frightful yells," curses and imprecations, "Down with M. Veto!" "Let Veto go to the devil!" "Take back the patriot ministers!" "He shall sign; we won't go away till he does!"--Foremost among them all, Legendre, more resolute than Santerre, declares himself the spokesman and trustee of the powers of the sovereign people: "Sir," says he to the King, who, he sees, makes a gesture of surprise, "yes, Sir, listen to us; you are made to listen to what we say! You are a traitor! You have always deceived us; you deceive us now! But look out, the measure is full; the people are tired of being played upon!"--" Sire, Sire," exclaims another fanatic, "I ask you in the name of the hundred thousand beings around us to recall the patriot ministers... I demand the sanction of the decree against the priests and the twenty thousand men. Either the sanction or you shall die!"--But little is wanting for the threat to be carried out. The first comers are on hand, "presenting pikes," among them "a brigand," with a rusty sword blade on the end of a pole, "very sharp," and who points this at the King. Afterwards the attempt at assassination is many times renewed, obstinately, by three or four madmen determined to kill, and who make signs of so doing, one, a shabby, ragged fellow, who keeps up his excitement with "the foulest propositions," the second one, "a so-called conqueror of the Bastille," formerly porte-tête for Foulon and Berthier, and since driven out of the battalion, the third, a market-porter, who, "for more than an hour," armed with a saber, makes a terrible effort to make his way to the king.--Nothing is done. The king remains impassible under every threat. He takes the hand of a grenadier who wishes to encourage him, and, placing it on his breast, bids him, "See if that is the beating of a heart agitated by fear." To Legendre and the zealots who call upon him to sanction, he replies without the least excitement:

"I have never departed from the Constitution.... I will do what the Constitution requires me to do.... It is you who break the law." --And, for nearly three hours, remaining standing, blockaded on his bench, he persists in this without showing a sign of weakness or of anger. This cool deportment at last produces an effect, the impression it makes on the spectators not being at all that which they anticipated. It is very clear that the personage before them is not the monster which has been depicted to them, a somber, imperious tyrant, the savage, cunning Charles IX. they had hissed on the stage. They see a man somewhat stout, with placid, benevolent features, whom they would take, without his blue sash, for an ordinary, peaceable bourgeois. His ministers, near by, three or four men in black coats, gentlemen and respectable employees, are just what they seem to be. In another window recess stands his sister, Madame Elizabeth, with her sweet and innocent face. This pretended tyrant is a man like other men; he speaks gently, he says that the law is on his side, and nobody says the contrary; perhaps he is less wrong than he is thought to be. If he would only become a patriot!--A woman in the room brandishes a sword with a cockade on its point; the King makes a sign and the sword is handed to him, which he raises and, hurrahing with the crowd, cries out: Vive la Nation! That is already one good sign. A red cap is shaken in the air at the end of a pole. Some one offers it to him and he puts it on his head; applause bursts forth, and shouts of Vive la Nation! Vive la Liberte! and even vive le Roi!

From this time forth the greatest danger is over. But it is not that the besiegers abandon the siege. "He did damned well," they exclaim, "to put the cap on, and if he hadn't we would have seen what would come of it. And damn it, if he does not sanction the decree against the priests, and do it right off; we will come back every day. In this way we shall tire him out and make him afraid of us.--But the day wears on. The heat is over-powering, the fatigue extreme, the King less deserted and better protected. Five or six of the deputies, three of the municipal officers, a few officers of the National Guard, have succeeded in making their way to him. Pétion himself, mounted on a sofa, harangues the people with his accustomed flattery. At the same time Santerre, aware of the opportunity being lost, assumes the attitude of a liberator, and shouts in his rough voice: "I answer for the royal family. Let me see to it." A line of National Guards forms in front of the King, when, slowly and with difficulty, urged by the mayor, the crowd melts away, and, by eight o'clock in the evening, it is gone.

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