Thus, before the action, blood was spilled in two places; on the City Hall steps and in Feuillants' yard. We shall presently see it flow in the Tuileries; the brook after the rain-drops, the river after the brook.
While this massacre was being perpetrated, about nine A. M., some eleven thousand National Guards, gathered by the alarm-bell of Barbaroux and the drum-beat of Santerre, marched down the St. Antoine ward and came out on the Strand. They wanted the order to assail the Tuileries.
Made to wait for an hour, two stories beguiled them: either concessions were hoped from the court, or the St. Marceau ward was not ready, and they could not fall on without them.
A thousand pikemen waxed restless; as ever, the worst armed wanted to begin the fray. They broke through the ranks of the Guard, saying that they were going to do without them and take the palace.
Some of the Marseilles Federals and a few French Guards—of the same regiments which had stormed the Bastile three years before—took the lead and were acclaimed as chiefs. These were the vanguard of the insurrection.
In the meanwhile, the aid who had seen Mandat murdered had raced back to the Tuileries; but it was not till after the king and the queen had returned from the fiasco of a review that he announced the ghastly news.
The sound of a disturbance mounted to the first floor and entered by the open windows.
The City and the National Guards and the artillerists—the patriots, in short—had taunted the grenadiers with being the king's tools, saying that they were bought up by the court; and as they were ignorant of their commander's murder by the mob, a grenadier shouted:
"It looks as though that shuffler Mandat had sent few aristocrats here."
Mandat's eldest son was in the Guards' ranks—we know where the other boy was, uselessly trying to defend his father on the City Hall steps. At this insult to his absent sire, the young man sprung out of the line with his sword flourished. Three or four gunners rushed to meet him. Weber, the queen's attendant, was among the St. Roch district grenadiers, dressed as a National Guardsman. He flew to the young man's help. The clash of steel was heard as the quarrel spread between the two parties.