By whom was this mob moved, stirred, and excited? By a man of powerful build, leonine mane, and roaring voice, whom Santerre was to find waiting in his brewery office—Danton.
None better than this terrible wizard of the Revolution could evoke terror from the slums and hurl it into the old palace of Catherine di Medicis. Danton was the gong of riots; the blow he received he imparted vibratingly to all the multitude around him. Through Hebert he was linked to the populace, as by the Duke of Orleans he was affixed to the throne.
Whence came his power, doomed to be so fatal to royalty? To the queen, the spiteful Austrian who had not liked Lafayette to be mayor of Paris, but preferred Petion, the Republican, who had no sooner brought back the fugitive king to the Tuileries than he set to watch him closely.
Petion had made his two friends, Manuel and Danton, the Public Prosecutor and the Vice, respectively.
On the twentieth of June, under the pretext of presenting a petition to the king and raising a liberty pole, the palace was to be stormed.
The adepts alone knew that France was to be saved from the Lafayettes and the Moderates, and a warning to be given to the incorrigible monarch that there are some political tempests in which a vessel may be swamped with all hands aboard; that is, a king be overwhelmed with throne and family as in the oceanic abysses.
Billet knew more than Santerre when he accompanied him on his tour, after presenting himself as from the committee.
Danton called on the brewer to arrange for the meeting of the popular leaders that night at Charenton for the march on the morrow, presumably to the House, but really to the Tuileries.
The watchword was, "Have done with the palace!" but the way remained vague.
On the evening of the nineteenth, the queen saw a woman clad in scarlet, with a belt full of pistols, gallop, bold and terrible, along the main streets. It was Theroigne Mericourt, the beauty of Liege, who had gone back to her native country to help its rebellion; but the Austrians had caught her and kept her imprisoned for eighteen months.