It was necessary to restore the revolutionary current to its old course, for it had been checked and was running up-stream.
The soul of the party, Mme. Roland, hoped to do this by rousing the Assembly. She chose the orator Vergniaud to make the appeal, and in a splendid speech, he shouted from the rostrum what was already circulating in an under-tone:
"The country is in danger!"
The effect was like a waterspout; the whole House, even to the Royalists, spectators, officials, all were enveloped and carried away by this mighty cyclone; all roared with enthusiasm.
That same evening Barbaroux wrote to his friend Rebecqui, at Marseilles:
"Send me five hundred men eager to die."
On the eleventh of July, the Assembly declared the country to be in danger, but the king withheld his authorization until the twenty-first, late at night. Indeed, this call to arms was an admission that the ruler was impotent, for the nation would not be asked to help herself unless the king could or would do nothing.
Great terror made the palace quiver in the interval, as a plot was expected to break out on the fourteenth, the anniversary of the taking of the Bastile—a holiday.
Robespierre had sent an address out from the Jacobin Club which suggested regicide.