"And when do the allied sovereigns expect to be in Paris?" inquired Mme. Campan.
"Between the fifteenth and twentieth of August," was the reply.
"God grant it!" said the lady.
But the prayer was not granted; or, if heard, Heaven sent France the succor she had not dreamed of—the Marseillaise Hymn of Liberty.
[CHAPTER VII.]
THE MEN FROM MARSEILLES.
We have said that Barbaroux had written to a friend in the south to send him five hundred men willing to die.
Who was the man who could write such lines? and what influence had he over his friends?
Charles Barbaroux was a very handsome young man of barely twenty-five, who was reproached for his beauty, and considered by Mme. Roland as frivolous and too generally amorous. On the contrary, he loved his country alone, or must have loved her best, for he died for her.
Son of a hardy sea-faring man, he was a poet and orator when quite young—at the breaking out of trouble in his native town during the election of Mirabeau. He was then appointed secretary to the Marseilles town board. Riots at Arles drew him into them; but the seething caldron of Paris claimed him; the immense furnace which needed perfume, the huge crucible hissing for purest metal.