He was beseeching "the Supreme Being," which was the fashionable God in 1789, when they had ceased to believe in heaven, for some chance to bring attention upon him, when all at once, as though the Ruler, under whatever title addressed, had heard the prayer, a poor priest who waited for the King to go by, approached from the roadside to see the august prisoner the nearer, and said as he raised his supplicating hands and tear-wet eyes:
"God bless your Majesty!"
It was a long time since the crowd had a chance of flying into anger. Nothing had presented itself since the hapless Knight of St. Louis, whose head was still following on the pike-point. This occasion was eagerly embraced.
The mob replied to the reverence with a roar: they threw themselves on the priest in a twinkling, and he was flung down and would have been flayed alive before Barnave broke from his abstraction had not the frightened Queen appealed to him.
"Oh, sir, do you not see what is going on?"
He raised his head, plunged a rapid look into the ocean which submerged the priest, and rolled in growling and tumultuous waves up to the carriage; he burst the door with such violence that he would have fallen out if the Princess Elizabeth had not caught him by the coat.
"You villains!" he shouted. "Tigers, who cannot be French men! or France, the home of the brave, has become a den of assassins!"
This apostrophe may appear bombastic to us but it was in the style of the period. Besides, the denunciator belonged to the National Assembly and supreme power spoke by his voice. The crowd recoiled and the old man was saved.
He rose and said: