"ON THE ALTAR OF THE COUNTRY,
"FIELD OF MARS, JULY 17 OF THE YEAR III OF LIBERTY.
"Representatives of the Nation:
"You are approaching the end of your labors. A great crime has been committed. Louis XVI flees, unworthily abandons his post. The citizens arrest him at Varennes. He is brought back to Paris. The people of the capital immediately demand that the fate of the guilty one be left undecided until an expression of opinion be obtained from the eighty-three departments of France. A multitude of addresses demanded of you that you pass judgment on Louis XVI. You, gentlemen, have prejudged him innocent and inviolable!
"Legislators, such was not the opinion of the people. Justice must be done.
"Everything compels us to demand of you, in the name of all France, that you reconsider your decision, that you hold that the offense of Louis XVI is proven; that the King, by the very fact of his flight, has abdicated.
"Receive, then, his abdication.
"Legislators, convoke a new constituent power, which will proceed in a truly national manner to deal with this guilty King, and above all to the organization of a new executive power.
"Signed:
"PEYRE,
"VACHART,
"ROBERT,
"DEMOY."
The reading of the petition, concise, measured in terms, but marked with energy, was received with unanimous applause. Its summary tenor, repeated from mouth to mouth down the whole length of the Field of Mars, received the assent of everyone. Then began an admirable scene. The petitioners, men, women and children, forming in long files, in perfect order, to the left of the staging, stopped one by one at the foot of the Altar of the Country, placing their signatures upon the thick book, whose many pages were bound together with lacings, and then descended on the other side of the stage; and all without confusion, without outcry, as if each were deeply conscious of the importance of the civic act.
Toward three o'clock I saw three municipal officers, girt in their sashes, mount the stage. They were Leroux, Hardy, and Renaud. The Jacobin delegation having given them notice of the petition, one of the three, after reading it to his colleagues, addressed the multitude as follows: