"If the revolution one of these days miscarries, it will be the fools of the stamp of this Lebrenn who will be to blame," continued Desmarais bitterly. "They will not comprehend that the ideal government is a bourgeois, constitutional monarchy, amenable to the courts, disarmed, and subordinated to an assembly of representatives of the Third Estate. These miserable workingmen dishonor the revolution by assassination."
"Father," responded Charlotte firmly, her forehead flushed with a generous resolve, "Monsieur John Lebrenn can not be called an assassin."
"I, too, believed in the honesty of that workman whom I showered with favors, in spite of the warnings of your uncle Hubert," replied Desmarais. "But when John Lebrenn takes part in this insurrection, I withdraw my esteem. I look upon him as a brigand!"
"John Lebrenn a brigand!" exclaimed Charlotte, unable to restrain her indignation. "Is it you, father, who thus insult a man whom you but now called your friend! What a contradiction in your language!"
"My dear husband," interposed Madam Desmarais, interrupting her daughter to retard an explanation of which she dreaded the issue: "You have not yet told us what compelled your departure from Versailles, and why you are in Paris instead of in session with the National Assembly."
"Last evening and night the most sinister rumors were in circulation about Versailles. According to some, the court party had secured from the King the dissolution of the Assembly. The members of the Left were to be arrested as seditious characters, and imprisoned or banished from the kingdom."
"Great heaven—that is where you sit, my friend! To what danger have you not been exposed!"
"They would not have taken me from my curule chair alive," responded the attorney grandly. "But the court party, frightened by the peals of the cannon at the Bastille, the roar of which carried to Versailles, drew back before the fearsome consequences of such an attempt."
"I breathe again," exclaimed Madam Desmarais with a sigh of relief. "You are neither a fugitive nor proscribed. God be praised!"
"Still, other reports agitated Versailles and the Assembly on the score of the uneasiness in Paris. During the night they saw, from the housetops, the gleam of burning barriers. In the morning a courier despatched by Baron Bezenval, commandant of Paris, brought news to the government that the people of the suburb of St. Antoine, assisted by those from the other suburbs, were besieging the Bastille. This sort of aggression was considered by the majority of the representatives an enterprise as blameworthy as it was senseless. No one could conjecture that a mob of people, in rags, almost without arms, could take a fortress defended by a garrison and a battery of artillery. The attempt was in the highest degree extravagant."