The Parliament, more and more bewildered, vacillated and was hardly heard as the two antagonists rose from their places to fight. The deputies refused all action. It had been proposed to them to condemn La Fayette for a hurried journey he had taken to Paris after the last insurrection to defend the King. They had refused by a very great majority. Now, on this 9th of August, the fatal eve of the struggle, they debated an academic point—whether the King should abdicate or no; they adjourned it to dine ... and after dinner they did not meet.
But all the while upon that Thursday evening troops were afoot along the Rueil road; the doors of the palace were open to men, who entered one by one, armed and were stationed; the sound of carpenters was heard in the Long Gallery of the Louvre, sawing the planking of the floors, by night, to make a gap between the Louvre and the Tuileries;[[27]] mounted police rode up in squads to the courtyard and took their stations; there was also the rumbling of waggons. In the sections south of the river and eastwards, St. Antoine and St. Marcel were moving; wherever the people had strained at the leash too long, the popular assemblies sat in their close halls choosing the men who should take the Guildhall by right of the city’s decision and in spite of the law, and proclaim the insurrection.
[27]. The gap was six feet broad. Too narrow; for the insurgents next day leapt it and bridged it, and by that entry forced the Tuileries.
The last of the day declined and the night came, but the unnatural heat would not decline, and the open windows all about, the lights shining from them, and the vigil which so many kept, gave the effect of an illumination.
That night, short and stifling as it was, was drowsy; a necessity for sleep oppressed the city. Danton himself, in the thick of the rising, attempted a moment of repose; he had hardly lain down when he was roused again. The watchers in the palace felt midnight upon them and would have slept. The barrack-beds which filled the attics in their regular lines were strewn with men; the gentry who had volunteered, certain also of the Militia, lay silent in the darkness, their muskets slung beside them, their large allowance of cartridges served. Below in the great rooms and on the stairways groups of mixed soldiery lay huddled, servants armed, and policemen: every kind of man. The Regulars who formed the core of this force, the Swiss, lounged in their bare guard-room or sat silent upon the stone benches of the yard; some few files of them stood at ease upon the stairs of the lesser hall.
Upon this silence there crashed at about a quarter to one o’clock the noise of cannon. The report was hard and close at hand—it came from the Pont Neuf at the further end of the Louvre, and the united fabric of the long walls trembled to it; the heavy pictures and the mirrors shook. The six thousand who garrisoned the Tuileries expected an immediate advance of the insurrection: for a moment the whole palace was roused. Those battalions of Militia which had been camped in the garden for a reserve began to file in by the central doors; the cavalry mounted to take up their stations at the narrow issues of the Louvre, and everywhere the lights moving before the windows of the vast façade showed the ordering of men.
This general stir had hardly arisen when it was perceived that this first shot had been but a signal, for to the call of that cannon no other succeeded, but almost immediately the steeples of the city trembled to the first notes of bells.
The deep and heavy bells, that had for centuries raised the alarm of invasion or of fire, began to boom just east of the University; they were answered by the peal of St. Anthony over the river, by the tocsins of St. John and St. Gervase; St. Laurence rang, and southward upon the night boomed the huge tower of the Abbey, which had heard the same sound nine hundred years before, when the dust of the Barbarian march hung over Enghien, and smoke went up from burning farms all down the Seine. The Cathedral followed: thenceforward no one could hear the striking of the hours, for the still air of the night pulsed everywhere with the riot of the bells. Two sounds alone could pierce the clamour: the high bugle-call to which the French still mobilise, and the sullen fury of the drums. The horses, therefore, of the defenders in the courts of the palace, the continual clattering of their hoofs upon the paving, the clink of metal as the lines were formed, the tramp of the reinforcements arriving—all the movement of the six thousand who gathered to support the Crown, was set to this music, and the air they breathed was full of the noise of the bells.
Yet for some hours after the posts had been taken the advent of the rebels was expected in vain. Paris seemed empty, or full only of this increasing and ominous sound. Of men there was no trace. The stone courtyards before the palace and the streets that led to the Square of the Carrousel were silent. They lay open and deserted under the sky, and so remained even when the first stars paled and when there was already a hint of dawn. A doubt rose among the Royalists, first whispered, then openly spoken, and leading at last to jests: the insurrection had missed fire; the bells had failed. No voice of the insurgents had been heard, nor had any rider brought news of their approach, when the last of the stars had gone and the Militia companies, still remaining as a reserve in the western gardens, saw the day rise gorgeously beyond the palace they were to defend.