Far off along the river-side one could still hear a rhythm and a tramp of men. It was the marching of the Marseillese with their prisoners: for they had made prisoners and disdained to massacre. They had saved somewhat more than a company of the Guard and bore them escort. The fight was done.
It was just after ten o’clock. In those two hours, or little more, of doubt, in that one hour of combat, there had perished many thousands of men and the tradition of nine hundred years.
The day passed without wind or air, a day of increasing clamour. The conquering populace entered by deputations, and with the rhetoric of the poor and of their leaders before the bar of the manège. They demanded and obtained the suspension of Louis “till the National Convention should be called.” They brought spoils religiously to that bar, “lest they should be thought thieves.” They harangued and they declaimed—by the mouth of leaders.
Far off in the chapel of the palace a young man at the organ played the “Dies Iræ” for his whim. Those who had so lately been the masters of the palace sat huddled in the box of the Logotachygraphe.
If the modern reader would have some conception of it, this “loge” of the shorthand reporter, let him think, if he is rich, of a box at the opera, or, if he is poor, of a cabin upon a steamer: such was its size.
Louis XVI. and one or two of his armed gentlemen, the Queen, the little children and their governess, sat packed hour after hour in that little den; through the torn grating of it they could see the vast oval of the riding-school, its sweep of benches under the candle-light. It was a huge pit, from whence in a confusion of speech and clamour rose the smoke of their fate.
The summer night had been so tedious and so burning that in their ten-foot square of a hutch the refugees had hardly endured it. The little child had fallen into a stupid sleep upon his mother’s knees, and a sweat unnatural to childhood so bathed his exhausted face that the Queen would not let it remain. She turned for a handkerchief to a gentleman of theirs: he gave her his—but there was the blood of a wound upon it.
Midnight had passed, and they still sat thus packed and buried; before them still rose the sonorous cries of the invading mob, the interjections of the Parliament, the rhetoric of the last speeches. The hundreds of lights still flamed in the double chandeliers of the enormous hall; the roof and the planks of the half-empty benches around the arena still sent back echoes.
It was two in the morning before the doors could open on them, and with the sweep of cooler air came the roar of the populace still on guard after all these eighteen hours. The crowd pressed against the railings as a strong escort hurried the King and Queen across a little corner of the gardens to the deserted monastery next door. There were large candles thrust into the barrels of chance muskets: the night was calm and they could burn. By that faint and smoky light, which but just caught the faces of the crowd beyond, they hurried into the door of the Feuillants.