Just then the whole Faubourg St. Antoine came marching along in solid column. They marched through the Carrousel, entered the court, and placed six pieces of cannon in battery to open a fire upon the palace. It was to avoid, if possible, a conflict, that the guards had been withdrawn from the court into the palace. The shouts of a countless multitude applauded this military movement of the mob. The Swiss had received command from the king not to fire. The crowd cautiously pressed nearer and nearer to the door, and at length, emboldened by the forbearance of the defenders of the palace, seized, with long poles to which hooks were attached, one after another of the sentinels, and, with shouts, captured and disarmed them. Thus five of the Swiss troops were taken prisoners.
MASSACRE OF THE ROYAL GUARD, AUGUST 10, 1792.
At last a single shot was fired, no one can tell on which side. It was the signal for blood. The Swiss, crowded upon the magnificent marble stairs, rising one above another, occupied a very formidable position. They instantly opened a deadly fire. Volley succeeded volley, and every bullet told upon the dense mass crowding the court. At the same moment, from every window of the palace, a storm of shot was showered down upon the foe. In a moment the pavement was red with blood, and covered with the dying and the dead. The artillerymen abandoned their pieces, and the whole multitude rushed pell-mell, trampling the dead and wounded beneath them in frantic endeavors to escape from the court into the Carrousel. In a few moments the whole court was evacuated, and remained strewed with pikes, muskets, grenadiers' caps, and gory bodies.
The besiegers, however, soon rallied. Following the disciplined troops from Marseilles, who were led by able officers, the multitude returned with indescribable fury to the charge. Cannon-balls, bullets, and grapeshot dashed in the doors and the windows. Most of the loyalist gentlemen escaped by a secret passage through the long gallery of the Louvre, as the victorious rabble, with pike, bayonet, and sabre, poured resistlessly into the palace and rushed through all its apartments. The Swiss threw down their arms and begged for quarter. But the pitiless mob, exasperated by the slaughter of their friends, knew no mercy. Indiscriminate massacre ensued, accompanied with every conceivable act of brutality. For four hours the butchery continued, as attics, closets, cellars, chimneys, and vaults were searched, and the terrified victims were dragged out to die. Some leaped from the windows and endeavored to escape through the Garden. They were pursued and mercilessly cut down. Some climbed the marble monuments. The assassins, unwilling to injure the statuary, pricked them down with their bayonets and then slaughtered them at their feet. Seven hundred and fifty Swiss were massacred in that day of blood.
The Assembly during these hours were powerless, and they awaited in intense anxiety the issue of the combat. Nothing can more impressively show the weak and frivolous mind of the king than that, in such an hour, seeing the painter David in the hall, he inquired of him,
"How soon shall you probably have my portrait completed?"
David brutally replied, "I will never, for the future, paint the portrait of a tyrant until his head lies before me on the scaffold."[356]
The queen sat in haughty silence. Her compressed lip, burning eye, and hectic cheek indicated the emotions of humiliation and of indignation with which she was consumed. The young princess wept, and her fevered face was stained with the dried current of her tears. The dauphin, too young to appreciate the terrible significance of the scene, looked around in bewildered curiosity.