At eleven o'clock reiterated shouts of victory, which rose from the Garden, the palace, the Carrousel, and all the adjoining streets and places, proclaimed that the triumph of the people was complete. The Assembly, now overawed, unanimously passed a decree suspending the king, dismissing the Royalist ministers, recalling the Girondist ministry, and convoking a National Assembly for the trial of the king. As Vergniaud read, in accents of grief, this decree to which the Assembly had been forced, the king listened intently, and then said satirically to M. Coustard, who was standing by his side,
"This is not a very constitutional act."
"True," M. Coustard replied; "but it is the only means of saving your majesty's life."
The Assembly immediately enacted the decrees, which the king had vetoed, banishing the refractory priests and establishing a camp near Paris. Danton,[357] whose tremendous energies had guided the insurrection, was appointed Minister of Justice. Monge, the illustrious mathematician, by the nomination of his equally illustrious friend Condorcet, was placed at the head of the Marine. Lebrun, a man of probity and untiring energy, was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Thus was the whole government effectually revolutionized and reorganized. During all the long hours of this day the royal family sat in the crowded Assembly almost suffocated with heat, and enduring anguish which no tongue can tell. The streets were filled with uproar, and the waves of popular tumult dashed against the old monastery of the Feuillans, even threatening to break in the doors. The regal victims listened to the decrees which tore the crown from the brow of the king, and which placed his sceptre in the hands of his most envenomed foes. In the conflict with the defenders of the palace, between three and four thousand of the populace had perished, in revenge for which nearly eight hundred of the inmates of the Tuileries had been massacred. The relatives of the slain citizens, exasperated beyond measure, were clamorous for the blood of the king as the cause of the death of their friends. There was no possible covert for the royal family but in the Assembly. Fifty armed soldiers, with bayonets fixed, surrounded them in their box, and yet it was every moment feared that the populace would break in and satiate their rage with the blood of the monarch and his family.
The king was ever famed for his ravenous appetite. Even in the midst of these terrific scenes he was hungry and called for food. Bread, wine, and cold viands were brought to him. He ate and drank voraciously to the extreme mortification of the queen, who could not but perceive how little respect the conduct of the king inspired. Neither she, Madame Elizabeth, nor the children could taste of any food. They merely occasionally moistened their fevered lips with iced water.
It was now ten o'clock in the evening. The night was calm and beautiful. The tumult of the day was over, but the terrific excitement of the scene had brought the whole population of Paris out into the promenades. Fires were still blazing beneath the trees of the Tuileries, consuming the furniture which had been thrown from the windows of the chateau. Lurid flames flashed from the barracks of the Swiss in the court-yard, which had been set on fire, streaming over the roof of the palace, and illuminated both banks of the Seine.
The whole number slain during the day, Royalists and Revolutionists, amounted to over four thousand. Many of the dead had been removed by relatives, but the ground was still covered with the bodies of the slain, who were entirely naked, having been stripped of their clothing by those wretches who ever swarm in the streets of a great city, and who find their carnival in deeds of violence and blood. By order of the insurrectional committee at the Hôtel de Ville, who had deposed the municipal government and usurped its authority, these dead bodies were collected and piled in vast heaps in the court-yards, in the Garden, in the Place Louis XV., and in the Elysian Fields. Immense quantities of wood were thrown upon them, and the whole city was illuminated by the glare of these funeral fires. The Swiss and the Marsellais, the Royalists and the Jacobins, were consumed together, and the ashes were swept clean from the pavement into the Seine.
As these scenes at midnight were transpiring in the streets, the Assembly sent a summary of its decrees to be read by torch-light to the groups of the people. It was hoped that these decrees would satisfy them, and put a stop to any farther acts of violence on the morrow. It was two o'clock in the morning before the Assembly suspended its sitting. For seventeen hours the royal family had sat in the reporters' box, enduring all of humiliation and agony which human hearts can feel.
In the upper part of the old monastery, above the committee-rooms of the Assembly, there was a spacious corridor, from which opened several cells formerly used by the monks. These cells, with walls of stone and floors of brick, and entirely destitute of furniture, were as gloomy as the dungeons of a prison. Here only could the king and his family find safety for the night. Some articles of furniture were hastily collected from different parts of the building, and four of these rooms were prepared for the royal party. Five nobles, who had heroically adhered to the king in these hours of peril, occupied one, where, wrapped in their cloaks and stretched out upon the floor, they could still watch through the night over the monarch. The king took the next. It was furnished with a table, and a plain wooden bedstead. He bound a napkin around his head for a night-cap, and threw himself, but partially undressed, upon his uncurtained bed. The queen, with her two children, took the next cell. Madame Elizabeth, with the governess of the children, Madame de Tourzel, and the Princess Lamballe, who had joined the royal family in the evening, took the fourth. Thus, after thirty-six hours of sleeplessness and terror, the royal family were left to such repose as their agitated minds could attain.