The crowd was beside itself with delight, and their cries were answered from without by the demand of the bloodthirsty rabble—"How soon are you going to throw out the heads of the king and the queen?"
Marie Antoinette had meanwhile succeeded in pacifying the dauphin. She raised herself up, and when she saw that the king had gone out, she started toward the door.
Her faithful friends stopped the way; they reminded her that she was not simply a queen, that she was a mother, too. They conjured her with tears to give ear to prudence—not to rush in vain into danger, and imperil the king still more.
"No one shall hinder me from doing what is my duty," cried the queen. "Leave the doorway free."
But her friends would not yield; they defied even the wrath of the queen. At that moment, some of the National Guards came in through another door, and pacified Marie Antoinette, assuring her that the life of the king was not threatened.
In the mean while the shouting came nearer and nearer, the cries resounded from the guard-room, the doors were torn open, and the people surged in, in immense waves, like the sea lashed into fury by the storm. The National Guards rolled a table before the queen and her children, and placed themselves at the two sides to defend them.
Only a bit of wood now separated the queen from her enemies, who brandished their weapons at her. But Marie Antoinette had now regained her whole composure. She stood erect; at her right hand, her daughter, who nestled up to her mother—at her left, the dauphin, who, with wide-open eyes and looks of astonishment, gazed at the people bursting in. Behind the queen were Princesses Lamballe and Tarente, and Madame Tourzel.
A man, with dishevelled hair and bare bosom, gave the queen a handful of rods, bearing the inscription, "For Marie Antoinette!" Another showed her a guillotine, a third a gallows, with the inscription, "Tremble, tyrant! thy hour has come!" Another held up before her, on the point of a pike, a human heart dripping with blood, and cried: "Thus shall they all bleed—the hearts of tyrants and aristocrats!"
The queen did not let her eyes fall, her fixed look rested upon the shrieking and howling multitude; but when this man, with the bleeding heart, approached her, her eyelids trembled—a deathly paleness spread over her cheeks, for she recognized him—Simon the cobbler—and a fearful presentiment told her that this man, who had always been for her the incarnation of hatred, is now, when her life is threatened, to be the source of her chief peril.
From the distance surged in the cries: "Long live Santerre! Long live the Faubourg Saint Antoine! Long live the sans-culottes!"