In exitu Israel

by S. Baring-Gould

CHAPTER XXXI.

That night few persons in Paris closed their eyes. The sky was red with fires made at all the barriers. In 1784 the octroi wall had been built round Paris, with gates called barrières, at which taxes were levied on eatables and wines brought into the capital. The people, who regarded this tax as an imposition, unjust and intolerable, attacked the gates during the day and again during the night, and destroyed them. The armourers' shops were pillaged, and the streets were paraded by bands of men armed with such weapons as they could get. The Baron de Besenval, finding that resistance was impossible, withdrew his troops from the town, and sent to Versailles for orders.

On Monday morning the electors assembled at the Hôtel de Ville, and thinking it necessary to give their authority a more legal form, they appointed M. de Flesselles administrator of the city. He refused to act without a formal requisition. This was given him, and a number of electors were associated with him to form a municipality invested with full powers. This municipality summoned before it the lieutenant of police, and in a few hours drew up a plan for the formation of a militia corps, to be composed of forty-eight thousand men, who were to wear instead of the green cockade another composed of blue and red, the Parisian colours. Every one with this cockade bearing arms, who was not enrolled in the corps of his district, was to be disarmed and punished.

The provost Flesselles by no means sympathised with this movement, and used every opportunity that presented itself of retarding the enrolment, and the subsequent armament of the body of militia so rapidly formed. He had been that day summoned by the king to Versailles, yet he dared not go there.

The people clamoured for guns. The Garde-Meuble had been broken open in the morning, and its rusty swords and antique armour had been distributed among the mob. But that was nothing. Flesselles promised twelve thousand guns the same day; before the night fell, surely the Marshal de Broglie would pour his troops upon Paris—so thought the provost. Berthier, it was well known, had caused thirty thousand muskets to be imported, and had commanded two hundred thousand cartridges to be made. The people grew impatient. Valuable time was being lost; the mercenaries might be upon them at any moment. The provost then declared that the guns he had promised were on their way to the Hôtel de Ville from the manufactory at Charleville, and waggons were shortly after seen to traverse La Grève, inscribed with the word Artillerie. These waggons drew up at the entrance of the Hôtel, and the cases were borne into the magazines.

The provost then refused to unpack the weapons, without French guardsmen to attend to their orderly distribution. The officers declined to send soldiers for the purpose; consequently, the people insisted on the electors opening the cases. They did so, and found them to contain old linen.

At this sight the people became furious, and threatened the provost, so that to appease them he was obliged to give orders for the immediate manufacture of fifty thousand pikes. As the people could see the fires roar, the bellows go, and hear the clink of the hammer, and see the flash of the sparks, they were satisfied, at least for a while.

In the meantime, the arsenal was besieged by a crowd, desiring gunpowder. They were solemnly assured that it was empty. An invalid and a wig-maker were stationed near it to keep watch. Presently they saw a number of barrels brought out and rolled on board some boats in the Seine. They gave the alarm; the boats were seized, and the gunpowder transported to the Hôtel de Ville, and distributed among the people by the Abbé Lefebvre.

The report spread that five regiments at S. Denis were on the move with forty pieces of artillery; that at Gonesse there were fifty cannons, and at Bourget sixty, and that the troops were advancing.