ey left
the Tuileries in such haste that they failed to give orders to
the faithful Garde Municipale, who would have suffered the fate
of the Swiss Guard in 1792, had not National Guards in the crowd
assisted them to change their conspicuous uniforms and to escape
out of the windows.

During the first half hour after the invasion of the palace a great
deal of money and many other valuables disappeared; but after that
time it was death to appropriate anything, even if it were of little
value.

Soon the gardens of the Tuileries were white with papers flung
from the windows of the palace, many of them of great historical
value. A piece of pink gauze, the property, probably, of some
maid-of-honor, streamed from one of the windows in the roof and
fluttered across the whole building. The crowd, in high good humor,
tossed forth livery coats, fragments of state furniture, and papers.
The beds still stood unmade, and all the apparatus of the ladies'
toilet-tables remained in disorder. In one royal bed-chamber a
man was rubbing pomade with both hands into his hair, another was
drenching himself with perfume, a third was scrubbing his teeth
furiously with a brush that had that morning parted the lips of
royalty. In another room a man _en blouse_ was seated at a piano
playing the "Marseillaise" to an admiring audience (the "Marseillaise"
had been forbidden in Paris for many years). Elsewhere a party of
_gamins_ were turning over a magnificent scrapbook. In the next
room was a grand piano, on which four men were thumping at once.
In another, a party of working-men were dancing a quadrille, while
a gentleman played for them upon a piano. At every chimney-piece
and before every work of art stood a guard, generally ragged and
powder-stained, bearing a placard, "Death to Robbers!" while at the
head of the Grand Staircase others stood, crying, "Enter, messieurs!
Enter! We don't have cards of admission to this house every day!"
While the cry that passed through the crowd was: "Look as much as
you like, but take nothing!" "Are not we magnificent in our own
house, Monsieur?" said a _gamin_ to an Englishman; while another
was to be seen walking about in one of poor Queen Amelie's state
head-dresses, surmounted by a bird-of-paradise with a long tail.

At first the crowd injured nothing, even the king's portraits being
respected; but after a while the destruction of state furniture
began. Three men were seen smoking in the state bed; some