of noble birth, but most ignoble heart[1], now
practiced toward his king and queen. Sentinels were placed along every
passage of the palace, and, that they might have their prisoners
constantly in sight, the door of every room was kept open day and night.
The queen was not allowed even to close her bed-chamber, and a soldier was
placed so as at all times to command a sight of the whole room; the only
moment that the door was permitted to be shut being a short period each
morning while she was dressing.

But after a time she rallied, and even began again to think the future not
wholly desperate. She always looked at the most promising side of affairs,
and the first shock of the anguish felt at Varennes had scarcely passed
away, when, with irrepressible sanguineness, she began to look around her
and search for some foundation on which to build fresh hopes. She even
thought that she had found it in the divisions which were becoming daily
more conspicuous in the Assembly itself. She had yet to learn that at such
times violence always overpowers moderation, and that the worse men are,
the more certain are they to obtain the upper hand.

The divisions among her enemies were indeed so furious as to justify at
one time the expectation that one party would destroy the other. The
Jacobins summoned a vast meeting, whose members they fixed beforehand at a
hundred thousand citizens, to meet on Sunday, the 17th of July, to
petition the Assembly to dethrone the king. On the appointed day, long
before the hour fixed for the meeting, a fierce riot took place, the
causes and even the circumstances of which have never been clearly
ascertained, but which soon became marked with scenes of extraordinary
violence. La Fayette, who tried to crush it in the bud, was pelted and
fired at. Bailly hung out the red flag, the token of martial law being
proclaimed, at the Hotel de Ville, The mob pelted the National Guard. The
National Guard, too much exasperated and alarmed to obey La Fayette's
order to fire over the people's heads, at one volley shot down a hundred
of the rioters. The Jacobin leaders fled in alarm. Robespierre, who had
been one of the chief organizers of the tumult, being also one of the
basest of cowards, was the most terrified of all, and fled for shelter to
his admirer, of congenial spirit, Madame Roland, whose protection he
afterward repaid by sending her to the scaffold. The riot was quelled, and
the officers of the National Guar