away in that manner, has
not the smallest humor to fire! At five o'clock this morning, as he
lay dreaming, oblivious in the Ecole Militaire, a "figure" stood
suddenly at his bedside; "with face rather handsome, eyes inflamed,
speech rapid and curt, air audacious:" such a figure drew Priam's
curtains! The message and monition of the figure was that resistance
would be hopeless; that if blood flowed, woe to him who shed it. Thus
spoke the figure: and vanished. "Withal there was a kind of eloquence
that struck one." Besenval admits that he should have arrested him,
but did not. Who this figure with inflamed eyes, with speech rapid and
curt, might be? Besenval knows, but mentions not. Camille Desmoulins?
Pythagorean Marquis Valadi, inflamed with "violent motions all night
at the Palais Royal"? Fame names him "Young M. Meillar"; then shuts
her lips about him forever.

In any case, behold, about nine in the morning, our National
Volunteers, rolling in long wide flood south-westward to the Hotel des
Invalides, in search of the one thing needful. King's Procureur M.
Ethys de Corny and officials are there; the Cure of Saint-Etienne du
Mont marches unpacific at the head of his militant Parish; the Clerks
of the Basoche in red coats we see marching, now Volunteers of the
Palais Royal;--National Volunteers, numerable by tens of thousands; of
one heart and mind. The King's Muskets are the Nation's; think, old M.
de Sombreuil, how, in this extremity, thou wilt refuse them! Old M. de
Sombreuil would fain hold parley, send couriers, but it skills not:
the walls are scaled, no Invalide firing a shot; the gates must be
flung open. Patriotism rushes in tumultuous, from grunsel up to
ridge-tile, through all rooms and passages; rummaging distractedly for
arms. What cellar or what cranny can escape it? The arms are found;
all safe there, lying packed in straw,--apparently with a view to
being burnt! More ravenous than famishing lions over dead prey, the
multitude, with clangor and vociferation, pounces on them; struggling,
dashing, clutching,--to the jamming-up, to the pressure, fracture, and
probable extinction of the weaker Patriot. And so, with such
protracted crash of deafening, most discordant Orchestra-music, the
Scene is changed; and eight-and-twenty thousand sufficient firelocks
are on the shoulders of as many National Guards, lifted thereby out of
darkness into fiery light.

Let Besenval look at the glitter of these muskets as th