st
there was the slowly rising tide of the popular impatience, the feeling
that after all the efforts and success of the spring and summer the
situation of affairs was still no better, and that to improve it the
King must come to Paris; all this increasing vastly in force since the
1st of October. Then there was the fact that Paris knew on the evening
of the 4th, that Louis would refuse, or in part refuse, the demands of
the assembly, and it was necessary, therefore, to find a reply to the
King's move. Last of all was hunger. And it was the part of the
Parisian people most nearly touched by hunger that actually raised the
standard of revolt.

The women felt the pinch of famine more bitterly than the men, and the
women played a noteworthy part in the formation of those deep strata of
popular opinion, or instinct, on which in turn each of the
revolutionary parties had to build their power. The women were the
first to turn the cannon against the King, and they were the last to
raise the horrible howl of the guillotine at the prisoners as they {84}
passed the prison gates to go to the scaffold. And the reason is not
far to seek. It was they who had to look after the household, to tend
the sick, to feed the children, and it was they who day after day, year
after year, formed in the long procession waiting to reach the baker's
or the butcher's stall. Often enough they stood and struggled for
hours, sometimes through the whole night, their hearts aching for the
loved ones at home,--at the end of all to find nothing left, to return
empty-handed. So late as the year 1795 there was a period of several
months during which the individual ration, for those who could pay and
for those who were lucky, was but 2 oz. of black bread a day; while
butcher's meat failed completely on many occasions and was always a
costly luxury. The details of the famine are scattered broadly through
the pages of the contemporaries, and at every point the woman appears,
wretched, lamenting, furious, ravenous for food, fighting for it and
plundering, her heart dulled with bitterness, and her mouth distorted
with curses for those pointed out to her as the cause of all her
sufferings. Louis, Marie Antoinette, Brissot, Vergniaud, Hebert, she
cared little what the name was, but was equally ready to rend them when
told that they stood for the starvation of {85} her children, her sick,
or her husband. And she was easily enough persuaded that some one