s. As if ideas were to be impaled on bayonets!

The war between the Privileged and the Court on one side, and the
Assembly and the People on the other had begun.

The Third Estate contained itself, and waited; waited with the patience
of nature; waited a month whilst, with the paralysis of business now
complete, the skeleton hand of famine took a firmer grip of Paris;
waited a month whilst Privilege gradually assembled an army in
Versailles to intimidate it--an army of fifteen regiments, nine of
which were Swiss and German--and mounted a park of artillery before
the building in which the deputies sat. But the deputies refused to be
intimidated; they refused to see the guns and foreign uniforms; they
refused to see anything but the purpose for which they had been brought
together by royal proclamation.

Thus until the 10th of June, when that great thinker and metaphysician,
the Abbe Sieyes, gave the signal: "It is time," said he, "to cut the
cable."

And the opportunity came soon, at the very beginning of July. M. du
Chatelet, a harsh, haughty disciplinarian, proposed to transfer the
eleven French Guards placed under arrest from the military gaol of the
Abbaye to the filthy prison of Bicetre reserved for thieves and felons
of the lowest order. Word of that intention going forth, the people at
last met violence with violence. A mob four thousand strong broke into
the Abbaye, and delivered thence not only the eleven guardsmen, but all
the other prisoners, with the exception of one whom they discovered to
be a thief, and whom they put back again.

That was open revolt at last, and with revolt Privilege knew how to
deal. It would strangle this mutinous Paris in the iron grip of the
foreign regiments. Measures were quickly concerted. Old Marechal de
Broglie, a veteran of the Seven Years' War, imbued with a soldier's
contempt for civilians, conceiving that the sight of a uniform would
be enough to restore peace and order, took control with Besenval as his
second-in-command. The foreign regiments were stationed in the
environs of Paris, regiments whose very names were an irritation to the
Parisians, regiments of Reisbach, of Diesbach, of Nassau, Esterhazy, and
Roehmer. Reenforcements of Swiss were sent to the Bastille between whose
crenels already since the 30th of June were to be seen the menacing
mouths of loaded cannon.

On the 10th of July the electors once more addressed the King to request
the withdrawal of the tro