wild and drunken madness of the triumphant people expended itself
in many strange forms, of which none was stranger, more awesome, more
ludicrous and yet more tragic than the Carmagnole.

This was a dance that seized whole multitudes in its rhythmic, swaying
clutch. The tune was "Ca Ira!" that mad measure of the sansculottes,
meaning roughly--

"Here it goes--

"And there it goes!"

--and go forever it did till all the world of Paris seemed a heaving,
throbbing vortex of werewolves and witches, things lower than animals
in their topsyturvydom, drunken frenzy and frequent obscenity.

The throng through which Henriette now directed her steps was verging
on this madness, though not yet at the pitch of it.

Henriette managed to find her way to two sansculotte troopers
stationed in the centre of the Place, to whom she told her story.
Reasonable fellows they seemed, offering to conduct her presently to
the new authorities and get a search warrant for the Frochard clan.
But the madder swirl of the Carmagnole came along, and presto!
swallowed them up. It happened on this wise:

As the locust swarms of the dancers enveloped them in shortening
circles, two young and attractive maenads broke from the throng and
literally entwined themselves with the troopers. Military dignity,
assaulted in burlesque, tried to keep its post. But the bold nymphs
were clinging, not to be "shaken"; as the mad whirl of the dancers
touched the centre, the troopers and their female captors were borne
away in the ricocheting, plunging motions, disappearing thenceforward
from our story. Little Henriette dived to a place of safety, the side
wall of the nearest building. Straightening herself after the
unexpected knocks and bruises, she looked aghast at the scene before
her.

Whole streets of them, plazas of them, these endlessly gyrating male
and female loons; swirls of gayety, twisting, upsetting passers-by
like a cyclone;--arms, bodies and legs frantically waving, as at the
very brink of Dante's Inferno!

Strange little dramas of lust and conquest punctuated the cyclonic
panorama. Here, a girl's snapping black eyes, winking devilishly, and
pursed-up Cupid mouth invited a new swain to master her. There, a
short-skirted beauty, whose sways and kicks revealed bare thighs, was
dancing wildly a solo intended to infatuate further two rival
admirers. Again, a half-crazed sansculotte had won a girl and