outbreak. July was a month
of insurrections and murders. The Bastille was assailed by rioters.
News came to the King that the ancient fortress had fallen. "Sire,"
announced the Duke of Orleans to the sleepy Monarch in his bedchamber,
"it is a Revolution!"

Lafayette, back from the war across the sea, became the unwilling leader
of the National Guard. On the evening of the first of October occurred
the fatal banquet of the King's guard, held, not in the Orangery or in
some other informal hall, but in the palace theater, where no fete had
been given since the visit of the Emperor Joseph II of Austria. A French
writer describes the scene. "The doors open. Behold the King and the
Queen! The King has been prevailed on to visit them on his return from
the chase. The Queen walks round to every table, looking beautiful, and
adorned with the child she bears in her arms.

"So beautiful and yet so unfortunate! As she was departing with the
King, the band played the affecting air: 'O Richard, O my King, abandoned
by the whole world!' Every heart melted at that appeal. Several tore
off their cockades, and took that of the Queen, the black Austrian
cockade, devoting themselves to her service. . . .

"On the 3rd of October, another dinner; they grow more daring, their
tongues are untied, and the counter-revolution showed itself boldly. In
the long gallery, and in the apartments, the ladies no longer allow the
tricolor cockade to circulate. With their handkerchiefs and ribands they
make white cockades, and tie them themselves."

Stories of royalist revels and open insults to the cockade of the
Revolutionists still further inflamed starving Paris. On the fifth of
October there were thousands of inhabitants that had tasted no food for
thirty hours. And then the ravenous women of Paris arose--mothers,
shop-girls, courtesans--and, gathering recruits as they swept through the
restless city streets, they rolled like an angry flood out the
eleven-mile road to Versailles. The King was hunting at Meudon; a
courier was sent for him. The Queen Consort was in her retreat at
Trianon. The messenger found her, sad and contemplative, seated in her
grotto. Hastily she was brought back to the palace. Later, she and the
King would have fled the anger of the crowd whose shouts of "Bread!
Bread!" echoed across the Marble Court to the windows of the royal
apartments. But their decision, put off from moment to moment, came too
late.