of your privacy. Knocks, in such case, grow strokes, grow smashings: the
wooden guardian flies in shivers. And now ensues a Scene over which the
world has long wailed; and not unjustly; for a sorrier spectacle, of
Incongruity fronting Incongruity, and as it were recognising themselves
incongruous, and staring stupidly in each other's face, the world seldom
saw.

King Louis, his door being beaten on, opens it; stands with free bosom;
asking, "What do you want?" The Sansculottic flood recoils awestruck;
returns however, the rear pressing on the front, with cries of "Veto!
Patriot Ministers! Remove Veto!"--which things, Louis valiantly answers,
this is not the time to do, nor this the way to ask him to do. Honour
what virtue is in a man. Louis does not want courage; he has even the
higher kind called moral-courage, though only the passive half of that.
His few National Grenadiers shuffle back with him, into the embrasure
of a window: there he stands, with unimpeachable passivity, amid the
shouldering and the braying; a spectacle to men. They hand him a Red
Cap of Liberty; he sets it quietly on his head, forgets it there. He
complains of thirst; half-drunk Rascality offers him a bottle, he drinks
of it. "Sire, do not fear," says one of his Grenadiers. "Fear?" answers
Louis: "feel then," putting the man's hand on his heart. So stands
Majesty in Red woollen Cap; black Sansculottism weltering round him, far
and wide, aimless, with in-articulate dissonance, with cries of "Veto!
Patriot Ministers!"

For the space of three hours or more! The National Assembly is
adjourned; tricolor Municipals avail almost nothing: Mayor Petion
tarries absent; Authority is none. The Queen with her Children and
Sister Elizabeth, in tears and terror not for themselves only, are
sitting behind barricaded tables and Grenadiers in an inner room. The
Men in Black have all wisely disappeared. Blind lake of Sansculottism
welters stagnant through the King's Chateau, for the space of three
hours.

Nevertheless all things do end. Vergniaud arrives with Legislative
Deputation, the Evening Session having now opened. Mayor Petion has
arrived; is haranguing, 'lifted on the shoulders of two Grenadiers.'
In this uneasy attitude and in others, at various places without and
within, Mayor Petion harangues; many men harangue: finally Commandant
Santerre defiles; passes out, with his Sansculottism, by the opposite
side of the Chateau. Passing through the room where