e head is off through the streets; ghastly, aloft on a
pike.

Rigorous de Launay has died; crying out, "O friends, kill me fast!"
Merciful de Losme must die; though Gratitude embraces him, in this
fearful hour, and will die for him; it avails not. Brothers, your wrath
is cruel! Your Place de Greve is become a Throat of the Tiger; full
of mere fierce bellowings, and thirst of blood. One other officer
is massacred; one other Invalide is hanged on the Lamp-iron: with
difficulty, with generous perseverance, the Gardes Francaises will save
the rest. Provost Flesselles stricken long since with the paleness
of death, must descend from his seat, 'to be judged at the Palais
Royal:'--alas, to be shot dead, by an unknown hand, at the turning of
the first street!--

O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on
reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages;
on ships far out in the silent main; on Balls at the Orangerie of
Versailles, where high-rouged Dames of the Palace are even now dancing
with double-jacketted Hussar-Officers;--and also on this roaring Hell
porch of a Hotel-de-Ville! Babel Tower, with the confusion of tongues,
were not Bedlam added with the conflagration of thoughts, was no type
of it. One forest of distracted steel bristles, endless, in front of an
Electoral Committee; points itself, in horrid radii, against this and
the other accused breast. It was the Titans warring with Olympus;
and they scarcely crediting it, have conquered: prodigy of prodigies;
delirious,--as it could not but be. Denunciation, vengeance; blaze
of triumph on a dark ground of terror: all outward, all inward things
fallen into one general wreck of madness!

Electoral Committee? Had it a thousand throats of brass, it would not
suffice. Abbe Lefevre, in the Vaults down below, is black as Vulcan,
distributing that 'five thousand weight of Powder;' with what perils,
these eight-and-forty hours! Last night, a Patriot, in liquor, insisted
on sitting to smoke on the edge of one of the Powder-barrels; there
smoked he, independent of the world,--till the Abbe 'purchased his pipe
for three francs,' and pitched it far.

Elie, in the grand Hall, Electoral Committee looking on, sits 'with
drawn sword bent in three places;' with battered helm, for he was of
the Queen's Regiment, Cavalry; with torn regimentals, face singed and
soiled; comparable, some think, to 'an antique warrior;'--judging the
people; form