nst France.
Riot and murder increased. A mob of twenty thousand invaded the
Tuileries then occupied by the royal family. It was divided into three
divisions. The first was composed of armed and disciplined men, led by
Santerre. The male ruffians of Paris, blood-thirsty and atrocious beyond
any thing that civilization has ever produced, formed the second
division. The third, most terrible of all, was composed of the lost
women of Paris, led by Theroigne de Mericourt, clad in a blood-red
riding dress, and armed with sword and pistol. This notorious woman had
acted a prominent part in former scenes. She led the attack upon the
Bastille. She led the mob which brought the king from Versailles to
Paris. In the subsequent riots life and death hung upon her nod, and in
one of them she met her betrayer. He begged piteously for her pardon and
his life, and this was her answer, if we believe Lamartine: "My pardon!"
said she, "at what price can you buy it? My innocence gone, my family
lost to me, my brothers and sisters pursued in their own country by the
jeers of their kindred; the maledictions of my father; my exile from my
native land; my enrollment among courtesans; the blood by which my days
have been and will be stained; that imperishable curse of vice linked to
my name instead of that immortality of virtue which you once taught me
to doubt--it is for this that you would buy my forgiveness--do you know
of any price on earth sufficient to purchase it?" And he was massacred.
She died forty years afterwards in a mad-house, for in the fate of the
revolution, she was stripped and whipped in the streets to madness by
the very women she had led.

These loathsome cohorts forced their way into the palace. They invaded
the rooms of the king and queen. They struck at him with pikes, and
forced upon his head the red bonnet of the Jacobins, while the most
wretched of her sex encircled the queen with a living wall of vice, and
loaded her with obscene execrations, charges, and epithets.

Although this outbreak has been charged to both the great political
parties, it is probably nearer to truth to say that it originated
spontaneously with that demoniac mob soon to rule France, and which from
this time carried all political organizations with it. The Girondists,
however, still retained enough of their constitutional conservatism to
be the only hope which royalty could have for its preservation. The king
again threw himself into their arms. R