urage and strength to hold on until his limbs were torn
from the sockets. 'Twould make a great painting, and I shall suggest the
idea to d'Angiviliers."

"Do they know of this at Versailles?" asked Calvert.

"The Duc de Liancourt passed in his carriage half an hour ago," said Mr.
Morris, "on his way to Versailles to inform the King. Yesterday it was
the fashion at Versailles not to believe that there were any
disturbances at Paris. I presume that this day's transactions will
induce a conviction that all is not perfectly quiet! But, even with this
awful evidence, the King is capable of not being convinced, I venture to
say." He was quite right in his surmise, and 'twas not until two o'clock
in the morning that Monsieur de Liancourt was able to force his way into
the King's bed-chamber and compel His Majesty to listen to a narrative
of the awful events of the day in Paris.

In the meantime crowds of the greatest ladies and gentlemen flocked to
the Place de la Bastille to witness the strange and horrid scenes there
enacting, rubbing elbows with the armed and drunken scum of the city,
and only retiring when night hid the sight of it all from them. It was
amid a very carnival of mad liberty, of flaring lights and hideous
noises, of fantastic and terrible figures thrusting their infuriated
countenances in at the coach-windows, with a hundred orders to halt and
to move on, a hundred demands to know if there were arms in the
carriage, that Mr. Jefferson and Calvert finally regained the Champs
Elysees and the American Legation. With the next day the foreign troops
were dismissed by order of the frightened King, and Paris had an armed
Milice Bourgeoise of forty thousand men, at the head of which, to Mr.
Jefferson's satisfaction and Mr. Morris's dismay, Lafayette was placed
as commander-in-chief. From the 16th to the 18th of that fatal July
twenty noble cowards, among them Monsieur de Broglie, Monsieur de St.
Aulaire, six princes of the blood royal, including the Comte d'Artois
and the Princes of Conde and Conti, fled affrighted before the first
gust of the storm gathering over France.

CHAPTER XIII

MONSIEUR DE LAFAYETTE BRINGS FRIENDS TO A DINNER AT THE LEGATION

It was in the midst of the alarms, the horror, and feverish agitation
following hard upon the taking of the Bastille and the assassination and
flight of so many important personages, that Mr. Jefferson, one evening,
received from Monsieur de Lafayette a hu