me thirty-five miles beyond Paris and kept there. A singular
means was devised for breaking up the choice troops of the National
Guard, who were royalists. They were told that it was contrary to
equality for certain citizens to be more brilliantly equipped than
others; that a bearskin cap humiliated those who were entitled only to
a felt one; and that there was a something aristocratic about the name
of grenadier which was really intolerable to a simple foot-soldier.
The choice troops were dissolved in consequence, and the grenadiers
came to the Assembly like good patriots to lay down their epaulettes
and bearskin caps and assume the red cap. On July 30, the National
Guard was reconstructed, by taking in all the vagabonds and bandits
that the clubs could muster.

The famous federates of Marseilles, who were to take such an active
part in the coming insurrection, arrived in Paris the same day. The
Girondins, having failed to obtain their camp of twenty thousand men
before Paris, had devised instead of it a reunion of federate
volunteers, summoned from every part of France. The roads were at once
thronged by future rioters whom the Assembly allowed thirty cents a day.

The Jacobins of Brest and Marseilles distinguished themselves. Instead
of a handful of volunteers they sent two battalions. That of
Marseilles, recruited by {269} Barbaroux, comprised five hundred men
and two pieces of artillery. Starting July 5, it entered Paris July
30. Excited to fanaticism by the sun and the declamations of the
southern clubs, it had run over France, been received under triumphal
arches, and chanted in a sort of frenzy the terrible stanzas of Rouget
de l'Isle's new hymn, the _Marseillaise_. It was at this time that
Blanc Gilli, deputy from the Bouches du Rhone department to the
Legislative Assembly, wrote: "These pretended Marseillais are the scum
of the jails of Genoa, Piedmont, Sicily, and of all Italy, Spain, the
Archipelago, and Barbary. I run across them every day." Rouget de
l'Isle received from his old mother, a royalist and Catholic at heart,
a letter in which she said: "What is this revolutionary hymn which a
horde of brigands are singing as they pass through France, and in which
your name is mixed up?" At Paris the accents of that terrible melody
sounded like strokes of the tocsin. The men who sang it filled the
conservatives with terror. They wore woollen cockades and insulted as
aristocrats those who wore sil