They were easily
marked and counted by their future executioners, who threatened them by
voice and gesture. Every {273} day the petitioners who were admitted
to the honors of the session avoided the empty benches of the right and
seated themselves with the Mountain or the centre, where they crowded
still more the already overcrowded deputies. The discussions were like
formidable tempests. "The effect produced by such a spectacle," says
Count de Vaublanc in his Memoirs, "was still greater on those who
entered the hall during one of those terrible moments. I received this
impression several times myself, and it will never be effaced from my
mind; I seek vainly for expressions by which to describe it. Long
afterwards, M. de Caux, then Minister of War, said to me: 'You made the
profoundest impression on me which I ever received in my life. I was
young at the time. I entered the galleries just as you were standing
out against the furious shouts of a part of the deputies and the people
in the galleries.'"

Meanwhile the end was approaching. Faithful royalists still proposed
schemes of flight to Louis XVI. Bertrand de Molleville, who is so ill
disposed toward Madame de Stael, says concerning this: "There was
nobody, even to Madame de Stael, who, either in the hope of being
pardoned the injury her intrigues had done the King, or else through
her continual need of intrigue, had not invented some plan of escape
for His Majesty." Louis XVI. declined them all. He would owe nothing
to Lafayette. He relied on the money he had given to Danton and other
demagogues, and hoped that the {274} insurrectionary bands would be
repulsed by the royalists of the National Guard and the Swiss regiment.
August 8th, in the evening, this fine regiment left its Courbevoie
barracks and arrived at the Tuileries at daybreak next morning. Under
various idle pretexts it had been deprived of its twelve pieces of
artillery, and also of three hundred men who had been given the
commission, true or false as may be, to watch over the transportation
of corn in Normandy. Only seven hundred and fifty, officers and
soldiers, remained; but all of them had said: "We will let ourselves be
killed to the last man rather than fail in honor or betray the sanctity
of our oaths." In company with a handful of noblemen, these were to be
the last defenders of the throne. The fatal hour was approaching. The
section of the Cordeliers had decided that if the Assem