rying to the assassins in Petion's name: "Spare the women;
do not dishonor the nation."

{324}

Madame Campan had attempted to go up a stairway in pursuit of her
sister. The murderers followed her. She already felt a terrible hand
against her back, trying to seize her by her clothes, when some one
cried from the foot of the stairs: "What are you doing up
there?"--"Hey!" said the murderer, in a tone that did not soon leave
the trembling woman's ears. The other voice replied: "We don't kill
women." The Revolution goes fast; it will kill them next year. Madame
Campan was on her knees. Her executioner let go his hold. "Get up,
hussy," he said to her, "the nation spares you!" In going back she
walked over corpses; she recognized that of the old Viscount de Broves.
The Queen had sent word to him and to another old man as the last night
began, that she desired them to go home. He had replied: "We have been
only too obedient to the King's orders in all circumstances when it was
necessary to expose our lives to save him; this time we will not obey,
and will simply preserve the memory of the Queen's kindness."

What a sight the Tuileries presented! People walked on nothing but
dead bodies. A comic actor drank a glass of blood, the blood of a
Swiss; one might have thought himself at a feast of Atreus. The
furniture was broken, the secretaries forced open, the mirrors smashed
to pieces. Prudhomme, the journalist of the _Revolutions de Paris_,
thinks that "Medicis-Antoinette has too long studied in them {325} the
hypocritical look she wears in public." What a sinister carnival!
Drunken women and prostitutes put on the Queen's dresses and sprawl on
her bed. Through the cellar gratings one can see a thousand hands
groping in the sand, and drawing forth bottles of wine. Everywhere
people are laughing, drinking, killing. The royal wine runs in
streams. Torrents of wine, torrents of blood. The apartments, the
staircase, the vestibule, are crimson pools. Disfigured corpses,
pictures thrust through with pikes, musicians' stands thrown on the
altar, the organ dismounted, broken,--that is how the chapel looks.
But to rob and murder is not enough: they will kindle a conflagration.
It devours the stables of the mounted guards, all the buildings in the
courts, the house of the governor of the palace: eighteen hundred yards
of barracks, huts, and houses. Already the fire is gaining on the
Pavilion of Marsan and the Pavili