rd, bleeding
beneath the blows of the assailants, had only time to cry to the queen,
"Fly! fly for your life!" when they were stricken down. The queen sprang
from her bed, rushed to the door leading to the king's apartments, when,
to her dismay, she found that it was locked, and that the key was upon
the other side. With the energy of despair, she knocked and called for
help. Fortunately, some one rushed to her rescue from the king's chamber
and opened the door. The queen had just time to slip through and again
turn the key, when the whole raging mob, with oaths and imprecations,
burst into the room, and pierced her bed through and through with their
sabers and bayonets. Happy would it have been for Maria if in that short
agony she might have died. But she was reserved by a mysterious
Providence for more prolonged tortures and for a more dreadful doom.

A few of the National Guard, faithful to the king, rallied around the
royal family, and La Fayette soon appeared, and was barely able to
protect the king and queen from massacre. He had no power to effectually
resist the tempest of human passion which was raging, but was swept
along by its violence. Nearly all of the interior of the palace was
ransacked and defiled by the mob. The bloody heads of the massacred
guards, stuck upon pikes, were raised up to the windows of the king, to
insult and to terrify the royal family with these hideous trophies of
the triumph of their foes.

At length the morning succeeding this dreadful night dawned lurid and
cheerless. It was the 8th of October, 1789. Dark clouds over-shadowed
the sky, showers of mist were driven through the air, and the branches
of the trees swayed to and fro before the driving storm. Pools of water
filled the streets, and a countless multitude of drunken vagabonds, in a
mass so dense as to be almost impervious, besieged the palace, having no
definite plan or desire, only furious with the thought that now was the
hour in which they could wreak vengeance upon aristocrats for ages of
oppression. Muskets were continually discharged by the more desperate,
and bullets passed through the windows of the palace. Maria Antoinette,
in these trying scenes, indeed appeared queenly. Her conduct was heroic
in the extreme. Her soul was nerved to the very highest acts of
fearlessness and magnanimity. Seeing the mob in the court-yard below
ready to tear in pieces some of her faithful guard whom they had
captured, regardless of the