d throughout France. Murders
were daily committed with impunity. There was no law. The mob had all
power in their hands. Neither the king nor queen could make their
appearance any where without exposure to insult. Violent harangues in
the Assembly and in the streets had at length roused the populace to a
new act of outrage. The immediate cause was the refusal of the king to
give his sanction to a bill for the persecution of the priests. It was
the 20th of June, 1792. A tumultuous assemblage of all the miserable,
degraded, and vicious, who thronged the garrets and the cellars of
Paris, and who had been gathered from all lands by the lawlessness with
which crime could riot in the capital, were seen converging, as by a
common instinct, toward the palace. They bore banners fearfully
expressive of their ferocity, and filled the air with the most savage
outcries. Upon the end of a pike there was affixed a bleeding heart,
with the inscription, "The heart of the aristocracy." Another bore a
doll, suspended to a frame by the neck, with this inscription, "To the
gibbet with the Austrian." With the ferocity of wolves, they surrounded
the palace in a mass impenetrable. The king and queen, as they looked
from their windows upon the multitudinous gathering, swaying to and fro
like the billows of the ocean in a storm, and with the clamor of human
passions, more awful than the voice of many waters, rending the skies,
instinctively clung to one another and to their children in their
powerlessness. Madame Elizabeth, with her saint-like spirit, and her
heaven-directed thoughts, was ever unmindful of her own personal danger
in her devotion to her beloved brother. The king hoped that the soldiers
who were stationed as a guard within the inclosures of the palace would
be able to protect them from violence. The gates leading to the Place du
Carrousel were soon shattered beneath the blows of axes, and the human
torrent poured in with the resistlessness of a flood. The soldiers very
deliberately shook the priming from their guns, as the emphatic
expression to the mob that they had nothing to fear from them, and the
artillery men coolly directed their pieces against the palace. Axes and
iron bars were immediately leveled at the doors, and they flew from
their hinges; and the drunken and infuriated rabble, with clubs, and
pistols, and daggers, poured, an interminable throng, through the halls
and apartments where kings, for ages, had reigned in ina