oud were ready, the dinner was cooking, and the
attendants looking out along the road to Paris, wondering why the
carriages did not appear, and fearing the dinner would be spoiled.
Nobody came to eat it, however, unless it was given to the National
Guard, a detachment of whom had gone forward, to be on duty about the
palace.

At one o'clock, the great royal coach, drawn by its eight black horses,
drove up to the palace-gate in Paris; and immediately the alarm-bell
from a neighbouring church-steeple began to sound. The family were
almost ready; but multitudes of people, summoned by the bell, collected
presently, and declared that the coach should not move. Lafayette and
his officers came up, and did what they could in the way of persuasion:
but the crowd said, "Hold your tongues. The king shall not go." They
shouted, on seeing one of the royal family, "We do not choose that the
king should go." The royal party, however, entered the carriage, and
the coachman cracked his whip; but some seized the reins and the horses'
heads; others shut the gates: and a multitude so pressed round the heavy
coach that it rocked from side to side. Such of the royal attendants as
attempted to get near for orders were seized, their swords taken from
them, and their persons roughly handled. The children must have been
grievously terrified; for even, their mother, so calm in danger,
passionately entreated from the carriage-window that her servants might
not be hurt. The National Guards did not know how to act. Lafayette
and his officers rode hither and thither, trying to open a way: the
driver whipped, the horses scrambled and reared; and the people pressed
closer and closer, so that the great coach rocked more and more;--all in
vain, it did not get on one inch.

All this, amidst tremendous noise and confusion, went on for an hour and
three-quarters. Then Lafayette rode up to say he would clear the way
with cannon, if the king would order it. The king was not a person to
give any order at all; and least of all, such an order as that. So the
royal family alighted, and returned into the palace, while the coach
went back to the coach-house, and the eight black horses to their
stalls.

The king and queen were not sorry for what had happened. This act of
violence must prove so plainly to all the world that they were
prisoners, that all the world would now think them justified in getting
off, in any way they could. They might now dev