ards
let things take their course; Saint-Prix and Leclerc, the officers in
command, threatened with death, have nothing to do but to yield with a
protest.--There is the same state of things in the Montreuil section;
the resistance of four out of six of the battalion officers merely
served to give full power to the instigator of the insurrection, and
henceforth Santerre becomes the sole leader of the assembled crowd.
About half-past eleven he leaves his brewery, and, followed by cannon,
the flag, and the truck which bears the poplar tree, he places himself
at the head of the procession "consisting of about fifteen hundred
persons including the bystanders."[2536] Like a snowball, however,
the troop grows as it marches along until, on reaching the National
Assembly, Santerre has behind him from seven to eight thousand
persons.[2537] Guadet and Vergniaud move that the petitioners be
introduced; their spokesman, Huguenin, in a bombastic and threatening
address, denounces the ministry, the King, the accused at Orleans, the
deputies of the "Right," demands "blood," and informs the Assembly that
the people "resolute" is ready to take the law in their own hands.[2538]
Then, with drums beating and bands playing, the crowd defiles for
more than an hour through the chamber under the eyes of Santerre and
Saint-Huruge: here and there a few files of the National Guard pass
mingled with the throng and lost in "the moving forest of pikes"; all
the rest is pure rabble, "hideous faces,"[2539] says a deputy, on
which poverty and loose living have left their marks, ragamuffins, men
"without coats," in their shirt-sleeves, armed in all sorts of ways,
with chisels and shoe-knives fastened on sticks, one with a saw on
a pole ten feet long, women and children, some of them brandishing a
saber.[2540] In the middle of this procession, an old pair of breeches
[culottes] borne on a pike with this motto: Vivent les Sans-Culottes!
and, on a pitch-fork, the heart of a calf with this inscription:
Coeur d'aristocrate, both significant emblems of the grim humor the
imaginations of rag-dealers or butchers might come up with for a
political carnival.--This, indeed, it is, they have been drinking and
many are drunk.[2541] A parade is not enough, they want also to amuse
themselves: traversing the hall they sing ca ira and dance in the
intervals. They at the same time show their civism by shouting Vive les
patriotes! A bas le Veto! They fraternise, as they pas