eeting-place of these gatherings of the people.

The Place de la Bastille, an immense square into which opened, like the
mouths of so many rivers, the numerous streets of the faubourg St.
Antoine, which joins, by the quartier de l'Arsenale and a bridge, the
faubourg St. Marceau, and which, by the boulevard, opened before the
ancient fortress, has a large opening to the centre of the city and the
Tuileries, was the rendezvous assigned, and the place whence the columns
were to depart. They were to be divided into three bodies, and a
petition to present to the king and the Assembly against the _veto_ to
the decree against the priests and the camp of 20,000 men, was the
ostensible purpose of the movement; the recall of the patriot ministers,
Roland, Servan, and Claviere, the countersign; and the terror of the
people, disseminated in Paris and the chateau of the Tuileries the
effect of this day. Paris expected this visit of the faubourgs, for five
hundred persons had dined together the previous day on the Champs
Elysees.

The chief of the _federes_ of Marseilles and the agitators of the
central quarters had fraternised there with the Girondists. The actor
Dugazon had sung verses, denunciatory of the inhabitants of the Chateau;
and at his window in the Tuileries the king had heard the applause and
these menacing strains, that reached even to his palace. As for the
order of the march, the grotesque emblems, the strange weapons, the
hideous costumes, the horrible banners and the obscene language,
destined to signal the apparition of this army of the faubourgs in the
streets of the capital, the conspirators prescribed nothing, for
disorder and horror formed a part of the programme, and they left all to
the disordered imagination of the populace, and to that rivalry of
cynicism which invariably takes place in such masses of men. Danton
relied on this fact.

VI.

Although the presence of Panis and Sergent, two members of the
municipality, gave a tacit sanction to the plan, the leaders undertook
to recruit the sedition in silence, by small groups during the night,
and to collect the fiercest _rassemblements_ of the quartier Saint
Marceau and the Jardin des Plantes, on the bank of the Arsenale, by
means of a ferry, then the only means of communication between the two
faubourgs. Lareynie was to arouse the faubourg St. Jacques and the market
of the place Maubert, where the women of the lower classes came daily to
make their hou