nts sang the chorus, and
brandished their arms threateningly at the windows of those suspected of
being aristocrates.

These weapons did not resemble the arms of regular troops, which excite
at once terror and admiration; they were strange and uncouth arms,
caught up by the people in the first impulse of fury or defence.[24]
Pikes, lances, spits, cutlasses, carpenters' axes, masons' hammers,
shoemakers' knives, paviours' levers, saws, wedges, mattocks, crow-bars,
the commonest household utensils of the poor, and the rusty iron exposed
for sale on the quays, were alike seized upon by the people; and these
different weapons, rusted, black, hideous, each of which presented a
different manner of inflicting a wound, seemed to increase the horror of
death by displaying it in a thousand terrible and unwonted forms. The
mixture of all sexes, ages, and conditions; the confusion of costumes
and rags beside uniforms, old men beside young; even children, some
carried in their mothers' arms, others holding their father's hand or
his garments; common prostitutes, their silken dresses soiled and torn,
indecency on their brow, and insult on their lips, hundreds of women of
the lowest description, and from the dregs of the people, recruited to
swell the cortege, and excite commiseration from the garrets of the
faubourgs, clothed in tattered finery, pale, emaciated, their eyes
hollow, and their cheeks sunken from misery, the personifications of
want, in fact the people, in all the disorder, the confusion, the
exposure of a city suddenly summoned from its houses, its workshops, its
garrets, its scenes and haunts of debauch and infamy; such was the
aspect of intimidation which the conspirators wished to give to this
scene.

Here and there flags waved above the heads of the multitude. On one was
written _Sanction or death_; on another, _The recall of the patriot
ministers_; on the third, _Tremble tyrant, thine hour is come_. A man,
his arms bared to the shoulders, bore a gibbet, from which hung the
effigy of a crowned female, with the inscription, _Beware the lantern_.
Farther on a group of hags raised a _guillotine_, with a card bearing
the words, _National Justice on tyrants; death for Veto and his wife_.
Amidst all this apparent disorder, a secret system of order was visible.
Men in rags, yet whose white hands and shirts of the finest linen
pointed them out as of superior rank, wore hats, on which signs of
recognition were drawn with w