hite chalk; the crowd regulated their march
by them, and followed wherever they went.

The principal body thus marched by the Rue Saint Antoine, and the dark
and central avenues of Paris, to the Rue Saint Honore, the population of
these quartiers swelling its numbers at each instant. The more this
living torrent increased the more furious it became. Now a band of
butchers joined it, each bearing a pike, on which was stuck the bleeding
heart of a calf, with the words, _Coeur d'aristocrate_. Next came a
band of Chiffoniers dressed in rags, and displaying a lance, from which
floated a tattered garment, with the inscription, _Tremble tyrants, here
are the sans culottes_. The insult which the aristocracy had cast at
poverty, now, when adopted by the people, became the weapon of the
nation against the rich.

This army defiled during three hours along the Rue Saint Honore.
Sometimes a terrible silence, only broken by the sound of thousands of
feet on the pavement, oppressed the imagination, as the sign of
concentrated rage of this multitude; then solitary voices, insulting
speeches, and atrocious sarcasms, were mingled with the laughter of the
crowd; then sudden and confused murmurs burst from this human sea, and
rising to the roofs of the houses, left only the last syllables of
their prolonged acclamations audible: _Long live the nation! Long live
the sans culottes! Down with the veto!_ This tumult reached the salle du
Manege, where the Legislative Assembly was then sitting. The head of the
cortege stopped at the doors, the columns inundated the court of the
Feuillants, the court of the Manege, and all the openings of the salle.
These courts, these avenues, these passages, which then masked the
terrace of the garden, occupied the space which now extends between the
garden of the Tuileries and the Rue Saint Honore--that central artery of
Paris. It was mid-day.

XIII.

Roederer, the procureur syndic of the directory of the department, a
post which in '92 corresponded with that of prefect de Paris, was at
this moment at the bar of the Assembly. Roederer, a partisan of the
constitution, of the school of Mirabeau and Talleyrand, was a courageous
enemy of anarchy. He found in the constitution the point of
reconciliation between his fidelity to the people and his loyalty to the
king; and he sought to defend this constitution with every weapon of the
law which sedition had not broken in his grasp. "Armed mobs threaten to
viola