as MM. Acloque and De Romainvilliers,
present the text of the law, ordering them to repel force by force. The
Assembly set the example of complicity; and the mayor, Petion, by his
absence avoided responsibility. The king took refuge in his
inviolability; and the troops, abandoned to themselves, could not fail
to yield to threats or seduction.

In the interior of the palace, two hundred gentlemen, at the head of
whom was the old marshal De Mouchy, had hastened together at the first
news of the king's danger. They were rather the voluntary victims of
ancient French honour, than useful defenders of the monarchy. Fearing to
excite the jealousy of the national guard and the troops, these
gentlemen concealed themselves in the remote apartments of the palace,
ready rather to die than to combat: they wore no uniform, and their arms
were concealed under their coats--hence the name by which they were
pointed out to the people of _Chevaliers du poignard_. Arriving secretly
from their provinces to offer their services to the king unknown to each
other; and only furnished with a card of entrance to the palace, they
hastened thither whenever there was danger. They should have been ten
thousand, and were but two hundred--the last reserve of fidelity; but
they did their duty without counting their number, and avenged the
French nobility for the faults and the desertion of the emigration.

XVII.

The mob, on quitting the Assembly, had marched in close columns to the
Carrousel. Santerre and Alexandre, at the head of their battalions,
directed the movement. A compact mass of the insurgents, followed by the
Rue St. Honore. The other branches of the populace, cut off from the
main body, thronged the courts of the Manege and the Feuillants, and
tried to make room for themselves by issuing violently by one of the
avenues which communicated with the garden from these courts. A
battalion of the national guard defended the approach to this iron gate.
The weakness or complaisance of a municipal officer freed the passage,
and the battalion fell back, and took up its ground beneath the windows
of the Chateau. The crowd traversed the garden in an oblique direction,
and passing before the battalions, saluted them with cries of _Vive la
nation!_ bidding them take their bayonets from their muskets. The
bayonets were removed, and the mob then passed out by the entrance of
the Port Royal, and fell back upon the gates of the Carrousel, which
shut of