nd sublime expression. "It
is the queen!" exclaimed several women of the faubourgs. This name, at
such a moment, was a sentence of death. Some miscreants rushed towards
the king's sister with uplifted arms, and were about to strike her, when
the officers of the palace undeceived them. The venerated name of Madame
Elizabeth made them drop their arms. "Ah! what are you doing?" exclaimed
the princess sorrowfully; "let them suppose I am the queen; dying in her
place, I might perhaps have saved her." At these words an irresistible
movement of the crowd thrust Madame Elizabeth violently from her
brother, and drove her into the opening of one of the windows of the
_salle_, where the crowd which hemmed her in still contemplated her with
respect.

XX.

The king was in a deep recess of the centre window; Acloque, Vaunot,
d'Hervilly, twenty volunteers and national guards, made him a rampart
with their bodies. Some of the officers drew their swords. "Put your
swords into their scabbards," said the king, calmly, "this multitude is
more excited than guilty." He got upon a bench in the window, the
grenadiers mounted beside him, the others in front of him; they thrust
aside, parried, and lowered the sticks, scythes, and pikes lifted above
the heads of the people. Ferocious vociferations now rose confusedly
from this irritated mass. "_Down with the veto!--the camp of Paris! give
us back our patriotic ministers! where is the Austrian woman?_" Some
ringleaders advanced from the ranks every moment to utter louder
threats and menaces of death to the king. Unable to reach him through
the hedge of bayonets crossed in front of him, they waved beneath his
eyes and over his head hideous flags, with sinister inscriptions, ragged
breeches, the guillotine, the bleeding heart, the gibbet. One of them
tried perpetually to reach the king with his lance in his hand; it was
the same cut-throat who, two years before, had washed with his own hands
in a pail of water the heads of Berthier and Foulon, and, carrying them
by the hair to the Quai de la Ferraille, had thrown them amongst the
people for symbols of carnage, and incentives to fresh murders.

A fair young man, elegantly dressed, with menacing gesture continually
attacked the grenadiers, and cut his fingers with their bayonets in
order to move them aside and make a clear passage. "Sire--Sire!" he
shouted, "I summon you in the name of one hundred thousand souls who
surround me, to sanction the d