sidency of an American government.
Robespierre and Danton, who detested La Fayette--Laclos, who urged on
the Duc d'Orleans, concerted together, and impeded the impulse given by
the Cordeliers subservient to Danton. The Assembly watchful, Bailly on
his guard, La Fayette resolute, watched in unison for the repression of
all outbreak. On the 16th the Assembly summoned to its bar the
municipality and its officers, to make it responsible for the public
peace. It drew up an address to the French people, in order to rally
them around the constitution. Bailly, the same evening, issued a
proclamation against the agitators. The fluctuating Jacobins themselves
declared their submission to the decrees of the Assembly. At the moment
when the struggle was expected, the leaders of the projected movement
were invisible. The night was spent in military preparations against the
meeting on the morrow.

XI.

On the 17th, very early in the morning, the people, without leaders,
began to collect in the Champ-de-Mars, and surround the altar of the
country, raised in the centre of the large square of the confederation.
A strange and melancholy chance opened the scenes of murder on this day.
When the multitude is excited, every thing becomes the occasion of
crime. A young painter, who, before the hour of meeting, was copying the
patriotic inscriptions engraved in front of the altar, heard a slight
noise at his feet; astonished, he looked around him and saw the point of
a gimlet, with which some men, concealed under the steps of the altar,
were piercing the planks of the pedestal. He hastened to the nearest
guard-house, and returned with some soldiers. They lifted up one of the
steps and found beneath two invalids, who had got under the altar in the
night, with no other design, as they declared, than a childish and
obscene curiosity. The report instantly spread that the altar of the
country was undermined, in order to blow up the people; that a barrel of
gunpowder had been discovered beside the conspirators; that the
invalids, surprised in the preliminaries to their criminal design, were
well known satellites of the aristocracy; that they had confessed their
deadly design, and the amount of reward promised on the success of their
wickedness. The mob mustered, and raging with fury, surrounded the
guard-house of the Gros-Caillou. The two invalids underwent an
interrogatory. The moment when they left the guard-house, to be conveyed
to the Hotel-