on boards or
biers, preceded by banners of all kinds; the plundered ornaments of the
Tuileries were borne on the heads of men; the horses from the royal
stables, caparisoned for the occasion, drew hearses, in which the bodies
of the mob who had fallen were deposited. Brief as the time for
decoration had been, wreaths of artificial flowers, taken from the shops
of the _marchandes de modes_, and theatrical shawls and mantles from the
stores of the _fripiers_, covered the biers; and the whole, surrounded
and followed by a forest of pikes and bayonets, plumes and flags, had no
other light than the lurid and shifting blaze of thousands of torches
tossing in the wild and howling wind.

The train seemed endless; shocked and sickened, I had made repeated
efforts to cross the column, but was repeatedly driven back. If all the
dead criminality of Paris had risen to join all the living, it could
scarcely have increased my astonishment at the countless thousands which
continued to pour on before me; nor scarcely, if the procession had
started from the grave, could it have looked more strange, squalid,
haggard, and woebegone. In the rear came the cannon, which had achieved
this melancholy victory. And they, again, were sometimes converted into
the carriage of the dead, sometimes of the plunder, and, in every
instance, were surmounted by women, female furies, drinking, shouting,
and uttering cries of unspeakable savageness and blasphemy against
priests, nobles, and kings; and, mingled with all this, were choruses of
bacchanal songs, accompanied with shouts of laughter. It was now near
midnight; and my anxiety for the condition of my unfortunate friend at
last urged me to make a desperate attempt to force my way through the
mass of pikes and daggers. After being swept far along with the stream,
I reached the street in which the physician lived. He set out with me
immediately, and, by his superior knowledge of the route, we were
enabled to make our way unimpeded through streets, that looked like dens
of robbers, to my hotel.

But there a new and still more alarming disappointment awaited me. I
found the porter and all the attendants of the establishment gathered on
the stairs in terror. Lafontaine was gone! Whether, frenzied by the
insults and yells of the populace, who continued to pass in troops from
time to time, or anxious for my safety, he had started from his bed, put
on his sword, and rushed into the street; without the possib