nd bring
the King to Paris; all the people wish it, tout le peuple le veut."

My General descends to the outer staircase; and harangues: once more
in vain. "To Versailles! To Versailles!" Mayor Bailly, sent for through
floods of Sansculottism, attempts academic oratory from his gilt
state-coach; realizes nothing but infinite hoarse cries of: "Bread!
To Versailles!"--and gladly shrinks within doors. Lafayette mounts the
white charger; and again harangues and reharangues: with eloquence, with
firmness, indignant demonstration; with all things but persuasion. "To
Versailles! To Versailles!" So lasts it, hour after hour; for the space
of half a day.

The great Scipio Americanus can do nothing; not so much as escape.
"Morbleu, mon General," cry the Grenadiers serrying their ranks as the
white charger makes a motion that way, "You will not leave us, you will
abide with us!" A perilous juncture: Mayor Bailly and the Municipals
sit quaking within doors; My General is prisoner without: the Place
de Greve, with its thirty thousand Regulars, its whole irregular
Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, is one minatory mass of clear or rusty
steel; all hearts set, with a moody fixedness, on one object. Moody,
fixed are all hearts: tranquil is no heart,--if it be not that of the
white charger, who paws there, with arched neck, composedly champing his
bit; as if no world, with its Dynasties and Eras, were now rushing down.
The drizzly day tends westward; the cry is still: "To Versailles!"

Nay now, borne from afar, come quite sinister cries; hoarse,
reverberating in longdrawn hollow murmurs, with syllables too like those
of Lanterne! Or else, irregular Sansculottism may be marching off,
of itself; with pikes, nay with cannon. The inflexible Scipio does at
length, by aide-de-camp, ask of the Municipals: Whether or not he may
go? A Letter is handed out to him, over armed heads; sixty thousand
faces flash fixedly on his, there is stillness and no bosom breathes,
till he have read. By Heaven, he grows suddenly pale! Do the Municipals
permit? 'Permit and even order,'--since he can no other. Clangour of
approval rends the welkin. To your ranks, then; let us march!

It is, as we compute, towards three in the afternoon. Indignant National
Guards may dine for once from their haversack: dined or undined, they
march with one heart. Paris flings up her windows, claps hands, as the
Avengers, with their shrilling drums and shalms tramp by; she will then