pity and refuge in the back benches there.  The third, and largest, darts out in column, three hundred strong, towards the Champs Elysees:  Ah, could we but reach Courbevoye, where other Swiss are!  Wo! see, in such fusillade the column ‘soon breaks itself by diversity of opinion,’ into distracted segments, this way and that;—­to escape in holes, to die fighting from street to street.  The firing and murdering will not cease; not yet for long.  The red Porters of Hotels are shot at, be they Suisse by nature, or Suisse only in name.  The very Firemen, who pump and labour on that smoking Carrousel, are shot at; why should the Carrousel not burn?  Some Swiss take refuge in private houses; find that mercy too does still dwell in the heart of man.  The brave Marseillese are merciful, late so wroth; and labour to save.  Journalist Gorsas pleads hard with enfuriated groups.  Clemence, the Wine-merchant, stumbles forward to the Bar of the Assembly, a rescued Swiss in his hand; tells passionately how he rescued him with pain and peril, how he will henceforth support him, being childless himself; and falls a swoon round the poor Swiss’s neck:  amid plaudits.  But the most are butchered, and even mangled.  Fifty (some say Fourscore) were marched as prisoners, by National Guards, to the Hotel-de-Ville:  the ferocious people bursts through on them, in the Place de Greve; massacres them to the last man.  ’O Peuple, envy of the universe!’ Peuple, in mad Gaelic effervescence!

Surely few things in the history of carnage are painfuller.  What ineffaceable red streak, flickering so sad in the memory, is that, of this poor column of red Swiss ’breaking itself in the confusion of opinions;’ dispersing, into blackness and death!  Honour to you, brave men; honourable pity, through long times!  Not martyrs were ye; and yet almost more.  He was no King of yours, this Louis; and he forsook you like a King of shreds and patches; ye were but sold to him for some poor sixpence a-day; yet would ye work for your wages, keep your plighted word.  The work now was to die; and ye did it.  Honour to you, O Kinsmen; and may the old Deutsch Biederheit and Tapferkeit, and Valour which is Worth and Truth be they Swiss, be they Saxon, fail in no age!  Not bastards; true-born were these men; sons of the men of Sempach, of Murten, who knelt, but not to thee, O Burgundy!—­Let the traveller, as he passes through Lucerne, turn aside to look a little at their monumental Lion; not for Thorwaldsen’s sake alone.  Hewn out of living rock, the Figure rests there, by the still Lake-waters, in lullaby of distant-tinkling rance-des-vaches, the granite Mountains dumbly keeping watch all round; and, though inanimate, speaks.

Chapter 2.6.VIII.

Constitution burst in Pieces.

Thus is the Tenth of August won and lost.  Patriotism reckons its slain by thousand on thousand, so deadly was the Swiss fire from these windows; but will finally reduce them to some Twelve hundred.  No child’s play was it;—­nor is it!  Till two in the afternoon the massacring, the breaking and the burning has not ended; nor the loose Bedlam shut itself again.