On the morning of the 20th, daylight had scarcely dawned when twenty thousand men, the greater part of whom were armed with some weapon or other—­muskets, pikes, hatchets, crowbars, and even spits from the cook-shops forming part of their equipment—­assembled on the place where the Bastile had stood.  Santerre was already there on horseback as their appointed leader; and, when all were collected and marshaled in three divisions, they began their march.  One division had for its chief the Marquis de St. Huruge, an intimate friend and adherent of the Duc d’Orleans; at the head of another, a woman of notorious infamy, known as La Belle Liegeoise, clad in male attire, rode astride upon a cannon; while, as it advanced, the crowd was every moment swelled by vast bodies of recruits, among whom were numbers of women, whose imprecations in ferocity and foulness surpassed even the foulest threats of the men.

The ostensible object of the procession was to present petitions to the king and the Assembly on the dismissal of Roland and his colleagues from the administration, and on the refusal of the royal assent to the decree against the priests.  The real design of those who had organized it was more truthfully shown by the banners and emblems borne aloft in the ranks.  “Beware the Lamp,[1]” was the inscription on one.  “Death to Veto and his wife,” was read upon another.  A gang of butchers carried a calf’s heart on the point of a pike, with “The Heart of an Aristocrat” for a motto.  A band of crossing-sweepers, or of men who professed to be such, though the fineness of their linen was inconsistent with the rags which were their outward garments, had for their standard a pair of ragged breeches, with the inscription, “Tremble, tyrants; here are the Sans-culottes.”  One gang of ruffians carried a model of a guillotine.  Another bore aloft a miniature gallows with an effigy of the queen herself hanging from it.  So great was the crowd that it was nearly three in the afternoon before the head of it reached the Assembly, where its approach had raised a debate on the propriety of receiving any petition at all which was to be presented in so menacing a guise; M. Roederer, the procurator-syndic, or chief legal officer of the department of Paris, recommending its rejection, on the ground that such a procession was illegal, not only because of its avowed object of forcing its way to the king, but also because it was likely to lead into acts of violence even if it had not premeditated them.

His arguments were earnestly supported by the constitutionalists, and opposed and ridiculed by Vergniaud.  But before the discussion was over, the rioters, who had now reached the hall, took the decision into their own hands, forced open the door, and put forward a spokesman to read what they called a petition, but which was in truth a sanguinary denunciation of those whom it proclaimed the enemies of the nation, and of whom it demanded that “the land should be purged.”