Our Mai is planted; if not in the Feuillants Terrace, whither is no ingate, then in the Garden of the Capuchins, as near as we could get.  National Assembly has adjourned till the Evening Session:  perhaps this shut lake, finding no ingate, will retire to its sources again; and disappear in peace?  Alas, not yet:  rearward still presses on; rearward knows little what pressure is in the front.  One would wish at all events, were it possible, to have a word with his Majesty first!

The shadows fall longer, eastward; it is four o’clock:  will his Majesty not come out?  Hardly he!  In that case, Commandant Santerre, Cattle-butcher Legendre, Patriot Huguenin with the tocsin in his heart; they, and others of authority, will enter in.  Petition and request to wearied uncertain National Guard; louder and louder petition; backed by the rattle of our two cannons!  The reluctant Grate opens:  endless Sansculottic multitudes flood the stairs; knock at the wooden guardian of your privacy.  Knocks, in such case, grow strokes, grow smashings:  the wooden guardian flies in shivers.  And now ensues a Scene over which the world has long wailed; and not unjustly; for a sorrier spectacle, of Incongruity fronting Incongruity, and as it were recognising themselves incongruous, and staring stupidly in each other’s face, the world seldom saw.

King Louis, his door being beaten on, opens it; stands with free bosom; asking, “What do you want?” The Sansculottic flood recoils awestruck; returns however, the rear pressing on the front, with cries of “Veto!  Patriot Ministers!  Remove Veto!”—­which things, Louis valiantly answers, this is not the time to do, nor this the way to ask him to do.  Honour what virtue is in a man.  Louis does not want courage; he has even the higher kind called moral-courage, though only the passive half of that.  His few National Grenadiers shuffle back with him, into the embrasure of a window:  there he stands, with unimpeachable passivity, amid the shouldering and the braying; a spectacle to men.  They hand him a Red Cap of Liberty; he sets it quietly on his head, forgets it there.  He complains of thirst; half-drunk Rascality offers him a bottle, he drinks of it.  “Sire, do not fear,” says one of his Grenadiers.  “Fear?” answers Louis:  “feel then,” putting the man’s hand on his heart.  So stands Majesty in Red woollen Cap; black Sansculottism weltering round him, far and wide, aimless, with in-articulate dissonance, with cries of “Veto!  Patriot Ministers!”

For the space of three hours or more!  The National Assembly is adjourned; tricolor Municipals avail almost nothing:  Mayor Petion tarries absent; Authority is none.  The Queen with her Children and Sister Elizabeth, in tears and terror not for themselves only, are sitting behind barricaded tables and Grenadiers in an inner room.  The Men in Black have all wisely disappeared.  Blind lake of Sansculottism welters stagnant through the King’s Chateau, for the space of three hours.