“Peuple Français, peuple intrépide . . . Entends les cris, vois l’insolence Des muscadins, amis des rois ; Ils menacent de leur vengeance Tous les défenseurs de tes droits. . . . . . . Ils se disent des patriotes, Ces vils esclaves des tyrans ; De leur égaux fougueux despotes, Du trône ils sont les partisans. Le mensonge vit sur leur bouche, Ils fondent sur lui leurs succès, Et leur haine impie et farouche Brûle de perdre les Français.” —_Le Vrai Reveil du Peuple_ (1795). When M. de la Guerinière, in the year 1743, took over the royal riding school of the Tuileries, and, making additions thereto, turned it into a private academy of horsemanship, he could have had small idea of what should, nearly fifty years later, replace his equestrian arrangements. Where the young Louis XV. had pranced and caracoled the National Assembly now deliberated the affairs of a France becoming daily more unlike that of the Bien-Aimé. It is only just to say that the tenants of the building had not found their new quarters altogether convenient. A parallelogram of great length, bordered by six rows of seats rising one above the other, seats from which some of the occupants could neither catch the eye of the president nor be seen by him, the Manège oppressed its inmates by its defective ventilation and its demands on the voice. The presidential tribune, a simple table covered with a green cloth, stood half way up the hall on a daïs, immediately facing that of the speakers, an arrangement which cut the space into two geographical divisions, and perhaps contributed, as one of its orators remarked, to the moral divisions of the Legislative Assembly also. These latter divisions were at any rate clear enough—the Right, the constitutional Royalists; the Left, the Gironde and their present allies, the Jacobins, further reinforced by the extreme Left; and the Centre, which generally voted with the Right. At nine o’clock on the morning of July 3rd the Manège was already full. The galleries for the people, which adorned all four walls, and of which some, supported by pillars, projected over the very heads of the orators, were crowded with spectators. Down in the central space between the seats, round the two china stoves in the semblance of the Bastille, deputies in negligent attire, booted and spurred, strolled about, talking, laughing, spitting, calling to each other. It was in vain that the President rang his bell several times for silence, and that the four black-clad ushers with their gilded swords attempted to enforce his appeals. At last a more effective check supervened, in the approach of a deputation. It was the customary hour for such attendances and the persons in the central space hastily clambered to their seats to get a better view of it.