Harper's New Monthly Magazine: No. XVI.—September, 1851—Vol. III. — John Shaqi
Harper's New Monthly Magazine: No. XVI.—September, 1851—Vol. III.Various
History
Harper's New Monthly Magazine: No. XVI.—September, 1851—Vol. III.
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
While in Paris, he was, on the famous morning of the 20th of June, 1792,
walking with his friend Bourrienne, along the banks of the Seine, when
he saw a vast mob of men, women, and boys, with hideous yells and
frantic gestures, and brandishing weapons of every kind, rolling like an
inundation through the streets of the metropolis, and directing their
steps toward the palace of the imprisoned monarch. Napoleon ran before
them that he might witness their proceedings. Climbing, by an iron
fence, upon the balustrade of a neighboring building, he saw the squalid
mass of thirty thousand miscreants break into the garden of the
Tuileries, swarm through the doors of the regal mansion, and, at last,
compel the insulted and humiliated king, driven into the embrasure of a
window, to put the filthy red cap of Jacobinism upon his brow. This
triumph of the drunken vagrants, from the cellars and garrets of infamy,
over all law and justice, and this spectacle of the degradation of the
acknowledged monarch of one of the proudest nations on the globe,
excited the indignation of Napoleon to the highest pitch. He turned away
from the sight as unendurable, exclaiming, "The wretches! how could they
suffer this vile mob to enter the palace! They should have swept down
the first five hundred with grape shot, and the rest would have soon
taken to flight."
[Illustration: THE ATTACK UPON THE TUILERIES]
New scenes of violence were now daily enacted before the eyes of
Napoleon in the streets of Paris, until the dreadful 10th of August
arrived. He then again saw the triumphant and unresisted mob sack the
palace of the Tuileries. He witnessed the king and the royal family
driven from the halls of their ancestors, and followed by the frenzied
multitude, with hootings, and hissings, and every conceivable insult, in
momentary peril of assassination, until they took refuge in the
Assembly. He saw the merciless massacre of the faithful guards of the
king, as they were shot in the garden, as they were pursued and
poniarded in the streets, as they were pricked down with bayonets, from
the statues upon which they had climbed for protection, and in cold
blood butchered. He saw, with his bosom glowing with shame and
indignation, the drunken rioters marching exultingly through the streets
of the metropolis, with the ghastly heads of the slaughtered guards
borne aloft, upon the points of their pikes, as the trophies of their
victory.
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