But as I sauntered through the brilliant scene, visions of other days, and of spectacles more impressive, filled my mind. Through these very halls, again and again, has rolled an inundation of all that Paris can furnish of vulgarity, degradation, and violence. Into the embrasure of this very window the drunken mob of men and women drove, with oaths and clubs, Louis XVI., and compelled him to drink the cup of humiliation to its very dregs. It was from this window that the hapless Maria Antoinette looked, when the sentinel beneath brutally exclaimed to her, "I wish, Austrian woman, that I had your head upon my bayonet here, that I might pitch it over the wall to the dogs in the street!" It was upon this balcony that the sainted Madame Elizabeth and Maria Antoinette stepped, that dark and dreadful night when frenzied Paris, from all its garrets, and all its kennels, was surging like the billows of the ocean against the Tuileries. Their hearts throbbed with terror as they heard the tolling of the alarm bells, the rumbling of artillery wheels, and the rattle of musketry, as the infuriate populace thronged the palace, thirsting for their blood. From this balcony that awful night, Maria entered the chamber where her beautiful son was sleeping, gazed earnestly upon him, and left a mother's loving kiss upon his cheek. She then went to the apartment of her daughter. The beautiful child, fifteen years of age, comprehending the peril of the hour, could not sleep. Maria pressed her to her throbbing heart, and a mother's tenderness triumphed over the stoicism of the Queen. Her pent-up feelings burst through all restraints, and she wept with anguish unendurable. [Illustration: THE TUILERIES.]