She bounded back into the room, knocking over the chair, snatched up her cloak, bounded to the window to cry "To arms!" crashed down the stairs, dragging Geneviève, flung out of the blind passage, bumping and bruising her shoulders, down and out into the streets. From every doorway figures shot forth and passed, running toward the north. The two girls, at top speed, joined the crowd. They passed a woman with a torch, whose hair stood out in long streams against the racing; la Mère Corniche hobbling along as fast as her old legs would take her; families of five and six running in packs, panting and silent, while beneath, above, about, from disgorging cellars, from loud-flung open windows, from every bell the city writhed in nightmare. Distancing their companions, they arrived among the first before the brasserie of Santerre, where the Quinze-Vingts were assembling, forming quickly into ranks. From one window Jambony, the crier, in an enormous red cap, was feeding pikes to a hundred outstretched hands. The arrival of fresh torches caused the walls to loom up like lurid cliffs, sparkling in spots where a window-pane blazed back the reflection. From the windows flattened faces with black-encircled eyes looked down,--children too young, men and women too old, to survive in the press below: unhuman faces of unhuman beings, like a multitude of rats driven to shelter by the influx of a torrent. Below, the black mass surged in, spattered, under the glow of the torches, with the red of the liberty-caps, while two banners hung like huge blurs above the tossing surface of pikes and weapons. The noise was deafening, the confusion beyond control. Men rushed in and out, their arms flung wide and high, bellowing: "Death to the tyrants!" "Death to the fat Louis!" A slip of a girl, clinging on a window-sill, harangued the mob; a fishwife, astride her husband, comic and furious, beat the air and screamed to the crowd to dye the Seine red. Hags with threatening fists shrieked themselves into a frenzy: "To the Tuileries! To the Tuileries!" Some, foaming, overcome with their passions, collapsed on the ground. The anger of the mob against the queen gathered at times in bursts and shouts: "Death to Mme. Veto!" "Death to the Austrian!" Unthinkable obscenities were coupled with her name and tossed from eddy to eddy. The Marseillais, gathering in a body, dominated the tumult with the swelling chords of their battle hymn that on their voices became a chant of carnage and a thing of terror.