The King had, since the insurrection of the 20th of June, which displayed how much he was at the mercy of his enemies, renounced almost all thoughts of safety or escape. Henry IV. would have called for his arms--Louis XVI. demanded his confessor. "I have no longer any thing to do with earth," he said; "I must turn all my thoughts on Heaven." Some vain efforts were made to bribe the leaders of the Jacobins, who took the money, and pursued, as might have been expected, their own course with equal rigour. The motion for the declaration of the King's forfeiture[235] still lingered in the Convention, its fate depending upon the coming crisis. At length the fatal Tenth of August approached, being the day which, after repeated adjournments, had been fixed by the Girondists and their rivals for the final rising. The King was apprised of their intention, and had hastily recalled from their barracks at Courbe-Voie about a thousand Swiss guards, upon whose fidelity he could depend. The formidable discipline and steady demeanour of these gallant mountaineers, might have recalled the description given by historians, of the entrance of their predecessors into Paris under similar circumstances, the day before the affair of the Barricades, in the reign of Henry II.[236] But the present moment was too anxious to admit of reflections upon past history. [Sidenote: TENTH OF AUGUST.] Early on the morning of the 10th of August, the tocsin rung out its alarm-peal over the terrified city of Paris, and announced that the long-menaced insurrection was at length on foot. In many parishes the Constitutional party resisted those who came to sound this awful signal; but the well-prepared Jacobins were found every where victorious, and the prolonged mournful sound was soon tolled out from every steeple in the metropolis.[237] To this melancholy music the contending parties arranged their forces for attack and defence, upon a day which was doomed to be decisive.