The Jacobins of Brest and Marseilles distinguished themselves. Instead of a handful of volunteers they sent two battalions. That of Marseilles, recruited by {269} Barbaroux, comprised five hundred men and two pieces of artillery. Starting July 5, it entered Paris July 30. Excited to fanaticism by the sun and the declamations of the southern clubs, it had run over France, been received under triumphal arches, and chanted in a sort of frenzy the terrible stanzas of Rouget de l'Isle's new hymn, the _Marseillaise_. It was at this time that Blanc Gilli, deputy from the Bouches du Rhone department to the Legislative Assembly, wrote: "These pretended Marseillais are the scum of the jails of Genoa, Piedmont, Sicily, and of all Italy, Spain, the Archipelago, and Barbary. I run across them every day." Rouget de l'Isle received from his old mother, a royalist and Catholic at heart, a letter in which she said: "What is this revolutionary hymn which a horde of brigands are singing as they pass through France, and in which your name is mixed up?" At Paris the accents of that terrible melody sounded like strokes of the tocsin. The men who sang it filled the conservatives with terror. They wore woollen cockades and insulted as aristocrats those who wore silk ones. There was no longer any dike to the torrent. August 1, Louis XVI. nominated a cabinet composed of loyal men: Joly was Minister of Justice; Champion de Villeneuve, of the Interior; Bigot de Sainte-Croix, of Foreign Affairs; Du Bouchage, of the Marine; Leroux de la Ville, of Public Taxes; and D'Abancourt, of War. But this ministry was to last only ten days. Certain petitioners at the bar of the {270} Assembly asked for the deposition of the King in most violent language. "This measure," says Barbaroux in his Memoirs, "would have carried Philippe of Orléans to the regency, and therefore his party violently clamored for it. His creditors, his hirelings, and boon-companions, Marat and his Cordeliers, all manner of swindlers and insolvent debtors, thronged public places and incited to this deposition because they were hungry for money and positions under a regent who was their tool and their accomplice." In vain did Louis XVI. display those sentiments of paternal kindness which had hitherto availed him so little. August 3, he sent a message to the Assembly, in which he said: "I will uphold national independence to my latest breath. Personal dangers are nothing compared to public ones. Oh! what are personal dangers to a King whom men are seeking to deprive of his people's love? This is the real plague-spot in my heart. Perhaps the people will some day know how dear their welfare is to me. How many of my sorrows could be obliterated by the least evidence of a return to right feeling!"