How did they respond to this conciliatory language? After it had been read, Pétion, the mayor of Paris, presented himself at the bar, and read an address from the Council General of the Commune, in which these words occur: "The chief of the executive power is the first link of the counter-revolutionary chain.... Through a lingering forbearance, we would have desired the power to ask you for the {271} suspension of Louis XVI., but to this the Constitution is opposed. Louis XVI. incessantly invokes the Constitution; we invoke it in our turn, and ask you for his deposition." The next day the municipality distributed five thousand ball cartridges to the Marseillais, while refusing any to the National Guards. Nevertheless, the Girondins still hesitated. Guadet, Vergniaud, and Gensonné would have declared themselves satisfied if the three ministers belonging to their party had been reinstated, and on July 29 they secretly despatched a letter to the sovereign, by Thierry, his valet-de-chambre, in which they said that, "attached to the interests of the nation, they would never separate them from those of the King except in so far as he separated them himself." As to Barbaroux, like a true visionary, he dreamed of I know not what rose-water insurrection. "They should not have entered the apartments of the palace," he has said, "but merely blockaded them. Had this plan been followed, the blood of Frenchmen and Swiss, ignorant victims of court perfidy, would not have been shed on the 10th of August, the republic would have been founded without convulsions or massacres, and we, corroded by popular gangrene, should not have become the horror of all nations." The demagogues were not at all certain of success. Robespierre was to spend the 10th of August in the discreet darkness of a cellar. Danton was prudently to await the end of the combat before arming himself with a big sabre and marching at the head of the Marseilles {272} battalion as the hero of the day. Barbaroux says in his Memoirs that on the 1st, 3d, and 7th of August, Marat implored him to take him to Marseilles, and that on the evening of the 9th he renewed this prayer more urgently than ever, adding that he would disguise himself as a jockey in order to get away.