The Court and the Assembly were at Versailles, wrangling together. The people all this time had been busy hunting down the king. Now they were marching upon him in one huge mob which left the lanes and streets of Paris empty, and its vast market places silent as tombs. The rain was pouring down in torrents, the mud was ankle deep; yet that vast concourse of people kept steadily on, wheeling cannon through the mud—throwing out banners to be soaked by the rain, shouting, grumbling, hurling curses on the king, the queen, and the court. In the midst of the rioters Madame Gosner was conspicuous, riding a heavy cart horse and carrying a spear in her hand. Close by her on a smaller and more gentle animal rode the prisoner of the Bastille, with a red cap upon his head, which hung limp and dripping over his white locks. Whenever this man appeared, shouts long and loud, followed him, at which his brow would contract gloomily and his eye gleam underneath them. In the crowd, mounted on horseback like her mother, but with no emblems of rebellion, came Marguerite, pale, dejected, and forced sorely against her will into the heart of the mob, as her father had been. About midway between Paris and Versailles, the crowd halted at a village where it was thought bread for the hungry crowd might be obtained. In the confusion which followed this movement, the old prisoner tore off his red cap, flung it into the mud, and in its place drew the hood of a friar’s cloak, which some priest had cast over him when the rain came down most violently—then he turned his horse and pushed his way out of the crowd unnoticed. In half an hour he left that vast crowd behind him and made the best of his way to Paris, which was still and deserted like a city of the dead. In the suburbs, the old man dismounted and turned his horse loose. He was weary and very feeble; the mud clung to his feet, and the rain poured upon him with cruel steadiness; but he moved on, and at last turned into the ruined court of the Bastille, crossed the draw-bridge, and went out of sight among the unshapely heap of stones beyond it. When the army of women went back to Paris, Madame Gosner was among those who conducted the royal captives to the very entrance of the Tuileries. Now her triumph seemed almost complete, her enemies were trampled almost into the dust. Her name was received with shouts wherever she turned. She forgot the husband who had disappeared in the crowd, and the child whom she had with despotic force urged into an act of open rebellion. The madness of ambition was upon her. She had begun now to rival Theroigne and the coarsest of her sex in a struggle for popularity. So she went into the thickest of the mob, while Marguerite sought her home with a heavy heart, hoping with terrible misgivings that she might find her father there. The rooms were empty. No human soul was there to meet or comfort her. No sign of the hunted man met her in the building.