at first a cry for justice became an appeal for liberty, then a demand for equality, and finally a mad howl for revenge. [Pg 208]XXIII POPULARITY AND PRISON So many local National Guards and revolutionary town governments had been formed that France was in danger of being split into a thousand self-governing fragments. Some of these came together in local federations for mutual benefit; and as the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile rolled around, Paris proposed a grand federation of all such organizations as a fitting way to celebrate the new national holiday. The idea caught popular fancy, and the city made ready for it with a feverish good will almost as strange as that of the memorable night when nobles and clergy in the National Assembly had vied with one another to give up their century-old privileges. The spot chosen for the ceremonies was the Champs de Mars, where the Eiffel Tower now stands. It is a deal nearer the center of Paris now than it was in 1790, when it was little more than a great field on the banks of the Seine, near the military academy. This was to be changed into an immense amphitheater three miles in circumference, a work [Pg 209]which required a vast amount of excavating and building and civil engineering. Men and women of all classes of society volunteered as laborers, and from dawn till dark a procession, armed with spades and every implement that could possibly be used, passed ceaselessly between the heart of the city and the scene of the coming festivity. Eye-witnesses tell us that on arriving each person threw down his coat, his cravat, and his watch, "abandoning them to the loyalty of the public" and fell to work. "A delicate duchess might be seen filling a barrow to be trundled away by a fishwife"; or a chevalier of the Order of Saint-Louis laboring with a hurried, flustered little school-boy; or a priest and an actor doing excellent team-work together. A hundred orchestras were playing; workers quitted their labors for a few turns in the dance, then abandoned that again for toil.