France -- History -- Louis XVI, 1774-1793; France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799
But glance now, for a moment, from the royal windows! A roaring
sea of human heads, inundating both Courts; billowing against all
passages: Menadic women; infuriated men, mad with revenge, with
love of mischief, love of plunder! Rascality has slipped its
muzzle; and now bays, three-throated, like the Dog of Erebus.
Fourteen Bodyguards are wounded; two massacred, and as we saw,
beheaded; Jourdan asking, ‘Was it worth while to come so far for
two?’ Hapless Deshuttes and Varigny! Their fate surely was sad.
Whirled down so suddenly to the abyss; as men are, suddenly, by
the wide thunder of the Mountain Avalanche, awakened not by
_them_, awakened far off by others! When the Château Clock last
struck, they two were pacing languid, with poised musketoon;
anxious mainly that the next hour would strike. It has struck; to
them inaudible. Their trunks lie mangled: their heads parade, “on
pikes twelve feet long,” through the streets of Versailles; and
shall, about noon reach the Barriers of Paris,—a too ghastly
contradiction to the large comfortable Placards that have been
posted there!
The other captive Bodyguard is still circling the corpse of
Jerome, amid Indian war-whooping; bloody Tilebeard, with tucked
sleeves, brandishing his bloody axe; when Gondran and the
Grenadiers come in sight. ‘Comrades, will you see a man massacred
in cold blood?’—‘Off, butchers!’ answer they; and the poor
Bodyguard is free. Busy runs Gondran, busy run Guards and
Captains; scouring at all corridors; dispersing Rascality and
Robbery; sweeping the Palace clear. The mangled carnage is
removed; Jerome’s body to the Townhall, for inquest: the fire of
Insurrection gets damped, more and more, into measurable,
manageable heat.
Transcendent things of all sorts, as in the general outburst of
multitudinous Passion, are huddled together; the ludicrous, nay
the ridiculous, with the horrible. Far over the billowy sea of
heads, may be seen Rascality, caprioling on horses from the Royal
Stud. The Spoilers these; for Patriotism is always infected so,
with a proportion of mere thieves and scoundrels. Gondran
snatched their prey from them in the Château; whereupon they
hurried to the Stables, and took horse there. But the generous
Diomedes’ steeds, according to Weber, disdained such
scoundrel-burden; and, flinging up their royal heels, did soon
project most of it, in parabolic curves, to a distance, amid
peals of laughter: and were caught. Mounted National Guards
secured the rest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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