By this main door you might have seen, under the rain, one after another entering as the morning wore on to ten o’clock. Some came on foot, most in the carriages of their equipage; but every individual, driven or walking, first halted at the line of armed men that barred the avenue, showed a card to prove that he was a deputy of the privileged orders, cleric, or noble, and only then was let through. But though the public gathered slowly (in such weather!) the careful policing of the streets by these armed men was maintained, and [Illustration: THE COMMONS TAKING THE OATH IN THE TENNIS-COURT AT VERSAILLES _To face p. 31_ ] the lines of red and blue still stood across the Avenue de Paris. They so came slowly up and in, the two privileged orders for one hour, six hundred in all. The hour drew to its close. Before the bugles up in the low, wooded heights to the south had sounded for the ten o’clock meal of the camp, before the hour had struck from the clocks of the churches, files drew up to line the street on each side, and a guard stood before the porch. Much farther down the road, beyond a second line of soldiery which barred access from that far side also, a small, but gathering, crowd of citizens showed far and small. Mixed with them and passing through them were figures hurrying toward a narrow side street which ran to a back entrance of the Menus-Plaisirs--men in knee-breeches and short coats, all in black, solemn. Those distant figures in black thus mixing with the crowd and getting in by a back way were the Commons, the men who had just claimed to be all France, to be sovereign. They had not been permitted to come in by the main door of their hall; they were under orders to reach the place in this fashion by the meaner street behind it. Even that back door was shut against them. Of the four thousand soldiers all told who formed the ornament, the patrol, and the barriers of those streets, one guard was set at this closed back door forbidding entry. The six hundred Commons, crowded and pushing under their dripping umbrellas, began loud complaints, suggested protests, egged on their officials and in particular their president. He, Bailly, the middle-aged astronomer, full of rectitude, simple, and pompous, still called it an insult to be kept thus. But the guard had no orders and would not open. Such citizens as had assembled in the street mixed now with the Commons, supported their indignation. The rain still fell.