This last day of their famous raid was hot and cloudless. The sight of the river alone was cool, beyond the stubble of the baked harvested fields; and the great road stretched on dusty hour after hour and league after league. They had halted for the mid-day meal; the afternoon was already mellowing when they saw at last, far off in the north and west, the twin towers of the cathedral, the lifted dome of the university church upon the height to the left, the windmills upon Montmartre to the right, and between those low and distant hills the haze of Paris. They formed somewhat before they reached the suburbs; they took some kind of rank, that their approach might be the more significant, and that they might hold their companies in the press of the poor from the eastern quarters who had come out in crowds to meet them under the sunset. They raised their famous song; they came in through the first houses to the noise of “La Marseillaise.” Before them other contingents, less famous, had reached the city for the Revolutionary feast. These had found the whole town alive with preparation for the struggle; for the war had now run four months, or nearly four, and it was certain that the crown was betraying the people. [Illustration: ENROLLING VOLUNTEERS IN PARIS ON THE PONT NEUF, BEFORE THE STATUE OF HENRY IV _To face p. 93_ ] Upon the morrow this battalion from Marseilles came into the town through St. Anthony’s Gate, through the main way dense with people, past the last foundation ruins of the Bastille. Their drums beat. They carried their colours before them. Their cannon, now cleaned and burnished, followed in their train. * * * * * In the centre of Paris there stands, the most famous, perhaps, among the royal emblems of Europe, a great palace the construction of which is of every age, though its outward aspect is singularly united. It is the Louvre. This great place, more than a third of a mile in length, is in plan two courtyards. The larger of these, as large as a little town, and called the Carrousel, at the time of the Revolution was completed only upon one of its branches, and was closed toward the west by the mass of the Tuileries. Its one completed side was the southern one, that toward the river, called “the Long Gallery.” From the end of this the Tuileries turned away from the river at right angles. For more than forty years the charred walls of that building, burned in the Commune, have disappeared, and their place is taken now by an open garden. Only the two high, flanking pavilions which closed the north and the south of its long line still stand, each now forming one end of the completed great courtyard of the Louvre.