there in the flooring, lest the Tuileries should be turned from that end. With the fall of darkness they could also hear the rumbling wheels of cannon going to their posts and of waggons still distributing the arms and the munitions for the fight. The night fell very dark and moonless, but open, in the stifling weather, to murky stars. From the higher windows of the Tuileries one could see in nearly all the houses around lights maintained at the windows of the citizens; for, that night, few slept. Amid so much terror and surmise, there was a grotesque suggestion of a city illuminated as for a gala-day. Garrisoned within the palace there stood to arms squads of the volunteers along the first row of its eastern windows; the Swiss Guards were stationed with piled muskets in the three courts before it, and in the central hall up which the great marble stairway turned. The hours of the night went by. Midnight was passed, but nothing stirred. It was a little before one o’clock in the morning of Friday, August 10th, when this general silence was shattered by one loud cannon-shot close at hand. For a moment it was thought that the popular forces were moving. It was not so. That cannon-shot was only a signal for the bells. The bells began to ring in steeple after steeple, dome after dome, catching the call one from another athwart the dark town. First on the hill of the university; then by St. Anthony’s Gate, where was the thickest of the Revolutionary gatherings; then, nearer, by the town hall; then from St. Martin’s to the north; from the millennial rough tower of St. Germain to the south. For an hour or more the clamour of the bells filled Paris. But still there was no marching or any sound of arms, and from those high windows of the roof in the Tuileries, those attic windows where the watchers were, the streets lay empty below, under the dim oil-lamps that swung from cords across them and from the brighter light of the unsleeping houses. From one of those same windows the queen, with certain of her women, watched through those hours of darkness. The stars began to pale, and along the uncertain east a band of dark cloud stood motionless in the sombre sky, like a distant coast revealed by the dawn. Behind it at last the vivid colour of a thunderous sunrise showed. The [Illustration: MARIE-ANTOINETTE AND HER CHILDREN From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of a painting by Mme. Vigée Lebrun, in Museum of Versailles _To face p. 103_ ]