But there came to the queen--for it was she who was the soul of that defence--news full of omen. The regular government of the city, elective, popular, and resistant to the crown though it was, had not seemed strong enough for battle: it had fallen in the night, and in the town hall there were now in power men of some insurrectionary committee, the leaders of the revolt. The man chiefly responsible for the militia of the city, one who might have divided or checked its forces, by his authority, had left the palace in the night to meet the authorities of the city. When he reached the town hall he had found there not the authorities of the city, but this new insurrectionary body, and as he left the place the mob without had murdered him. It was certain now that the attack could not be restrained. Before the eastern front of the palace, cutting the great courtyard of the Louvre and shutting off the houses in it from the Tuileries, ran a high wooden paling, stretching from one lodge gate to another. Between that paling and the Tuileries itself detachments of the guard were waiting with muskets loaded, and sections of cannon with matches lit, prepared to discharge at the first menace of attack. It was about eight o’clock when the head of a street boy who had hoisted himself up precariously from the farther side appeared above that paling’s rim and disappeared again. Then one face, then another, as grotesquely, as impotently showed. Some stayed so long that it seemed as though their owners were standing upon the shoulders of companions. One or two of these larrikins threw stones. A guard levelled his musket, and all those faces popped down again. What a beginning for the catastrophe of a thousand years! At an upper window of the palace Louis, the king, watched, looking eastward in his turn, and he and those about him heard a murmur coming from along the river quay--a murmur not loud, but wide-spread and deep and dull because there stood between it and the hearers the Long Gallery of the Louvre. It was the advance of the people, of their unformed vanguard, coming before the militia and the volunteers. In a moment that murmur turned to vivid, immediate, and neighbouring sound, like the roar of water which had [Illustration: Copyright by Manzi-Joyant Co. LOUIS XVI The Forge in the Palace at Versailles _To face p. 106_ ] been heard approaching in a flume upon a mountain side and breaks suddenly outward from its issue over the washers: so the many thousands of the insurrectionary crowd burst through the arches under the Long Gallery, coming from the river quays into the Carrousel of the Louvre. Every musket and every window was ready; all the fourteen guns of the palace were ready in rank before it. The great oaken gates of the palisade were burst asunder; the armed mob broke through swelling in; and at that moment the first order was given in the palace to fire.