Instantly the signal rolled along the line, and all the windows blazed with flame. Range in those days was very short, windage very great, and few fell; but the assault was checked, and as it halted, two guns of the Swiss roared out together, and the grape-shot swept down perhaps thirty men, opened a lane in the dark and shouting mass, and sent it pressing backward through the gates and the now opened rents in the palisade. The Swiss, both those already before the palace and those coming out from within, formed by companies and charged. There were the shrieks and the trampling of a herd overcome by discipline,--the Swiss were perhaps a thousand all told,--and the whole place was cleared: the narrow and tortuous streets between the houses of the great Carrousel of the Louvre; and even, some say, the arches under the Long Gallery and the quays for some yards beyond. It was not yet nine o’clock, and the palace seemed to be already saved. There is no other town in Europe, and only two other peoples, the Irish and the Poles, of whom one could not say what many said in that moment of the town of Paris and of the French people, that their fate had been decided by this action of regulars against a mob. But Paris being Paris, and Gaul Gaul, and the French people having beyond any other the gift for rapid organization from below and for corporate discipline, no victory was yet won by the regulars. Even as the noise of the broken mob retreating died away, another new noise, more formidable, more rhythmical, approached, and the watchers in the Tuileries heard it. It was not an army upon the march, but it was men determined and in some way ordered. It was the militia, it was the contingents from the provinces, and chief among them the volunteers from Marseilles, the five hundred with their guns. The Swiss were back, ranged before the palace and in reserve in the central hall and by the great staircase. All the muskets were loaded again, though the affair was thought to be finished after that first brief and successful skirmish, when the sound of regular marching and the rumble of cannon-wheels were heard. At his window, overlooking the still empty enclosures beneath him, stood Louis, heavy with insufficient sleep; by his side stood an official of the county, Roederer. The column of the popular attack came swinging through the arches which led from the river quay under the Long Gallery; their cannon were ready, and their muskets charged. This time it was war.