All that first fortnight of July was full of three great things in motion: the pomp of Austria going to the coronation of the Emperor at Frankfort before the forces of Austria should be launched upon France; the Federates from all the French departments (and notably the armed battalion from Marseilles) coming up to Paris to take part in the great feast-day of the nation; the gathering of the Prussian forces upon the Rhine. Meanwhile two other things waited: Lafayette and his army waited to save the crown in Paris; the court in Paris waited for the success of the invader and for its own deliverance. Upon Saturday, the fourteenth of July, the Federates from all over France held their great national feast in the capital. On that same day the emperor was crowned in Frankfort; upon the following Tuesday (it was the anniversary of the Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars!), with Paris in full effervescence from the arrival of the Federates, the Jacobins took their opportunity, Robespierre leading them, and petitioned the parliament to impeach Lafayette for treason. The parliament temporized. Upon the nineteenth, when the question was again raised, it refused to condemn the general. Old Dückner came from his frontier command to Paris; he was publicly accused in Parliament of having conspired with Lafayette to march upon the capital in favour of the king. That charge was disproved so far as letters could disprove it; but in the midst of the excitement which it raised yet another step was taken by Destiny. The Army of the Allies being at last concentrated at Coblenz, the Duke of Brunswick, its commander-in-chief, signed and issued upon the twenty-fifth of July the manifesto which had been largely dictated from the French court, and of which the most violent clause proceeded from the queen herself; it threatened the parliament and the town of Paris with military execution if the king were not restored to his pre-revolutionary power. That document was known in Paris upon the twenty-eighth, and for the next few days only the time and the conditions of the last conflict between the Royal Guards, their allied volunteers and militia upon the one hand, and the populace upon the other, were in doubt. The armed battalion of Federates from Marseilles had marched in upon the thirtieth of July. Upon the eighth of August one last attempt was made to get the parliament to impeach Lafayette, and for the last time the parliament, in its sympathy with the crown and against the Paris populace, refused. The motion was rejected by 406 to 224. Robespierre had never given a better example of his sharp and piercing judgment than when he had said at the Jacobins, “The parliament will not save the nation; the nation must save itself.” All the night of the ninth of August Paris watched in a vigil. We have seen how the windows were [Illustration: MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE _To face p. 147_ ]