When, six weeks after their arrival in the country, the incidents of the tenth of August reached far Touraine, the cunning abbé had the gazette wherein they were chronicled laid on the table of the marquise, whom he justly calculated would be frozen with horror. That her innocent benefactress should be summoned by destiny in fulfilment of prophecy, to drain so full a cup of bitterness was appalling, and naturally set her friend reflecting upon the darkness of her own horoscope. The sensitive and haughty queen was indeed humbled; her defenders massacred, her home converted into a shambles. After the storming of the Tuileries, the populace, blood-drunk, wreaked their insensate fury upon all alike, irrespective of age or sex. The gentlemen-ushers, pages, doorkeepers, even the lowly scullions of the kitchen were, without distinction, butchered. It was impossible to move a yard over the polished floors without treading on a corpse, stripped and horribly mutilated. Every corner of the palace was plundered, its furniture flung out of the window. When there were no more Royalists to kill, the rioters turned upon each other, making the fatal day the fête of carnage and devastation. The mangled bodies of the seven hundred murdered Swiss were covered with those of _sans-culottes_. It was a carnival of slaughter. On the Place Louis XV., groups of men and women amused themselves by severing the heads of the slain and tearing their flesh like tigers. It was a relief to know that the royal family were safe within the Temple; and yet, for what further suffering had they been rescued? The situation was so alarming that foreign ambassadors left Paris in a body, the last to go milady Sutherland, who stood by Marie Antoinette in her travail till the prison gates were closed on her. Then came the incident, so often repeated in history, of a hopeless combat with a spirit which, easily raised, it is found impossible to lay. General Lafayette, perceiving, with distress, the results of his own teaching, implored his army to rise in defence of king and constitution, and being met with laughter, fled.