Victoria and I went out to observe what impression the desertion of the King and Queen would make upon the people. An innumerable multitude covered the garden of the Palais Royal, the place before the City Hall, and the grounds of the Tuileries and the National Assembly. At ten o'clock in the morning the municipal officers fired three cannon as an alarm. The tocsin sounded, the drums of the National Guard rang out the "assembly." The confusion was indescribable. In the course of our travels we met Monsieur Hubert. It was the first time I had come face to face with him since the day I asked his niece in marriage. In full uniform, the banker was repairing to his Section, where his royalist district battalion, the Daughters of St. Thomas, was assembling. He approached me and cried brusquely: "Well? The King has gone. But we don't want the Republic, and shall defend the Constitution to the death." "What Constitution do you pretend to defend?" replied Victoria. "The Constitution recognizes a hereditary King, the King absconds. Circumstances themselves demand the Republic." Hubert was dumb for a moment. Then he said, "Citizeness! The Assembly will name Lafayette provisionally Protector of the kingdom. For the rest, the Assembly has sent commissioners after the King, and we hope that they will succeed in reaching him before he gains the frontier. The question will be simplified." At that moment a flux of the crowd tore Victoria and me away, and carried us on towards the palace of the Tuileries. The sentinels at the foot of the great stairway allowed everyone up into the apartments. The thronging visitors were, like ourselves, all under the influence of a mocking curiosity, remembering, as they did, that the monarch who inhabited these sumptuous apartments complained of the insufficiency of his 40,000,000 francs on the civil list, and pretended that he could not procure the necessaries of life. Leaving the palace again, we followed the boulevards back to the St. Antoine suburb. Everywhere were manifested aversion for royalty, contempt for the person of Louis XVI, and hatred for the Austrian, Marie Antoinette. Several organs of the patriotic press lent their encouragement to the republican tendencies in the air, either by openly demanding the Republic, or by insisting that Louis had forfeited his title. Marat, in _The Friend of the People_, voiced in these words the indignation of the people against the King, the court, and the ministers: