While these words were being anxiously exchanged around me, the apparition of the almost invisible bit of red bunting, the expression of sinister glee I had just remarked on the faces of several inebriated National Guardsmen who, marching past the crowd, tapped their guns, crying "We shall send a few pills into the Jacobins;"--all these circumstances connected themselves in my mind and forced upon me all too clear a premonition of what was about to occur. The batteries of artillery had commenced to disgorge through the Great Rock gate when the bourgeois guard which was in line halted, and, deploying before its banner, advanced, with leveled guns and quickened pace, upon the multitude, which recoiled before it. At the same instant the cavalry entered at a rapid trot by the gate near the Military School, while the other column poured in by the bridge over the Seine. By this simultaneous manoeuvre the forty thousand persons or thereabouts who still remained in the Field of Mars, surrounded by embankments and walls, saw themselves hemmed in on every side by the troops who occupied the gates. Vain would be any attempt on my part to give an idea of the stupor, then the fright, and soon the panic, which seized the helpless multitude. Great God, what a picture! What heartrending cries! What shrieks of children, of women, mingling with the imprecations of men whose energy became paralyzed, either by the physical impossibility of doing anything in the crush, or by their preoccupation to safeguard a wife, a mother, a daughter, or children of tender age, exposed to smothering, or to being trampled under foot! Suddenly I saw appear, on top of one of the embankments, Lehiron and about a score of his cut-throat band, accompanied by some tattered, bare-headed urchins who cried: "Down with the National Guard! Down with the blue-bonnets! Down with Lafayette!" While his followers rained a hail of rocks at the city guard, Lehiron drew a pistol from his pocket, and, without even taking aim, discharged his weapon in the direction of the General's staff, shouting: "Death to Lafayette!"