An isolated picture showed us the man's head and shoulders. I recognised and, generally speaking, the whole audience in the amphitheatre recognised the heavy-jowled face of King Louis XVI. This expression was hard and proud. We saw him again, after a few interruptions, in a great square surrounded by artillery and black with soldiers. He climbed the steep steps of a scaffold. His coat and neck-tie had been removed. The priest was supporting him. Four executioners tried to lay hold of him. I am obliged to interrupt my narrative, which I am deliberately wording as drily as possible, of these fleeting apparitions, in order to make it quite clear that they did not at the moment produce the effect of terror which my readers might suppose. They were too short, too desultory, let me say, and so bad from the strictly cinematographic point of view which the audience adopted, in spite of itself, that they excited irritation and annoyance rather than dread. The spectators had suddenly lost all confidence. They laughed, they sang. They hooted Massignac. And the storm of invective increased when, on the screen, one of the executioners held up the head of the king and faded away in the mist, together with the scaffold, the soldiers and the guns. There were a few more timid attempts at pictures, attempts on the part of the film, in which several persons say that they recognized Queen Marie Antoinette, attempts which sustained the patience of the onlookers who were anxious to see the end of a spectacle which they had paid so heavily to attend. But the violence could no longer be restrained. Who started it? Who was the first to rush forward and provoke the disorder and the resultant panic? The subsequent enquiries failed to show. There seems no doubt that the whole crowd obeyed its impulse to give full expression to its dissatisfaction and that the more turbulent of its members seized the opportunity of belabouring Théodore Massignac and even of trying to take the fabulous screen by storm. This last attempt, at any rate, failed before the impenetrable rampart formed by the attendants, who, armed with knuckledusters or truncheons, repelled the flood of the invaders. As for Massignac, who, after raising the curtain, had the unfortunate idea of leaving his cage and running to one of the exits, he was struck as he passed and swallowed up in the angry swirl of rioters. After that everybody attacked his neighbour, with a frantic desire for strife and violence which brought into conflict not only the enemies of Massignac and the partisans of order, but also those who were exasperated and those who had no thought but of escaping from the turmoil. Sticks and umbrellas were brandished on high. Women seized one another by the hair. Blood flowed. People fell to the ground, wounded.