Five hours later--that is to say, at eight in the morning--this is what the two officers had accomplished. They reached the camp at Sablons in time to bring the artillery to Paris. They established a manufactory of cartridges at Meudon. They planted guns at every avenue, and masked batteries were erected in the event of any of the outlets being carried. A battery, consisting of two eight-pounders and two howitzers, was erected on the Place du Carrousel to cover the columns and to fire on the windows of the houses from which weapons could be brought to bear upon the place. General Verdier commanded at the Palais National. Means of subsistence for the Convention and its soldiers were thus assured for four or five days in case of blockade. Guns and troops were stationed in and around the building occupied by the Convention--in the cul-de-sac of the Dauphin, in the Rues de Rohan and Saint-Nicaise, at the Palais-Égalité, at the Pont de la Révolution, and the Place Vendôme. A small body of cavalry and two thousand infantry were kept in reserve at the Carrousel and in the garden of the Tuileries. Thus this great Convention of France, which had overturned a monarchy that had endured for centuries; which had made every throne in Europe tremble; which had driven the English from Holland, and the Austrians and the Prussians from Champagne and Alsace; which had driven the Spanish troops one hundred and eighty miles beyond the Pyrenees, and destroyed the two Vendées--this great Convention of France, which had just united Belgium, Nice, Savoy, and Luxemburg to France, whose armies, passing like a whirlwind through Europe, had leaped the Rhine as though it had been a brook, and threatened to pursue the eagle of Hapsburg to Vienna; this National Convention possessed nothing in Paris but the banks of the Seine, from the Rue Dauphine to the Rue du Bac, and only those parts of the city on the other side of the river which were included between the Place de la Révolution and the Place des Victoires; and to defend itself against all Paris it had only five thousand men and a general who was almost unknown. CHAPTER XIX CITIZEN GARAT On several points, and particularly along the Pont-Neuf, the sentinels of the Sections and those of the Convention were so near to one another that they could easily talk together. A few unimportant skirmishes occurred during the morning. The Section Poissonière stopped the men and the guns who were on their way to the Section Quinze-Vingts. That of Mont-Blanc captured a convoy of provisions intended for the Tuileries. A detachment from the Section Le Peletier took possession of the bank. And finally Morgan, with a corps of five hundred men, almost all émigrés or Chouans, all wearing collars and pompons of green, advanced toward the Pont-Neuf, while the Section of the Comédie-Française descended by way of the Rue Dauphine.