Page:Historyoffranc00yong.djvu/193

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IX.] . THE GREAT REVOLUTION. i6o all emigrants traitors, and to send out of the kingdom all the clergy who had refused the oaths. Much as Lewis had already yielded, to this he would not consent, and again it was resolved to extort his signature by terror. On the 20th of June, 1792, 30,000 of the lowest of the people formed a procession, with banners inscribed, "The Rights of Man," and on tie end of a pike a pig's heart, labelled, " The heart of an Aristocrat." Through the Tuilleries they marched, the king allowing no resist- ance, and showing not a moment's terror ; but when the signature to the act was demanded from him, he gently replied that this was not the time nor the way to ask it. His calmness, and the quiet dignity of the queen and her sister, impressed the people, and after three hours they drew off without bloodshed. The war, however, made a real union between the king and the nation im- possible. Pnissia had joined Ajjstria. In a week or two more the tidings that the army of emigrants and Germans, under the Duke of Brunswick, was on the frontier, calling on loyal subjects to rise and deliver the king, renewed the rage of the people. La Fayette tried to interpose, but he was only suspected of treachery, and he tried to fly to Holland. He was captured by the Austrians and kept in prison for several years. The nation was possessed with the idea that the king had been playing them false, and meant to turn in his soldiers to crush them, and their wrath was pitiless. Loyal gentlemen rallied round the king at the Tuilleries, and the Swiss guards were of unshaken fidelity. Marie Antoinette would have trusted to them, and have stood by her husband while all sold their lives dearly, but Lewis still saw in the howling mob his ill-treated subjects, and could not bear to draw the sword against them. When, on the loth of August, 1792, they again rushed on the Tuilleries, reinforced by five hundred ruffians from Mar- seilles, he wavered, not for his ©wn sake, but theirs. Just as the attack was beginning, the Legislative Assembly sent to offer him shelter ; and though the queen declared that she would rather be nailed to the palace doors than fly, he consented, and was escorted across the street with his wife, sister, two children, and three ladies, to the hall of the Assembly, where they were shut up in the short- hand writers' box. He had forgotten that this left the faithful men who had come to defend him to give their lives for nothing. No word to disperse had been given to