Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/323

 How deluges of frantic Sansculottism roared through all passages of this Tuileries, ruthless in vengeance; how the Valets were butchered, hewn down; and Dame Campan saw the Marseillese sabre flash over her head, but the Blackbrowed said, 'Va-t'en, Get thee gone,' and flung her from him unstruck; how in the cellars wine-bottles were broken, wine-butts were staved-in and drunk; and, upwards to the very garrets, all windows tumbled out their precious royal furnitures: and, with gold mirrors, velvet curtains, down of ript feather-beds, and dead bodies of men, the Tuileries was like no Garden of the Earth:—all this let him who has a taste for it see amply in Mercier, in acrid Montgaillard, or Beaulieu of the Deux Amis. A hundred and eighty bodies of Swiss lie piled there; naked, unremoved till the second day. Patriotism has torn their red coats into snips; and marches with them at the Pike's point: the ghastly bare corpses lie there, under the sun and under the stars; the curious of both sexes crowding to look. Which let not us do. Above a hundred carts, heaped with Dead, fare towards the Cemetery of Saint-Madeleine; bewailed, bewept; for all had kindred, all had mothers, if not here, then there. It is one of those Carnage-fields, such as you read of by the name 'Glorious Victory,' brought home in this case to one's own door.

But the blackbrowed Marseillese have struck down the tyrant of the Château. He is struck down; low, and hardly again to rise. What a moment for an august Legislative was that when the Hereditary Representative entered, under such circumstances; and the Grenadier, carrying the little Prince Royal out of the press, set him down on the Assembly-table! A moment,—which one had to smooth-off with oratory; waiting what the next would bring! Louis said few words: 'He was come hither to prevent a great crime; he believed himself safer nowhere than here.' President Vergniaud answered briefly, in vague oratory as we say, about 'defence