And then the ravenous women of Paris arose--mothers,
shop-girls, courtesans--and, gathering recruits as they swept through the
restless city streets, they rolled like an angry flood out the
eleven-mile road to Versailles. The King was hunting at Meudon; a
courier was sent for him. The Queen Consort was in her retreat at
Trianon. The messenger found her, sad and contemplative, seated in her
grotto. Hastily she was brought back to the palace. Later, she and the
King would have fled the anger of the crowd whose shouts of "Bread!
Bread!" echoed across the Marble Court to the windows of the royal
apartments. But their decision, put off from moment to moment, came too
late. The gates were closed. They were prisoners within the walls of
Versailles.
"It was a rainy night," relates a French historian of the Revolution.
"The crowd took shelter where they could; some burst open the gates of
the great stables, where the regiment of Flanders was stationed, and
mixed pell-mell with the soldiers. Others, about four thousand in
number, had remained in the Assembly. The men were quiet enough, but the
women were impatient at that state of inaction; they talked, shouted, and
made an uproar.
"The King's heart was beginning to fail him; he perceived that the Queen
was in peril. However agonizing it was to his conscience to consecrate
the legislative work of philosophy, at ten o'clock in the evening he
signed the Declaration of Rights.
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