honorable service of guarding the palace.  And at the same time, as if to punish the National Guard for its conduct on the previous day, another vote broke up the staff of that force; cashiered its finest companies, the grenadiers and the mounted troopers, on the plea that such distinctions were inconsistent with equality; and filled up the vacancies with men who were the very dregs of the city, many of whom were, in fact, secret agents of the Jacobins, by whose aid they hoped to spread disaffection through the entire force.

The afternoon of the 9th was passed in anxious preparation by both the conspirators and those whom they were about to attack.  The king and queen were not destitute of faithful adherents, whom their very danger only rendered the more zealous to place all their strength, their valor, and, as they truly foreboded, their lives, at the disposal of their honored and threatened sovereigns.  The veteran Marshal de Mailly, one of those gallant nobles whose devoted loyalty had been so scandalously insulted by La Fayette[1] in the spring of the preceding year, though now eighty years of age, hastened to the defense of his royal master and mistress, and brought with him a chivalrous phalanx of above a hundred gentlemen, all animated with the same self-sacrificing heroism, as his own, to fight, or, if need should be, to die for their king and queen, though they had no arms but their swords.  It seemed fortunate, too, that the command of the National Guard for the day fell by rotation to an officer named Mandat, a man of high professional skill, intrepid courage, and unshaken in his zeal for the royal cause, though in former days the constitutionalists had reckoned him among their adherents.  His brigade numbered about two thousand four hundred men, on most of whom he could thoroughly rely.  And it was no slight proof of his force of character and energy, as well as of his address, that, as the National Guard could not be employed out of the routine of their regular duty without a special authorisation from the civil power, he contrived to extort from Petion, as mayor of the city, a formal authority to augment his brigade for the special occasion, and, if force should be used against him, to repel it by force.

The Swiss Guard of about a thousand men were all trustworthy; and there was also a small body of heavy cavalry of the gendarmery who had proved true enough to resist all the seductions of the conspirators.  There were likewise a few cannon.  In all, nearly four thousand men could be mustered for the defense of the palace; a force, if well equipped and well led, not inadequate to the task of holding it out for some time against any number of undisciplined assailants.  But they were not well armed.  They were nearly destitute of ammunition, and Mandat’s most vehement entreaties and remonstrances could not wring out from Petion an order for a supply of cartridges, though, as he told him, several companies had not four rounds left, some had only one; and though it was notorious that the police had served out ammunition to the Marseillese, who had no claim to a single bullet.  Still less were they well led; for at such a crisis every thing depended on the king’s example, and Louis was utterly wanting to himself.