As night approached, the agitation in the palace, and still more in the city, grew more and more intense.  It was a brilliant and a warm night.  By ten o’clock the mob began to cluster in the streets, many only curious and anxious from uncertain fear; those in the secret hastening toward the point of rendezvous.  The rioters also had cannon, and by eleven their artillery-men had taken charge of their guns.  The conspirators had got possession of all the churches; and as the hour of midnight struck, a single cannon-shot gave the signal, and from every steeple and tower in the city the fatal tocsin began to peal.  The insurrection was begun.

Petion, who, from some motive which is not very intelligible, wished to save appearances, and who, though in fact he had been eager in promoting the insurrection, pretended innocence of all complicity in it even to the Assembly, whom he was aware that he was not deceiving, on the first sound of the bells repaired to the Hotel de Ville.  He found, as indeed he was aware that he should find, a strange addition to the Municipal Council.  The majority of the sections of the city had declared themselves in insurrection; had passed resolutions that they would no longer obey the existing magistrates; and had appointed a body of commissioners to overbear them, trusting in the cowardice of the majority, and in the willing acquiescence and co-operation of Danton and the other members of the party of violence.  The commissioners seized on a room in the Hotel by the side of the regular council-room, and their first measures were marked with a cunning and unscrupulousness which largely contributed to the success of their more active comrades in the streets.  Even Petion himself was not wicked enough or resolute enough for them.  The authority which Mandat had wrung from him on the previous morning was, in their eyes, a proof of unpardonable weakness.  He might be terrified into issuing some other order which might disconcert or at least impede their plans; and accordingly they put him under a kind of honorable arrest, and sent him to his own house under the guard of an armed force, which was instructed to allow no one access to him; and at the same time they sent an order in his name to Mandat to repair to the Hotel de Ville, to concert with them the measures necessary for the safety of the city.

Had he acted on his own judgment, Mandat would have disregarded the summons; but M. Roederer urged upon him that he was bound to comply with an order brought in the name of the mayor.  Accordingly he repaired to the Hotel de Ville, and gave to the Municipal Council so distinct an account of his measures, and of his reason for taking them, that, though Danton and some of his more factious colleagues reproached him for exhibiting what they called a needless distrust of the people, the majority of the Council approved of his conduct, and dismissed him to return to his duties.  But as he quit their chamber, he was dragged before