Madame Roland went from the palace to hired lodgings, and in the temporary fusion which followed of the revolutionists of all parties, the most eminent leaders gathered around her again.  Robespierre came, but said little, for he was waiting his hour.  Danton laid his lion mane in her lap, all his savagery for the moment tamed.  Vergniaud, Buzot, and all the chiefs of the Gironde, gathered around this oracle of liberty.  Anarchy supervened.  Paris and all France were filled with riotings and murder.  The king finally declared war, but battles went against France.  Riot and murder increased.  A mob of twenty thousand invaded the Tuileries then occupied by the royal family.  It was divided into three divisions.  The first was composed of armed and disciplined men, led by Santerre.  The male ruffians of Paris, blood-thirsty and atrocious beyond any thing that civilization has ever produced, formed the second division.  The third, most terrible of all, was composed of the lost women of Paris, led by Theroigne de Mericourt, clad in a blood-red riding dress, and armed with sword and pistol.  This notorious woman had acted a prominent part in former scenes.  She led the attack upon the Bastille.  She led the mob which brought the king from Versailles to Paris.  In the subsequent riots life and death hung upon her nod, and in one of them she met her betrayer.  He begged piteously for her pardon and his life, and this was her answer, if we believe Lamartine:  “My pardon!” said she, “at what price can you buy it?  My innocence gone, my family lost to me, my brothers and sisters pursued in their own country by the jeers of their kindred; the maledictions of my father; my exile from my native land; my enrollment among courtesans; the blood by which my days have been and will be stained; that imperishable curse of vice linked to my name instead of that immortality of virtue which you once taught me to doubt—­it is for this that you would buy my forgiveness—­do you know of any price on earth sufficient to purchase it?” And he was massacred.  She died forty years afterwards in a mad-house, for in the fate of the revolution, she was stripped and whipped in the streets to madness by the very women she had led.

These loathsome cohorts forced their way into the palace.  They invaded the rooms of the king and queen.  They struck at him with pikes, and forced upon his head the red bonnet of the Jacobins, while the most wretched of her sex encircled the queen with a living wall of vice, and loaded her with obscene execrations, charges, and epithets.

Although this outbreak has been charged to both the great political parties, it is probably nearer to truth to say that it originated spontaneously with that demoniac mob soon to rule France, and which from this time carried all political organizations with it.  The Girondists, however, still retained enough of their constitutional conservatism to be the only hope which royalty could have for its preservation.  The king again threw himself into their arms.  Roland was reinstated in his ministry, and the palace again received his wife.