The parterres, the courts, even the salons of the palace swarmed with ruffians that had marched out from Paris to menace Versailles.  By June 25th there was open revolt in the capital.  “A stormy, heavy, gloomy time, like a feverish, painful dream,” prefaced the furious deeds of the 14th of July.  Every day witnessed some new outbreak.  July was a month of insurrections and murders.  The Bastille was assailed by rioters.  News came to the King that the ancient fortress had fallen.  “Sire,” announced the Duke of Orleans to the sleepy Monarch in his bedchamber, “it is a Revolution!”

Lafayette, back from the war across the sea, became the unwilling leader of the National Guard.  On the evening of the first of October occurred the fatal banquet of the King’s guard, held, not in the Orangery or in some other informal hall, but in the palace theater, where no fete had been given since the visit of the Emperor Joseph II of Austria.  A French writer describes the scene.  “The doors open.  Behold the King and the Queen!  The King has been prevailed on to visit them on his return from the chase.  The Queen walks round to every table, looking beautiful, and adorned with the child she bears in her arms.

“So beautiful and yet so unfortunate!  As she was departing with the King, the band played the affecting air:  ’O Richard, O my King, abandoned by the whole world!’ Every heart melted at that appeal.  Several tore off their cockades, and took that of the Queen, the black Austrian cockade, devoting themselves to her service. . . .

“On the 3rd of October, another dinner; they grow more daring, their tongues are untied, and the counter-revolution showed itself boldly.  In the long gallery, and in the apartments, the ladies no longer allow the tricolor cockade to circulate.  With their handkerchiefs and ribands they make white cockades, and tie them themselves.”

Stories of royalist revels and open insults to the cockade of the Revolutionists still further inflamed starving Paris.  On the fifth of October there were thousands of inhabitants that had tasted no food for thirty hours.  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.