In the interior of the palace, two hundred gentlemen, at the head of whom was the old marshal De Mouchy, had hastened together at the first news of the king’s danger.  They were rather the voluntary victims of ancient French honour, than useful defenders of the monarchy.  Fearing to excite the jealousy of the national guard and the troops, these gentlemen concealed themselves in the remote apartments of the palace, ready rather to die than to combat:  they wore no uniform, and their arms were concealed under their coats—­hence the name by which they were pointed out to the people of Chevaliers du poignard.  Arriving secretly from their provinces to offer their services to the king unknown to each other; and only furnished with a card of entrance to the palace, they hastened thither whenever there was danger.  They should have been ten thousand, and were but two hundred—­the last reserve of fidelity; but they did their duty without counting their number, and avenged the French nobility for the faults and the desertion of the emigration.

XVII.

The mob, on quitting the Assembly, had marched in close columns to the Carrousel.  Santerre and Alexandre, at the head of their battalions, directed the movement.  A compact mass of the insurgents, followed by the Rue St. Honore.  The other branches of the populace, cut off from the main body, thronged the courts of the Manege and the Feuillants, and tried to make room for themselves by issuing violently by one of the avenues which communicated with the garden from these courts.  A battalion of the national guard defended the approach to this iron gate.  The weakness or complaisance of a municipal officer freed the passage, and the battalion fell back, and took up its ground beneath the windows of the Chateau.  The crowd traversed the garden in an oblique direction, and passing before the battalions, saluted them with cries of Vive la nation! bidding them take their bayonets from their muskets.  The bayonets were removed, and the mob then passed out by the entrance of the Port Royal, and fell back upon the gates of the Carrousel, which shut off this place from the Seine.  The guards at these wickets again gave way, to allow a certain number of the malcontents to enter, and then shut the doors.  These men, excited by their march, songs, the acclamations of the Assembly, and by intoxication, rushed with furious clamours into the court-yards of the Chateau.  They ran to the principal doors, pressed upon the soldiers on guard, called their comrades without to come to them, and forced the hinges of the royal entrance gate.  The municipal officer, Panis, gave orders that it should be opened.  The Carrousel was forced, and the mob seemed for a moment to hesitate before the cannon pointed against them, and some squadrons of gendarmerie, drawn up in a line of battle.  Saint Prix, who commanded the artillery, separated from his guns by a movement of the crowd, sent to the