She had escaped from the women who retained the queen and children in the bed-chamber.  She adored her brother, and wished to die with him.  Young, excessively beautiful, and deeply respected at court, for the piety of her life and her passionate devotion to the king, she had renounced all love from her intense affection for her family.  Her dishevelled hair, her eyes swimming with tears, her arms extended towards the king, gave to her a despairing and sublime expression.  “It is the queen!” exclaimed several women of the faubourgs.  This name, at such a moment, was a sentence of death.  Some miscreants rushed towards the king’s sister with uplifted arms, and were about to strike her, when the officers of the palace undeceived them.  The venerated name of Madame Elizabeth made them drop their arms.  “Ah! what are you doing?” exclaimed the princess sorrowfully; “let them suppose I am the queen; dying in her place, I might perhaps have saved her.”  At these words an irresistible movement of the crowd thrust Madame Elizabeth violently from her brother, and drove her into the opening of one of the windows of the salle, where the crowd which hemmed her in still contemplated her with respect.

XX.

The king was in a deep recess of the centre window; Acloque, Vaunot, d’Hervilly, twenty volunteers and national guards, made him a rampart with their bodies.  Some of the officers drew their swords.  “Put your swords into their scabbards,” said the king, calmly, “this multitude is more excited than guilty.”  He got upon a bench in the window, the grenadiers mounted beside him, the others in front of him; they thrust aside, parried, and lowered the sticks, scythes, and pikes lifted above the heads of the people.  Ferocious vociferations now rose confusedly from this irritated mass. “Down with the veto!—­the camp of Paris! give us back our patriotic ministers! where is the Austrian woman?” Some ringleaders advanced from the ranks every moment to utter louder threats and menaces of death to the king.  Unable to reach him through the hedge of bayonets crossed in front of him, they waved beneath his eyes and over his head hideous flags, with sinister inscriptions, ragged breeches, the guillotine, the bleeding heart, the gibbet.  One of them tried perpetually to reach the king with his lance in his hand; it was the same cut-throat who, two years before, had washed with his own hands in a pail of water the heads of Berthier and Foulon, and, carrying them by the hair to the Quai de la Ferraille, had thrown them amongst the people for symbols of carnage, and incentives to fresh murders.