Every thing was preparing in the departments to send to Paris the 20,000 troops ordered by the Assembly.  The Marseillais, summoned by Barbaroux at the instigation of Madame Roland, were approaching the capital.  It was the fire of the soul in the south coming to rekindle the revolutionary hearth, which, as the Girondists believed, was failing in Paris.  This body of twelve or fifteen hundred men was composed of Genoese, Ligurians, Corsicans, Piedmontese, banished from their country and recruited suddenly on the shores of the Mediterranean; the majority sailors or soldiers accustomed to warfare, and some bandits, hardened in crime.  They were commanded by young men of Marseilles, friends of Barbaroux and Isnard.  Rendered fanatic by the climate and the eloquence of the provincial clubs, they came on amidst the applauses of the population of central France, received, feted, overcome by enthusiasm and wine at the patriotic banquets which hailed them in constant succession on their way.  The pretext of their march was to fraternise, at the federation of the 14th of July[25], with the other federes of the kingdom.  The secret motive was to intimidate the Parisian national guard, to revive the energy of the faubourgs, and to be the vanguard of that camp of 20,000 men which the Girondists had made the Assembly vote, in order at the same time to control the Feuillants, the Jacobins, the king, and the Assembly itself, with an army from the departments wholly composed of their creatures.  The sea of people was violently agitated on their approach.  The national guard, the federes, the popular societies, children, women, all that portion of the population which lives on excitement of the streets, and runs after public spectacles, flew to meet the Marseillais.  Their bronzed faces, martial appearance, eyes of fire, uniforms covered with the dust of their journey, their Phrygian head-dress, their strange weapons, the guns they dragged after them, the green branches which shaded their bonnets rouges, their strange language mingled with oaths, and accentuated by savage gestures, all struck the imagination of the multitude with great force.  The revolutionary idea appeared to have assumed the guise of a mortal, and to be marching under the aspect of this horde, to the assault of the last remnant of royalty.  They entered the cities and villages beneath triumphal arches.  They sang terrible songs as they progressed.  Couplets, alternated by the regular noise of their feet on the road, and by the sound of drums, resembled chorusses of the country and war, answering at intervals to the clash of arms and weapons of death in a march to combat.  This song is graven on the soul of France.

XXVII.

THE MARSEILLAISE.

I.