On the 17th, very early in the morning, the people, without leaders, began to collect in the Champ-de-Mars, and surround the altar of the country, raised in the centre of the large square of the confederation.  A strange and melancholy chance opened the scenes of murder on this day.  When the multitude is excited, every thing becomes the occasion of crime.  A young painter, who, before the hour of meeting, was copying the patriotic inscriptions engraved in front of the altar, heard a slight noise at his feet; astonished, he looked around him and saw the point of a gimlet, with which some men, concealed under the steps of the altar, were piercing the planks of the pedestal.  He hastened to the nearest guard-house, and returned with some soldiers.  They lifted up one of the steps and found beneath two invalids, who had got under the altar in the night, with no other design, as they declared, than a childish and obscene curiosity.  The report instantly spread that the altar of the country was undermined, in order to blow up the people; that a barrel of gunpowder had been discovered beside the conspirators; that the invalids, surprised in the preliminaries to their criminal design, were well known satellites of the aristocracy; that they had confessed their deadly design, and the amount of reward promised on the success of their wickedness.  The mob mustered, and raging with fury, surrounded the guard-house of the Gros-Caillou.  The two invalids underwent an interrogatory.  The moment when they left the guard-house, to be conveyed to the Hotel-de-Ville, the populace rushed upon them, tore them from the soldiers who were escorting them, rent them in pieces, and their heads, placed on the tops of pikes, were carried by a band of ferocious children to the environs of the Palais Royal.

XII.

The news of these murders, confusedly spread and variously interpreted in the city, in the Assembly, among various groups, excited various feelings, according as it was viewed as a crime of the people or a crime of its enemies.  The truth was only made apparent long after.  The agitation increased from the indignation of some and the suspicions of others.  Bailly, duly informed, sent three commissaries and a battalion.  Other commissaries traversed the quarters of the capital, reading to the people the proclamation of the magistrates and the address of the National Assembly.

The ground of the Bastille was occupied by the national guard and the patriotic societies, which were to go thence to the field of the Federation.  Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Freron, Brissot, and the principal ringleaders of the people had disappeared; some said in order to concert insurrectional measures, at Legendre’s house in the country; others, in order to escape the responsibility of the day.  The former version was the more generally accredited, from Robespierre’s known hatred to Danton, to whom Saint Just said, in