This was no normal state of things at the Academy of Bertrand des Amis.  Whatever else in Paris might have been at a standstill lately, the fencing academy had flourished as never hitherto.  Usually both the master and his assistant were busy from morning until dusk, and already Andre-Louis was being paid now by the lessons that he gave, the master allowing him one half of the fee in each case for himself, an arrangement which the assistant found profitable.  On Sundays the academy made half-holiday; but on this Sunday such had been the state of suspense and ferment in the city that no one having appeared by eleven o’clock both des Amis and Andre-Louis had gone out.  Little they thought as they lightly took leave of each other — they were very good friends by now — that they were never to meet again in this world.

Bloodshed there was that day in Paris.  On the Place Vendome a detachment of dragoons awaited the crowd out of which Andre-Louis had slipped.  The horsemen swept down upon the mob, dispersed it, smashed the waxen effigy of M. Necker, and killed one man on the spot — an unfortunate French Guard who stood his ground.  That was a beginning.  As a consequence Besenval brought up his Swiss from the Champ de Mars and marshalled them in battle order on the Champs Elysees with four pieces of artillery.  His dragoons he stationed in the Place Louis XV.  That evening an enormous crowd, streaming along the Champs Elysees and the Tuileries Gardens, considered with eyes of alarm that warlike preparation.  Some insults were cast upon those foreign mercenaries and some stones were flung.  Besenval, losing his head, or acting under orders, sent for his dragoons and ordered them to disperse the crowd, But that crowd was too dense to be dispersed in this fashion; so dense that it was impossible for the horsemen to move without crushing some one.  There were several crushed, and as a consequence when the dragoons, led by the Prince de Lambesc, advanced into the Tuileries Gardens, the outraged crowd met them with a fusillade of stones and bottles.  Lambesc gave the order to fire.  There was a stampede.  Pouring forth from the Tuileries through the city went those indignant people with their story of German cavalry trampling upon women and children, and uttering now in grimmest earnest the call to arms, raised at noon by Desmoulins in the Palais Royal.

The victims were taken up and borne thence, and amongst them was Bertrand des Amis, himself — like all who lived by the sword — an ardent upholder of the noblesse, trampled to death under hooves of foreign horsemen launched by the noblesse and led by a nobleman.

To Andre-Louis, waiting that evening on the second floor of No. 13 Rue du Hasard for the return of his friend and master, four men of the people brought that broken body of one of the earliest victims of the Revolution that was now launched in earnest.

CHAPTER III