The Marseillais began by driving from their posts several Swiss, who yielded without resistance; a few of the assailants fired upon them; some of the Swiss officers, seeing their men fall, and perhaps thinking the King was still at the Tuileries, gave the word to a whole battalion to fire.  The aggressors were thrown into disorder, and the Carrousel was cleared in a moment; but they soon returned, spurred on by rage and revenge.  The Swiss were but eight hundred strong; they fell back into the interior of the Chateau; some of the doors were battered in by the guns, others broken through with hatchets; the populace rushed from all quarters into the interior of the palace; almost all the Swiss were massacred; the nobles, flying through the gallery which leads to the Louvre, were either stabbed or shot, and the bodies thrown out of the windows.

M. Pallas and M. de Marchais, ushers of the King’s chamber, were killed in defending the door of the council chamber; many others of the King’s servants fell victims to their fidelity.  I mention these two persons in particular because, with their hats pulled over their brows and their swords in their hands, they exclaimed, as they defended themselves with unavailing courage, “We will not survive!—­this is our post; our duty is to die at it.”  M. Diet behaved in the same manner at the door of the Queen’s bedchamber; he experienced the same fate.  The Princesse de Tarente had fortunately opened the door of the apartments; otherwise, the dreadful band seeing several women collected in the Queen’s salon would have fancied she was among us, and would have immediately massacred us had we resisted them.  We were, indeed, all about to perish, when a man with a long beard came up, exclaiming, in the name of Potion, “Spare the women; don’t dishonour the nation!” A particular circumstance placed me in greater danger than the others.  In my confusion I imagined, a moment before the assailants entered the Queen’s apartments, that my sister was not among the group of women collected there; and I went up into an ‘entresol’, where I supposed she had taken refuge, to induce her to come down, fancying it safer that we should not be separated.  I did not find her in the room in question; I saw there only our two femmes de chambre and one of the Queen’s two heyducs, a man of great height and military aspect.  I saw that he was pale, and sitting on a bed.  I cried out to him, “Fly! the footmen and our people are already safe.”—­“I cannot,” said the man to me; “I am dying of fear.”  As he spoke I heard a number of men rushing hastily up the staircase; they threw themselves upon him, and I saw him assassinated.

I ran towards the staircase, followed by our women.  The murderers left the heyduc to come to me.  The women threw themselves at their feet, and held their sabres.  The narrowness of the staircase impeded the assassins; but I had already felt a horrid hand thrust into my back to seize me by my clothes, when some one called out from the bottom of the staircase, “What are you doing above there?  We don’t kill women.”  I was on my knees; my executioner quitted his hold of me, and said, “Get up, you jade; the nation pardons you.”