of the people.”  At the same moment a man, dressed much in the style of a marketman, with his hat pulled down over his eyes, seized me by the other arm, and said, “Yes, yes; tell her over and over again that it will not be with these States as with the others, which produced no good to the people; that the nation is too enlightened in 1789 not to make something more of them; and that there will not now be seen a deputy of the ’Tiers Etat’ making a speech with one knee on the ground; tell her this, do you hear?” I was struck with dread; the Queen then appeared in the balcony.  “Ah!” said the woman in the veil, “the Duchess is not with her.”—­“No,” replied the man, “but she is still at Versailles; she is working underground, molelike; but we shall know how to dig her out.”  The detestable pair moved away from me, and I reentered the palace, scarcely able to support myself.  I thought it my duty to relate the dialogue of these two strangers to the Queen; she made me repeat the particulars to the King.

About four in the afternoon I went across the terrace to Madame Victoire’s apartments; three men had stopped under the windows of the throne-chamber.  “Here is that throne,” said one of them aloud, “the vestiges of which will soon be sought for.”  He added a thousand invectives against their Majesties.  I went in to the Princess, who was at work alone in her closet, behind a canvass blind, which prevented her from being seen by those without.  The three men were still walking upon the terrace; I showed them to her, and told her what they had said.  She rose to take a nearer view of them, and informed me that one of them was named Saint-Huruge; that he was sold to the Duc d’Orleans, and was furious against the Government, because he had been confined once under a ’lettre de cachet’ as a bad character.

The King was not ignorant of these popular threats; he also knew the days on which money was scattered about Paris, and once or twice the Queen prevented my going there, saying there would certainly be a riot the next day, because she knew that a quantity of crown pieces had been distributed in the faubourgs.

[I have seen a six-franc crown piece, which certainly served to pay some wretch on the night of the 12th of July; the words “Midnight, 12th July, three pistols,” were rather deeply engraven on it.  They were, no doubt, a password for the first insurrection. —­Madame COMPAN]

On the evening of the 14th of July the King came to the Queen’s apartments, where I was with her Majesty alone; he conversed with her respecting the scandalous report disseminated by the factious, that he had had the Chamber of the National Assembly undermined, in order to blow it up; but he added that it became him to treat such absurd assertions with contempt, as usual; I ventured to tell him that I had the evening before supped with M. Begouen, one of the deputies, who said that there were very respectable persons who thought that this horrible contrivance had been