Robespierre came,
but said little, for he was waiting his hour. Danton laid his lion mane
in her lap, all his savagery for the moment tamed. Vergniaud, Buzot, and
all the chiefs of the Gironde, gathered around this oracle of liberty.
Anarchy supervened. Paris and all France were filled with riotings and
murder. The king finally declared war, but battles went against France.
Riot and murder increased. A mob of twenty thousand invaded the
Tuileries then occupied by the royal family. It was divided into three
divisions. The first was composed of armed and disciplined men, led by
Santerre. The male ruffians of Paris, blood-thirsty and atrocious beyond
any thing that civilization has ever produced, formed the second
division. The third, most terrible of all, was composed of the lost
women of Paris, led by Theroigne de Mericourt, clad in a blood-red
riding dress, and armed with sword and pistol. This notorious woman had
acted a prominent part in former scenes. She led the attack upon the
Bastille. She led the mob which brought the king from Versailles to
Paris. In the subsequent riots life and death hung upon her nod, and in
one of them she met her betrayer. He begged piteously for her pardon and
his life, and this was her answer, if we believe Lamartine: "My pardon!"
said she, "at what price can you buy it? My innocence gone, my family
lost to me, my brothers and sisters pursued in their own country by the
jeers of their kindred; the maledictions of my father; my exile from my
native land; my enrollment among courtesans; the blood by which my days
have been and will be stained; that imperishable curse of vice linked to
my name instead of that immortality of virtue which you once taught me
to doubt--it is for this that you would buy my forgiveness--do you know
of any price on earth sufficient to purchase it?" And he was massacred.
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