the King be too weak to wear his crown, let him lay it down. You will
crown his Son, you will name a Council of Regency; and all will go
better." (Deux Amis, iii. 161.) Reproachful astonishment paints itself
on the face of Lafayette; speaks itself from his eloquent chivalrous
lips: in vain. "My General, we would shed the last drop of our blood for
you; but the root of the mischief is at Versailles; we must go and bring
the King to Paris; all the people wish it, tout le peuple le veut."

My General descends to the outer staircase; and harangues: once more
in vain. "To Versailles! To Versailles!" Mayor Bailly, sent for through
floods of Sansculottism, attempts academic oratory from his gilt
state-coach; realizes nothing but infinite hoarse cries of: "Bread!
To Versailles!"--and gladly shrinks within doors. Lafayette mounts the
white charger; and again harangues and reharangues: with eloquence, with
firmness, indignant demonstration; with all things but persuasion. "To
Versailles! To Versailles!" So lasts it, hour after hour; for the space
of half a day.

The great Scipio Americanus can do nothing; not so much as escape.
"Morbleu, mon General," cry the Grenadiers serrying their ranks as the
white charger makes a motion that way, "You will not leave us, you will
abide with us!" A perilous juncture: Mayor Bailly and the Municipals
sit quaking within doors; My General is prisoner without: the Place
de Greve, with its thirty thousand Regulars, its whole irregular
Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, is one minatory mass of clear or rusty
steel; all hearts set, with a moody fixedness, on one object. Moody,
fixed are all hearts: tranquil is no heart,--if it be not that of the
white charger, who paws there, with arched neck, composedly champing his
bit; as if no world, with its Dynasties and Eras, were now rushing down.
The drizzly day tends westward; the cry is still: "To Versailles!"