Once more Latour besought her to take refuge in another apartment.

"You have said that they cannot force the entrance: what do you
fear?" said she.

"I fear the stones, your highness."

"Then I will prove to the rabble that I, no more than Cardinal
Mazarin, am to be terrified by stones," returned Olympia,
approaching the window and placing herself at the side of her son.

The multitude, as they recognized her, broke forth into a wild shout
of abhorrence.

"Look! there is the woman who murdered her husband, and would have
murdered her children too!" "There is the wretch who would have
poisoned the king!" "There stands the accomplice of La Voisin!" "And
while her tool languishes in prison, she has no right to breathe the
free air of heaven!" "Away with her to the Bastile!" "To the
Bastile, to the Bastile!" "No! let her be burned for her crimes!"

"Louvois! Louvois!" murmured Olympia, her brow reddening with
humiliation.

Another yell from the besiegers was silenced by a loud voice, whose
words of command rose clear above the tumult.

"I knew it," said Eugene, "they have a leader. There is a method in
these manifestations which shows that they are not the disconnected
efforts of a many-headed monster."