Therefore, at the first cry of liberty which rang through France
the French town rose full of joy and hope. The moment had come
at last for her to contest aloud that concession made by a young
queen, a minor, in expiation of her sins, of a city and a province,
and with it half a million souls. By what right had she sold
these souls in aeternum to the hardest and most exacting of all
masters, the Roman Pontiff?

All France was hastening to assemble in the fraternal embrace
of the Federation at the Champ de Mars. Was she not France? Her
sons ejected delegates to wait upon the legate and request him
respectfully to leave the city, giving him twenty-four hours
in which to do so.

During the night the papists amused themselves by hanging from
a gibbet an effigy of straw wearing the tri-color cockade.

The course of the Rhone has been controlled, the Durance canalled,
dikes have been built to restrain the fierce torrents, which,
at the melting of the snows, pour in liquid avalanches from the
summits of Mt. Ventoux. But this terrible flood, this living
flood, this human torrent that rushed leaping through the rapid
inclines of the streets of Avignon, once released, once flooding,
not even God Himself has yet sought to stay it.

At sight of this manikin with the national colors, dancing at
the end of a cord, the French city rose upon its very foundations
with terrible cries of rage. Four papist, suspected of this
sacrilege, two marquises, one burgher, and a workman, were torn