Behind the queen were Princesses Lamballe
and Tarente, and Madame Tourzel.
A man, with dishevelled hair and bare bosom, gave the queen a
handful of rods, bearing the inscription, "For Marie Antoinette!"
Another showed her a guillotine, a third a gallows, with the
inscription, "Tremble, tyrant! thy hour has come!" Another held up
before her, on the point of a pike, a human heart dripping with
blood, and cried: "Thus shall they all bleed--the hearts of tyrants
and aristocrats!"
The queen did not let her eyes fall, her fixed look rested upon the
shrieking and howling multitude; but when this man, with the
bleeding heart, approached her, her eyelids trembled--a deathly
paleness spread over her cheeks, for she recognized him--Simon the
cobbler--and a fearful presentiment told her that this man, who had
always been for her the incarnation of hatred, is now, when her life
is threatened, to be the source of her chief peril.
From the distance surged in the cries: "Long live Santerre! Long
live the Faubourg Saint Antoine! Long live the sans-culottes!"
And at the head of a crowd of half-naked fellows, the brewer
Santerre, arrayed in the fantastic costume of a robber of the
Abruzzo Mountains, with a dagger and pistol in his girdle, dashed
into the room, his broad-brimmed hat, with three red plumes, aslant
upon his brown hair, that streamed down on both sides of his savage
countenance, like the mane of a lion.
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