Both the men and especially the women, in such a state of nervous tension, readily jump from one extreme to another, rage bordering on tears.

A portress, who is a companion of Maillard's,[1443] imagines that she hears Lafayette promise in the Queen's name "to love her people and be as much attached to them as Jesus Christ to his Church." People sob and embrace each other; the grenadiers shift their caps to the heads of the body-guard.

Everything will be fine: "the people have won their King back."-- Nothing is to be done now but to rejoice; and the cortege moves on.

The royal family and a hundred deputies, in carriages, form the center, and then comes the artillery, with a number of women bestriding the cannons; next, a convoy of flour.

Round about are the King's Guards, each with a National Guard mounted behind him; then comes the National Guard of Paris, and after them men with pikes and women on foot, on horseback, in cabs, and on carts; in front is a band bearing two severed heads on the ends of two poles, which halts at a hairdresser's, in Sevres, to have these heads powdered and curled;[1444] they are made to bow by way of salutation, and are daubed all over with cream; there are jokes and shouts of laughter; the people stop to eat and drink on the road, and oblige the guards to clink glasses with them; they shout and fire salvos of musketry; men and women hold each other's hands and sing and dance about in the mud .-- Such is the new fraternity: a funeral procession of legal and legitimate authorities, a triumph of brutality over intelligence, a murderous and political Mardi-gras, a formidable masquerade which, preceded by the insignia of death, drags along with it the heads of France, the King, the ministers, and the deputies, that it may constrain them to rule to until according to its frenzy, that it may hold them under its them pikes until it is pleased to slaughter them.
VI .-- The Government and the nation in the hands of the revolutionary party.
This time there can be no mistake: the Reign of Terror is fully and firmly established.