The mixture of all sexes, ages, and conditions; the confusion of costumes and rags beside uniforms, old men beside young; even children, some carried in their mothers' arms, others holding their father's hand or his garments; common prostitutes, their silken dresses soiled and torn, indecency on their brow, and insult on their lips, hundreds of women of the lowest description, and from the dregs of the people, recruited to swell the cortege, and excite commiseration from the garrets of the faubourgs, clothed in tattered finery, pale, emaciated, their eyes hollow, and their cheeks sunken from misery, the personifications of want, in fact the people, in all the disorder, the confusion, the exposure of a city suddenly summoned from its houses, its workshops, its garrets, its scenes and haunts of debauch and infamy; such was the aspect of intimidation which the conspirators wished to give to this scene.
Here and there flags waved above the heads of the multitude.

On one was written _Sanction or death_; on another, _The recall of the patriot ministers_; on the third, _Tremble tyrant, thine hour is come_.

A man, his arms bared to the shoulders, bore a gibbet, from which hung the effigy of a crowned female, with the inscription, _Beware the lantern_.
Farther on a group of hags raised a _guillotine_, with a card bearing the words, _National Justice on tyrants; death for Veto and his wife_.
Amidst all this apparent disorder, a secret system of order was visible.
Men in rags, yet whose white hands and shirts of the finest linen pointed them out as of superior rank, wore hats, on which signs of recognition were drawn with white chalk; the crowd regulated their march by them, and followed wherever they went.
The principal body thus marched by the Rue Saint Antoine, and the dark and central avenues of Paris, to the Rue Saint Honore, the population of these quartiers swelling its numbers at each instant.

The more this living torrent increased the more furious it became.

Now a band of butchers joined it, each bearing a pike, on which was stuck the bleeding heart of a calf, with the words, _Coeur d'aristocrate_.