wear ee 
HIs OWN TRIAL. 231 
ten hours after, surrounded the altar of their country ; 
to the crowd who fell by the fusillade of the National 
Guard. By changing the date of these crimes, and dis- 
placing also the localities where these crimes were com- 
mitted, some historians of our revolution, and amongst 
others the best known of all, have given, without intend- 
ing it, to the meeting in the afternoon, a character that 
cannot be honestly concurred in. 
It is requisite we-should know at what hour, in what 
place, and how, these misfortunes happened, before we 
hazard an opinion on the sanguinary acts of that day, the: 
17th of July. 
A young man had gone that day very early to the altar 
of his country. This young man wished to copy several 
inscriptions. All at once he heard a singular noise, and 
very soon after the worm of a wimble shot up from the 
planked floor on which he was standing. The youth 
went and sought the guard, who raised the plank, and 
found beneath the altar two ill-looking individuals, lying 
down and furnished with provisions. One of these men 
was an invalid with a wooden leg. The guard seized 
them, and took them to the Gros Caillou, to the section, 
to the Commissary of Police. On the way, the barrel of 
water with which these unfortunate men had provided 
themselves under the altar of their country, was trans- 
formed, according to the ordinary eourse of things, into a 
barrel of gunpowder. The inhabitants of that quarter of 
the town collected together; it was on a Sunday. ‘The 
women especially showed themselves very much irritated 
when the purpose of the auger-holes was told them, as 
declared by the invalid. When the two prisoners came 
out of the hall to be conducted to the Hétel de Ville, the 
crowd tore them from the guard, massacred them, and 
paraded their heads on pikes! 
