heaped on you at St. Petersburg, Brussels, Vienna, Turin, London. What will your royal patrons think of you if you incite to revolution and violence?"
His words were of no avail. "She had made up her mind long before consulting her "oracle," and three days later, after a stormy and excited representation of Lucrèce, the tricolour flag was left, as it were by chance, lying on a bench in the Forum, in the last scene of the play. Rachel seized it, and, with one of those grand gestures of hers, holding it aloft, came on towards the foot-lights, chanting, low and fierce, "Allons enfants de la patrie." The audience sat silent and breathless, while this fate, this fury, this goddess of Liberty—for to them she represented all this—gave a new significance, a new meaning to every word and every line of the hymn: a perfect delirium of excitement fell upon the crowd, and, as the flag waved harmoniously round her, men felt capable of heroism and death. "Le jour de gloire" had dawned for them and their country. Republicans fell sobbing into one another's arms; Royalists trembled and shivered before the great wave of Revolutionary exultation that swept around them.
"One felt in the air," said Madame Louise Collet to Béranger, "a mighty breath of hope, that bore along with it all youthful desires." That beautiful apparition, pale, menacing, was no longer a woman; she was the goddess of Liberty, calling on her countrymen to arms.
The performance was repeated next day before thousands of spectators, for one of the new arrangements of the Radical director was the admittance of the mob to the Théâtre de la République, as the old Comédie Française was now re-christened.
