The king then, with his attendant court, left the hall. A large part of the nobility and nearly all the bishops followed him. Exultation beamed upon their faces, for they supposed that the National Assembly was now effectually crushed.
FOOTNOTES:
[111] Michelet, vol. i., p. 105.
[112] "The party which professed to be the defender of the throne spoke with infinite disdain of the authority of the King of England. To reduce a King of France to the miserable condition of the British monarch was, in the bare conception, heinous and treasonable."—Considerations on the French Revolution, by Madame de Staël.
[113] Madame de Staël, vol. i., p. 106.
[114] Michelet, vol. i., p. 106.
The Marquis of Ferrières, a deputy of the nobles and an earnest advocate of aristocratic assumption, writes in his Mémoires: "The court, unable any longer to hide from themselves the real truth that all their petty expedients to separate the orders served only to bring on their union, resolved to dissolve the States-General. It was necessary to remove the king from Versailles, to get Necker and the ministers attached to him out of the way. A journey to Marly was arranged. The pretext was the death of the dauphin. The mind of the king was successfully worked upon. He was told it was high time to stop the unheard-of enterprises of the Third Estate; that he would soon have only the name of a king. The Cardinal Rochefoucault and the Archbishop of Paris threw themselves at the feet of the king and supplicated him to save the clergy and protect religion. The Parliament sent a secret deputation proposing a scheme for getting rid of the States-General. The keeper of the seals, the Count d'Artois, the queen, all united. All was therefore settled, and an order from the king announced a royal sitting and suspended the States under the pretense of making arrangements in the hall."
[115] "The deputies stand grouped on the Paris road, on this umbrageous Avenue de Versailles, complaining aloud of the indignity done them. Courtiers, it is supposed, look from their windows and giggle."—Carlyle, vol. i., p. 156.
"Is it decent," writes M. Bailly in his Memoirs, "that the members of the National Assembly, or even the deputies of the Commons, as you may still please to consider them, should thus be apprised of the intentions of the king, of the suspension of their own sittings, only by the public criers and by notices posted on the wall, as the inhabitants of a town would be made acquainted with the shutting up of a theatre?"
[116] "It is quite certain that, mixed with a little personal vanity, the most sincere wish for the happiness of France, and the happiness of mankind, was the ruling motive with Necker."—Lectures on the French Revolution, by Wm. Smyth, vol. i., p. 287.