In the orangery belonging to the palace, meat and wine had been distributed among the foreign troops to encourage and spirit them up. The Viscount of Noailles and another deputy, Wimpfen, brought word of the latest events in the capital, and of the increasing violence of the people. Couriers were despatched every half-hour to gather intelligence. Deputations waited on the King to lay before him the progress of the insurrection, but he still gave evasive and unsatisfactory answers. In the night of the 14th the Duke of Liancourt had informed Louis XVI of the taking of the Bastille and the massacre of the garrison on the preceding day. "It is a revolt!" exclaimed the monarch, taken by surprise. "No, sire, it is a revolution," was the answer.
FOOTNOTES:
[33] Edmund Burke passed a splendid and well-known eulogium on the beauty and accomplishments of the Queen, and it was in part the impression which her youthful charms had left in his mind that threw the casting-weight of his talents and eloquence into the scale of opposition to the French Revolution. I have heard another very competent judge, Mr. Northcote, describe her entering a small anteroom, where he stood, with her large hoop sideways, and gliding by him from one end to the other with a grace and lightness as if borne on a cloud. It was possibly to "this air with which she trod or rather disdained the earth," as if descended from some higher sphere, that she owed the indignity of being conducted to a scaffold. Personal grace and beauty cannot save their possessors from the fury of the multitude, more than from the raging elements, though they may inspire that pride and self-opinion which expose them to it.
[34] It was observed that almost all the greatest cruelties of the Reign of Terror were resolved on by committees of persons who had been in the immediate employment of the great, and had suffered by their caprice and insolence.
ESTABLISHMENT OF THE UNITED STATES BANK
a.d. 1791
ALEXANDER HAMILTON and LAWRENCE LEWIS, Jr.
Through the founding of the first Bank of the United States, which existed from 1791 to 1811, and was succeeded by another national bank in 1817, the monetary affairs of the Republic, under Hamilton's able administration, were placed upon a sounder basis, and the transaction of public business was greatly facilitated.