The troops encamped around Paris had been sent away, and by one of those contradictory counsels which vexed the will of the King, the Flanders Regiment was summoned to Versailles. The Bodyguards invited the officers of that regiment to dinner[356]; heads grew excited; the Queen appeared in the middle of the banquet, with the Dauphin; toasts were drunk to the health of the Royal Family; the King came in his turn; the military band played the touching and favourite air, "Ô Richard! ô mon roi[357]!" No sooner was this news spread through Paris, than it was seized upon by the opposite opinion; people cried that Louis was refusing his sanction to the Declaration of Rights with the intention of escaping to Metz with the Comte d'Estaing[358]. Marat propagated this rumour: he was already writing the Ami du peuple[359].
The 5th of October arrived. I did not witness the events of that day. The accounts of what had occurred reached the Capital early on the 6th. We were told at the same time to expect a visit from the King. I was as bold in public places as I was timid in drawing-rooms: I felt myself made for solitude or the forum. I hastened to the Champs-Élysées: first appeared guns, upon which harpies, thieves' doxies, women of the town rode astride, uttering the most obscene speeches, making the most filthy gestures. Next, surrounded by a horde of people of every age and sex, marched on foot the Bodyguards, who had exchanged hats, swords, and bandoliers with the National Guards: each of their horses carried two or three fish-fags, dirty bacchantes, drunk and indecently clad. After them came the deputation from the National Assembly; the royal carriages followed, rolling in the dusty darkness of a forest of pikes and bayonets. Tattered rag-men, butchers with their blood-stained aprons hanging from their thighs, their bare knives from their belts, their shirtsleeves turned up, walked beside the carriage-doors; other sinister guards had climbed upon the roof; others hung on to the foot-board, lolled upon the box. They fired muskets and pistols; they cried:
"Here are the baker, the baker's wife, and the baker's boy!"
By way of oriflamme, they carried before the descendant of St. Louis, in mid-air, upraised on Swiss halberts, the heads of two Bodyguards, powdered and curled by a Sèvres hair-dresser.
The King brought to Paris.
Bailly the astronomer told Louis XVI. at the Hôtel de Ville that the "humane, respectful and faithful" people had "conquered" its King, and the King on his side, "greatly touched and greatly pleased," declared that he had come to Paris "of his free will:" unworthy insincerities pertaining to the violence and fear which at that time dishonoured all men and all parties. Louis XVI. was not insincere: he was weak; weakness is not an insincerity, but it takes its place and fulfills its functions: the respect with which the virtues and misfortunes of the sainted and martyred King must needs inspire us render any expression of human judgment almost sacrilegious.
*
The deputies left Versailles and held their first sitting on the 19th of October in one of the halls of the archbishop's palace. On the 9th of November they moved into the Riding-hall, near the Tuileries. The remainder of the year 1789 witnessed the decrees which despoiled the clergy, destroyed the old magistracy, and created the assignats[360]; the resolution of the Commune of Paris in favour of the first committee of research; and the order of the judges for the prosecution of the Marquis de Favras[361].
The Constituent Assembly, in spite of all with which it can be reproached, remains nevertheless the most illustrious popular assemblage that has ever appeared among the nations of the world, both because of the magnitude of its transactions' and the immensity of their results. There is no political question, however lofty, which it did not discuss and suitably solve. What would it not have been, had it kept to the cahiers[362] of the States-General and not endeavoured to go beyond them! All that human experience and intelligence had conceived, discovered and elaborated during three centuries is to be found in these instructions. The various abuses of the old monarchy are there pointed out and remedies proposed; every kind of liberty is claimed, even the liberty of the press; every form of improvement demanded for industries, manufactures, commerce, public roads, the army, taxation, finance, the schools, public education, and the rest. We have passed across abysses of crime and accumulations of glory to no profit; the Republic and the Empire have served no purpose: the Empire merely regulated the brute force of the arms which the Republic had set in motion; it has left us centralization, a vigorous form of administration which I consider an evil, but which alone, perhaps, was able to replace the local systems of administration at a time when these were destroyed, and when anarchy combined with ignorance filled all men's heads. With that exception, we have not moved a step forward since the Constituent Assembly: its labours are like those of the great physician of antiquity, which at the same time extended and settled the boundaries of science. Let us speak of some of the members of this Assembly, and in particular of Mirabeau, in whom they are all summed up, by whom they are all governed.