The meeting in the Tenth Arrondissement yielded to force.  President Vitet insisted that they should forcibly arrest him.  A police agent who seized him turned pale and trembled.  In certain circumstances, to lay violent hands upon a man is to lay them upon Right, and those who dare to do so are made to tremble by outraged Law.  The exodus from the Mairie was long and beset with obstructions.  Half-an-hour elapsed while the soldiers were forming a line, and while the Commissaries of Police, all the time appearing solely occupied with the care of driving back the crowd in the street, sent for orders to the Ministry of the Interior.  During that time some of the Representatives, seated round a table in the great Hall, wrote to their families, to their wives, to their friends.  They snatched up the last leaves of paper; the pens failed; M. de Luynes wrote to his wife a letter in pencil.  There were no wafers; they were forced to send the letters unsealed; some soldiers offered to post them.  M. Chambolle’s son, who had accompanied his father thus far, undertook to take the letters addressed to Mesdames de Luynes, de Lasteyrie, and Duvergier de Hauranne.  General Forey—­the same who had refused a battalion to the President of the Constituent Assembly, Marrast, who had promoted him from a colonel to a general—­General Forey, in the centre of the courtyard of the Mairie, his face inflamed, half drunk, coming out, they said, from breakfast at the Elysee, superintended the outrage.  A member, whose name we regret we do not know, dipped his boot into the gutter and wiped it along the gold stripe of the regimental trousers of General Forey.  Representative Lherbette came up to General Forey, and said to him, “General, you are a coward.”  Then turning to his colleagues, he exclaimed, “Do you hear?  I tell this general that he is a coward.”  General Forey did not stir.  He kept the mud on his uniform and the epithet on his cheek.

The meeting did not call the people to arms.  We have just explained that it was not strong enough to do so; nevertheless, at the last moment, a member of the Left, Latrade, made a fresh effort.  He took M. Berryer aside, and said to him, “Our official measures of resistance have come to an end; let us not allow ourselves now to be arrested.  Let us disperse throughout the streets crying, ‘To arms!’” M. Berryer consulted a few seconds on the matter with the Vice-President, M. Benoist d’Azy, who refused.

The Deputy Mayor, hat in hand, reconducted the members of the Assembly as far as the gate of the Mairie.  As soon as they appeared in the courtyard ready to go out between two lines of soldiers, the post of National Guards presented arms, acid shouted, “Long live the Assembly!  Long live the Representatives of the People!” The National Guards were at once disarmed, almost forcibly, by the Chasseurs de Vincennes.

There was a wine-shop opposite the Mairie.  As soon as the great folding gates of the Mairie opened, and the Assembly appeared in the street, led by General Forey on horseback, and having at its head the Vice-President Vitet, grasped by the necktie by a police agent, a few men in white blouses, gathered at the windows of this wine-shop, clapped their hands and shouted, “Well done! down with the ‘twenty-five francs!’"[7]