des poignards, touch the hands of those whom he had denounced to public indignation the yesterday.  And now we behold him quit the cause of liberty, by a decree which he himself had secretly solicited, and disappear for a moment in Auvergne to re-appear on our frontiers.  Yet he has done us some service, let us acknowledge it.  We owe to him to have accustomed our national guards to go through the civic and religious ceremonies; to bear the fatigue of the morning drill in the Champs Elysees; to take patriotic oaths and to give suppers.  Let us then bid him adieu!  La Fayette, to consummate the greatest revolution that a nation ever attempted, we required a leader, whose mind was on an equality with so great an event.  We accepted you; the pliability of your features, your studied orations, your premeditated axioms—­all those productions of art that nature disavows, seemed suspicious to the more clear-sighted patriots.  The boldest of them followed you, tore the mask from your visage, and cried—­Citizens, this hero is but a courtier, this sage but an impostor.  Now, thanks to you, the Revolution can no longer bite, you have cut the lion’s claws; the people is more formidable to its conductors; they have reassumed the whip and spur, and you fly.  Let civic crowns strew your paths, though we remain; but where shall we find a Brutus?”

XXII.

Bailly, mayor of Paris, withdrew at the same time, abandoned by that party of whom he had been the idol, and whose victim he began to be; but his philosophic mind rated more highly the good done to the people than its favour, and more ambitious of being useful than of governing it, he already testified that heroic contempt for the calumnies of his enemies he afterwards displayed for death.

His voice was, however, lost in the tumult of the approaching municipal elections; two men already disputed the dignity of mayor of Paris, for in proportion as the royal authority declined, and that of the constitution was absorbed in the troubles of the kingdom, the mayor of Paris would become the real dictator of the capital.

These two men were La Fayette and Petion.  La Fayette supported by the constitutionalists and the national guard, Petion by the Girondists and the Jacobins.  The royalist party, by pronouncing for or against one of them, would decide the election.  The king had no longer the influence of the government, which he had suffered to escape from his grasp, but he still possessed the occult powers of corruption over the leaders of the different parties.  A portion of the twenty-five millions of francs (1,000,000_l._) was applied by M. de Laporte, the intendant de la liste civile, and by MM.  Bertrand de Molleville and Montmorin, his ministers, in purchasing votes at the elections, motions at the clubs, applause or hisses in the Assembly.  These subsidies, which had commenced with Mirabeau, now descended to the lowest dregs of