e, the revolutionary
club holds its tumultuous sessions in the former convent founded in
1611 by the Jacobin, or Dominican, friars. The club meets three times
a week, at seven in the evening. The hall is a long rectangle with a
vaulted roof. Four rows of stalls occupy the longer sides, while the
two ends serve as public galleries. Nearly in the middle of the hall,
the speaker's platform and the president's writing-table stand opposite
each other. Hither come all ambitious revolutionists who desire to
talk, to agitate, to make themselves conspicuous. Here Robespierre
lords it, not being a deputy in consequence of the law forbidding
members of the {6} Constituent Assembly to belong to the legislative
body. Those who love disorder come here to seek emotions. Some find
lucrative employment, applause being paid for, and the different
parties having each its _claque_ in the galleries. Since April, 1791,
the Jacobin Club has affiliations in two thousand French towns and
villages. At its orders and in its pay is an army of agents whose
business it is to make stump speeches, to sing in the streets, to make
propositions in cafes, to applaud or to hiss in the galleries of the
National Assembly. These hirelings usually receive about five francs a
day, but as the number of the chevaliers of the revolutionary lustrum
increases, the pay diminishes, until it is finally reduced to forty
sous. Deserters and soldiers dismissed from their regiments for
misconduct are admitted by preference.

For some days past, the Club of Moderate Revolutionists, friends of
Lafayette, who might have closed the old clubs after the sanguinary
repression of the riot in the Champ-de-Mars, and who contented
themselves with opening a new one, have been meeting in the convent of
the Feuillants, rue Saint-Honore. But this new club has not been a
great success; moderation is not the order of the day; the Jacobins
have regained their empire, and on December 26, 1791, seals are placed
on the door of the Club of the Feuillants.

At the other extremity of Paris there is a club still more inflammatory
than that of the Jacobins: {7} that of the Cordeliers. "The Jacobins,"
said Barbaroux, "have no common aim, although they act in concert. The
Cordeliers are bent on blood, gold, and offices." Speaking as a rule,
the Cordeliers belong to the Jacobin Club, while hardly a single
Jacobin is a Cordelier. The Cordeliers are the advance-guard of the
Revolution