s for the discharge of his debts, and the
securing to him the enjoyment of a sufficient though by no means excessive
income, were intrusted to Marie Antoinette by the king, and by her to her
almoner, M. de Fontanges, who, when Lomenie de Brienne was promoted to the
archbishopric of Sens, had succeeded him at Toulouse. The archbishop, who
was sincerely devoted to his royal mistress, carried out the necessary
arrangements with great skill, but they could not be managed with such
secrecy as entirely to escape notice. Among the clubs which had been set
on foot at the beginning of the previous year the most violent had been
that known as the Breton Club, from being founded by some of the deputies
from the great province of Brittany; but, when the court removed to Paris,
and the Assembly was established in a large building close to the garden
of the Tuileries, the Bretons obtained the use of an apartment in an old
convent of Dominican or Jacobin friars (as they were called), the same
which two centuries before had been the council-room of the League, and
they changed their own designation also, and called themselves the
Jacobins; and, canceling the rule which limited the right of membership to
deputies, they now admitted every one who, by application for election,
avowed his adherence to their principles. Their leaders at this time were
Barnave; a young noble named Alexander Lameth, whose mother, having been
left in necessitous circumstances, owed to the bounty of the king and
queen the means of educating her children, a benefit which they repaid
with the most unremitting hostility to the whole royal family; and a
lawyer named Duport. Mirabeau was in the habit of ridiculing them as the
triumvirate; but they were crafty and unscrupulous men, skillful in
procuring information; and, having obtained intelligence of his
negotiations with the court, they retaliated on him by hiring pamphleteers
and journalists to attack him, and narratives of the treason of the Count
de Mirabeau were hawked about the streets.

To apply such language to the adherence of a French noble to the crown was
the most open avowal of disloyalty on which the revolutionary party had
yet ventured; and in the next four weeks it received a practical
development in a series of measures, some of which were so ridiculous as
only to deserve notice from the additional evidence which they furnished
of the extreme folly of those who now had the lead in the Assembly, and o