e.--
The Count de Narbonne.--Petion is elected Mayor of Paris.--Scarcity of
Money, and Great Hardships of the Royal Family.--Presents arrive from
Tippoo Sahib.--The Dauphin.--The Assembly passes Decrees against the
Priests and the Emigrants.--Misconduct of the Emigrants.--Louis refuses
his Assent to the Decrees.--He issues a Circular condemning Emigration.

The new Assembly met on the 1st of October, and its composition afforded
the Royalists, or even the Constitutionalists, the party that desired to
stand by the Constitution which had just been ratified, very little
prospect of a re-establishment of tranquillity. The mischievous effect of
the vote which excluded members of the last Assembly from election was
seen in the very lists of those who had been returned. In the whole number
there were scarcely a dozen members of noble or gentle birth; the number
of ecclesiastics was equally small; while property was as little
represented as the nobility or the Church. It was reckoned that of the
whole body scarcely fifty possessed two thousand francs a year. The
general youth of the members was as conspicuous as their poverty; half of
them had hardly attained middle age; a great many were little more than
boys. The Jacobins themselves, who, before the elections, had reckoned on
swaying their decisions by terror, could hardly have anticipated a result
which would place the entire body so wholly at their mercy.

But what was still move ominous of evil was the rise of a new party, known
as that of the Girondins, from the circumstance of some of its most
influential members coming from the Gironde, one of the departments which
the late Assembly had carved out of the old province of Gascony. It was
not absolutely a new party, since the foundations of it had been laid,
during the last two months of the old Assembly, by Petion and a low-born
pamphleteer named Brissot, who, as editor of a newspaper to which he gave
the name of _Le Patriote Francais_, rivaled the most blood-thirsty of the
Jacobins in exciting the worst passions of the populace. But Petion and
Brissot had only sown the seeds. The opening of the new Assembly at once
gave it growth and vigor, when the deputies from the Gironde plunged into
the arena of debate, and showed an undeniable superiority in eloquence to
every other party. The chiefs, Vergniaud, Gensonne, and Gaudet, were
lawyers who had never obtained any practice. Isnard, the first man to make
an open professio