by a
majority of more than two to one, rejected a motion made by Vergniaud for
the impeachment of La Fayette for his conduct in June; and when the mob
fell upon those who had voted against it, as they came out of the hall,
the National Guard came promptly to their rescue, and inflicted severe
chastisement on the foremost of the rioters.

The vote of the Assembly may be said to have been the last it ever gave
for any object but the promotion of anarchy. It more than neutralized its
effect the very next day, when it passed a decree for the immediate
removal of three regiments of the line which were quartered in Paris. It
even at first included in its resolution the Swiss Guards also; but was
subsequently compelled to withdraw that clause, since an old treaty with
Switzerland expressly secured to the republic the right of always
furnishing a regiment for the honorable service of guarding the palace.
And at the same time, as if to punish the National Guard for its conduct
on the previous day, another vote broke up the staff of that force;
cashiered its finest companies, the grenadiers and the mounted troopers,
on the plea that such distinctions were inconsistent with equality; and
filled up the vacancies with men who were the very dregs of the city, many
of whom were, in fact, secret agents of the Jacobins, by whose aid they
hoped to spread disaffection through the entire force.

The afternoon of the 9th was passed in anxious preparation by both the
conspirators and those whom they were about to attack. The king and queen
were not destitute of faithful adherents, whom their very danger only
rendered the more zealous to place all their strength, their valor, and,
as they truly foreboded, their lives, at the disposal of their honored and
threatened sovereigns. The veteran Marshal de Mailly, one of those gallant
nobles whose devoted loyalty had been so scandalously insulted by La
Fayette[1] in the spring of the preceding year, though now eighty years of
age, hastened to the defense of his royal master and mistress, and brought
with him a chivalrous phalanx of above a hundred gentlemen, all animated
with the same self-sacrificing heroism, as his own, to fight, or, if need
should be, to die for their king and queen, though they had no arms but
their swords. It seemed fortunate, too, that the command of the National
Guard for the day fell by rotation to an officer named Mandat, a man of
high professional skill, intrepid courage,