f royal authority.

"Oh!" exclaimed all together, "we should be sorry not to have a king.
We respect the King and maintain his authority. But you are forbidden
to oppose the dominant opinion and the liberty which is decreed by the
National Assembly."

Mallet du Pan, apparently, knows more about this than they do, for he is
a Swiss by birth, and has lived under a republic for twenty years.
But this does not concern them. They persist all the same, five or six
talking at once, misconstruing the sense the words they use, and each
contradicting the other in point of detail, but all agreeing to impose
silence on him:

"You should not run counter to the popular will, for in doing this
you preach civil war, bring the assembly's decrees into contempt, and
irritate the nation."

Evidently, for them, they constitute the nation, or, more or less,
they represent it. Through this self-investiture they are at once
magistrates, censors, and police, while the scolded journalist is only
too glad, in his case, to have them stop at injunctions.--Three days
before this he is advised that a body of rioters in his neighborhood
"threatened to treat his house like that of M. de Castries," in which
everything had been smashed and thrown out the windows. At another time,
apropos of the suspensive or absolute veto; "four savage fellows came
to his domicile to warn him, showing him their pistols, that if he dared
write in behalf of M. Mounier he should answer for it with his life."
Thus, from the outset,

"just as the nation begins to enjoy the inestimable right of free
thought and free speech, factional tyrants lose no time in depriving
citizens of these, proclaiming to all that would maintain the integrity
of their consciences: Tremble, die, or believe as we do!"

After this, to impose silence on those who express what is offensive,
the crowd, the club, the section, decree and execute, each on its
own authority,[1227] searches, arrests, assaults, and, at length,
assassinations. During the month of June, 1792, "three decrees of
arrest and fifteen denunciations, two acts of affixing seals, four civic
invasions of his premises, and the confiscation of whatever belonged to
him in France" is the experience of Mallet du Pan. He passes four years
"without knowing with any certainty on going to bed whether he should
get out of it in the morning alive and free." Later on, if he escapes
the guillotine and the lantern, it is owing to exile. On the 1