er, in each bailiwick. The weather was severe, the harvest had
been bad, the suffering was extreme. "Famine and fear of insurrection
overthrew M. Necker, the means of providing against them absorbed all his
days and nights and the greater part of the money he had at his
disposal." Agitators availed themselves ably of the misery as a means of
exciting popular passion. The alms-giving was enormous, charity and fear
together opened both hearts and purses. The gifts of the Duke of Orleans
to the poor of Paris appeared to many people suspicious; but the
Archbishop of Paris, M. de Juigne, without any other motive but his
pastoral devotion, distributed all he possessed, and got into debt four
hundred thousand livres, in order to relieve his flock. The doors of the
finest houses were opened to wretches dying of cold; anybody might go in
and get warmed in the vast halls. The regulations for the elections had
just been published (24th of January, 1789). The number of deputies was
set at twelve hundred. The electoral conditions varied according to
order and dignity, as well as according to the extent of the bailiwicks;
in accordance with the opinion of the Assembly of notables, the simple
fact of nationality and of inscription upon the register of taxes
constituted electoral rights. No rating (_cens_) was required.

The preparatory labors had been conducted without combination, the
elections could not be simultaneous; no powerful and dominant mind
directed that bewildered mass of ignorant electors, exercising for the
first time, under such critical circumstances, a right of which they did
not know the extent and did not foresee the purport. "The people has
more need to be governed and subjected to a protective authority than it
has fitness to govern," M. Malouet had said in his speech to the assembly
of the three orders in the bailiwick of Riom. The day, however, was
coming when the conviction was to be forced upon this people, so impotent
and incompetent in the opinion of its most trusty friends, that the
sovereign authority rested in its hands, without direction and without
control.

"The elective assembly of Riom was not the most stormy," says M. Malouet,
who, like M. Mounier at Grenoble, had been elected by acclamation head of
the deputies of his own order at Riom, "but it was sufficiently so to
verify all my conjectures and cause me to truly regret that I had come to
it and had obtained the deputyship. I was on t