d and approved of the grounds for the explanation I desire to
have with you." "Sir," replied M. Necker, "M. Malouet has told me that
you had proposals to make to me; what are they?" Mirabeau, hurt at the
cold, interrogative tone of the minister and the sense he attached to the
word proposals, jumps up in a rage and says: "My proposal is to wish you
good day." Then, running all the way and fuming all the while, Mirabeau
arrives at the sessions-hall. "He crossed, all scarlet with rage, over
to my side," says M. Malouet, and, as he put his leg over one of our
benches, he said to me, 'Your man is a fool, he shall hear of me.'"

When the expiring kingship recalled Mirabeau to its aid, it was too late
for him and for it. He had already struck fatal blows at the cause which
he should have served, and already death was threatening himself with its
finishing stroke. "He was on the point of rendering great services to
the state," said Malouet: "shall I tell you how? By confessing to you
his faults and pointing out your own, by preserving to you all that was
pure in the Revolution and by energetically pointing out to you all its
excesses and the danger of those excesses, by making the people
affrighted at their blindness and the factions at their intrigues. He
died ere this great work was accomplished; he had hardly given an inkling
of it."

Timidity and maladdress do not retard perils by ignoring them. The day
of meeting of the States-general was at hand. Almost everywhere the
elections had been quiet and the electors less numerous than had been
anticipated. We know what indifference and lassitude may attach to the
exercise of rights which would not be willingly renounced; ignorance and
inexperience kept away from the primary assemblies many working-men and
peasants; the middle class alone proceeded in mass to the elections. The
irregular slowness of the preparatory operations had retarded the
convocations; for three months, the agitation attendant upon successive
assemblies kept France in suspense. Paris was still voting on the 28th
of April, 1789, the mob thronged the streets; all at once the rumor ran
that an attack was being made on the house of an ornamental paper-maker
in the faubourg St. Antoine, named Reveillon. Starting as a simple
journeyman, this man had honestly made his fortune; he was kind to those
who worked in his shops: he was accused, nevertheless, amongst the
populace, of having declared that a jo