urneyman could live on fifteen sous
a day. The day before, threats had been levelled at him; he had asked
for protection from the police, thirty men had been sent to him. The
madmen who were swarming against his house and stores soon got the better
of so weak a guard, everything was destroyed; the rioters rushed to the
archbishop's, there was voting going on there; they expected to find
Reveillon there, whom they wanted to murder. They were repulsed by the
battalions of the French and Swiss guards. More than two hundred were
killed. Money was found in their pockets. The Parliament suspended its
prosecutions against the ringleaders of so many crimes. The government,
impotent and disarmed, as timid in presence of this riot as in presence
of opposing parties, at last came before the States-general, but blown
about by the contrary winds of excited passions, without any guide and
without fixed resolves, without any firm and compact nucleus in the midst
of a new and unknown Assembly, without confidence in the troops, who were
looked upon, however, as a possible and last resort.

The States-general were presented to the king on the 2d of May, 1789. It
seemed as if the two upper orders, by a prophetic instinct of their ruin,
wanted, for the last time, to make a parade of their privileges.
Introduced without delay to the king, they left, in front of the palace,
the deputies of the third estate to wait in the rain. The latter were
getting angry and already beginning to clamor, when the gates were opened
to them. In the magnificent procession on the 4th, when the three orders
accompanied the king to the church of St. Louis at Versailles, the laced
coats and decorations of the nobles, the superb vestments of the
prelates, easily eclipsed the modest cassocks of the country priests as
well as the sombre costume imposed by ceremonial upon the deputies of the
third estate; the Bishop of Nancy, M. de la Fare, maintained the
traditional distinctions even in the sermon he delivered before the king.
"Sir," said he, "accept the homage of the clergy, the respects of the
noblesse, and the most humble supplications of the third estate." The
untimely applause which greeted the bishop's words were excited by the
picture he drew of the misery in the country-places exhausted by the
rapacity of the fiscal agents. At this striking solemnity, set off with
all the pomp of the past, animated with all the hopes of the future, the
eyes of the