g the capital;
to deserve, as he himself said, the title of the _Father nourisher of
the Parisians_,--that title of which he showed himself always so proud,
after having painfully gained it.

Bailly day by day recorded in his Memoirs a statement of his actions, of
his anxieties, and of his fears. It may be good for the instruction of
the more fortunate administrators of the present epoch, to insert here a
few lines from the journal of our colleague.

"18th August. Our provisions are very much reduced. Those of the morrow
depend strictly on the arrangements made on the previous evening; and
now amidst this distress, we learn that our flour-wagons have been
stopped at Bourg-la-Reine; that some banditti are pillaging the markets
in the direction of Rouen, that they have seized twenty wagons of flour
that were destined for us; ... that the unfortunate Sauvage was
massacred at Saint Germain-en-Laye; ... that Thomassin escaped with
difficulty from the fury of the populace at Choisy."

By repeating either these literal words, or something equivalent to
them, for every day of distress throughout the year 1789, an exact idea
may be formed of the anxieties that Bailly experienced from the morning
after his installation as mayor. I deceive myself; to complete the
picture we ought also to record the unreflecting and inconsiderate
actions of a multitude of people whose destiny appeared to be, to meddle
with every thing and to spoil every thing. I will not resist the wish to
show one of these self-important men, starving (or very nearly so) the
city of Paris.

"21st August. The store of victuals, Bailly says, was so scanty, that
the lives of the inhabitants of Paris depended on the somewhat
mathematical precision of our arrangements. Having learnt that a barge
with eighteen hundred sacks of flour had arrived at Poissy, I
immediately despatched a hundred wagons from Paris to fetch them. And
behold, in the evening, an officer without powers and without orders,
related before me, that having met some wagons on the Poissy road, he
made them go back, because he did not think that there was a wharf for
any loaded barge on the Seine. It would be difficult for me to describe
the despair and the anger into which this recital threw me. We were
obliged to put sentinels at the bakers' doors!"

The despair and the anger of Bailly were very natural. Even now, after
more than half a century, no one thinks without a shudder of that
obscure ind