with contemporaneous history, fancy
that during the whole duration of Bailly's administration, Paris was
quite a cut-throat place. That is a romance; the following is the
truth:--

Bailly was Mayor during two years and four months. In that time there
occurred four political assassinations; those of Foulon and of Berthier
de Sauvigny, his son-in-law, at the Hotel de Ville; that of M. Durocher,
a respectable officer of the gendarmerie, killed at Chaillot, by a
musket-shot, in August, 1789; and that of a baker massacred in a riot in
the month of October of the same year. I do not speak of the
assassination of two unfortunate men on the Champ de Mars in July, 1791,
as that deplorable fact must be considered separately.

The individuals guilty of the assassination of the baker were seized,
condemned to death, and executed. The family of the unfortunate victim
became the object of the anxious care of all the authorities, and
obtained a pension.

The death of M. Durocher was attributed to some Swiss soldiers who had
revolted.

The horrible and ever to be deplored assassinations of Foulon and of
Berthier, are among those misfortunes which, under certain given
circumstances, no human power could prevent.

In times of scarcity, a slight word, either true or unfounded, suffices
to create a terrible commotion.

Reveillon is made to say, that a workman can live upon fifteen sous per
diem, and behold his manufactory destroyed from top to bottom.

They ascribe to Foulon the barbarous vaunt; "I will force the people to
eat hay;" and without any order from the constituted authorities, some
peasants, neighbours of the old minister, arrest him, take him to Paris,
his son-in-law experiences the same fate, and the famished populace
immolates both of them.

In proportion as the multitude appear to me unjust and culpable, in
attacking certain men respecting a scarcity of provisions, when it is
the manifest consequence of the severity of the seasons, I should be
disposed to excuse their rage against the authors of factitious
scarcities. Well, Gentlemen, at the time that Foulon was assassinated,
the people, deceived by some impassioned orators of the Assembly, might,
or let us rather say, ought to believe, that they were wilfully
famished. Foulon perished the 22d of July, 1789; on the 15th, that is to
say, seven days before, Mirabeau had addressed the following incendiary
words to the inhabitants of the capital, from the National Tri