ence of the multitude, and the intrigues
of a crowd of secret agents, who distributed money with a liberal hand.

Some day, said our colleague, the infernal genius who directed those
intrigues and _le bailleur de fonds_ will be known. Although the proper
names are wanting, it is certain that some persons inimical to the
revolution urged it to deplorable excesses.

These enemies had collected in the capital thirty or forty thousand
vagabonds. What could be opposed to them? The Tribunals? They had no
moral power, and were declared enemies to the revolution. The National
Guard? It was only just formed; the officers scarcely knew each other,
and moreover scarcely knew the men who were to obey them. Was it at
least permitted to depend on the regular armed force? It consisted of
six battalions of French Guards without officers; of six thousand
soldiers who, from every part of France, had flocked singly to Paris, on
reading in the newspapers the following expressions from General
Lafayette: "They talk of deserters! The real deserters are those men who
have not abandoned their standards." There were finally six hundred
Swiss Guards in Paris, deserters from their regiments; for, let us speak
freely, the celebrated monument of Lucerne will not prevent the Swiss
themselves from being recognized by impartial and intelligent
historians, as having experienced the revolutionary fever.

Those who, with such poor means of repression, flattered themselves that
they could entirely prevent any disorder, in a town of seven or eight
hundred thousand inhabitants in exasperation, must have been very blind.
Those, on the other hand, who attempt to throw the responsibility of the
disorders on Bailly, would prove by this alone, that good people should
always keep aloof from public affairs during a revolution.

The administrator, a being of modern creation, now declares, with the
most ludicrous self-sufficiency, that Bailly was not equal to the
functions of a Mayor of Paris. It is, he says, by undeserved favour that
his statue has been placed on the facade of the Hotel de Ville. During
his magistracy, Bailly did not create any large square in the capital,
he did not open out any large streets, he elevated no splendid monument;
Bailly would therefore have done better had he remained an astronomer or
erudite scholar.

The enumeration of all the public erections that Bailly did not execute
is correct. It might also have been added, that far from