y preparations. At Paris, the agitators and
organisers employed the time in arranging their counter measures.

The king refused to send away troops which there had been good reason
to collect, but he was ready to move, with the Assembly, to some town
at a distance from the turbid capital. The royal message was tipped
with irony, and the deputies, in spite of Mirabeau, resolved not to
discuss it. After this first thrust Lewis flung away the scabbard.
That day, at council, it was noticed that he was nervous and uneasy,
and disguised his restlessness by feigning sleep. At the end, taking
one of the ministers aside, he gave him a letter for Necker, who was
absent. The letter contained his dismissal, with an order for
banishment.

Necker, who for some days had known that it must come, was at dinner.
He said nothing to his company, and went out, as usual, for a drive.
Then he made for the frontier, and never stopped till he reached
Brussels. Two horsemen who had followed, keeping out of sight, had
orders to arrest him if he changed his course. He travelled up the
Rhine to his own country, on the way to his home by the lake of
Geneva. At the first Swiss hotel he found the Duchess de Polignac. He
had left her at Versailles, the Queen's best friend and the heart of
the intrigue against him; and she was now ruined and an exile, and the
forerunner of the emigration. From her, and from the letters that
quickly followed, forwarded by the Assembly, he learned the events
that had happened since his fall, learned that he was, for one
delirious moment, master of the king, of his enemies, and of the
country.

The astounding news that Necker heard at "The Three Kings" at Bale was
this. His friends had been disgraced with him, and the chief of the
new ministry was Breteuil, who had been the colleague of Calonne and
Vergennes, and had managed the affair of the Diamond Necklace. He had
directed the policy of those who opposed the National Assembly,
holding himself in the twilight, until strong measures and a strong
man were called for. He now came forward, and proposed that the nobles
should depart in a body, protesting against the methods by which the
States-General had been sunk in the National Assembly. In one day he
brought round twenty-six of the minority to his views. A few remained,
who would make a light day's work for a man of conviction and
resource. But resolute as Breteuil was, the Parisian democracy acted
with still greater