t
Lafayette asserted that above L2000 a week were paid to bakers, or to
millers, to create discontent by shortening supplies. There were
people who thought that money spent in this way would rouse
indignation against the incompetent and inactive Assembly. Upon
sixteen days in the course of September the bakers' shops had to be
guarded by troops. The reduced noble families were putting down their
establishments; and 200,000 passports were issued to intending
_emigres_ in the two months following the fall of the Bastille.

The primary offender, responsible for subsistence, was the
municipality of the capital; and their seat of office was the first
object of attack. Early on the Monday morning a multitude of excited
women made their way into the Hotel de Ville. They wanted to destroy
the heaps of papers, as all that writing did them no good. They seized
a priest, and set about hanging him. They rang the tocsin, bringing
all the trained battalions and all the ragged bands of the city to the
Place de Greve. They carried away several hundreds of muskets, and
some useless cannon; and they fetched torches, that they might burn
the building to the ground. It was the headquarters of the elected
municipality; but the masses were becoming conscious that they were
not the Third Estate, that there was a conflict of interest between
property and labour, and they began to vent their yet inarticulate
rage upon the middle class above them. It presently appeared that
these revolutionary heroines, knitting companions of the future
guillotine, were not all infuriated or implacable. Parcels of
banknotes that they took away were brought back; the priest was left
unhung; the torches that were to have lighted the conflagration were
extinguished without difficulty. They were easily persuaded that their
proper sphere of action was Versailles, with its Assembly, that was
able to do everything, and did nothing for the poor. They played the
genuine part of mothers whose children were starving in their squalid
homes, and they thereby afforded to motives which they neither shared
nor understood the aid of a diamond point that nothing could
withstand. It was this first detachment of invading women that allowed
Stanislas Maillard to lead them away.

Maillard was known to all the town as a conqueror of the Bastille.
Later, he acquired a more sinister celebrity. But on that 5th of
October, as the calculating controller of dishevelled tumult, he left
on