Reluctant, and half expecting violence, he made his entry on
the 17th between lines of armed citizens representing every class of
his Parisian subjects, and proceeded to the Hotel de Ville. It was an
occasion on which a little kingly grace or a little kingly boldness,
which so many of his ancestors commanded, might have fired the flame of
pent-up popular emotion. But there was nothing of this sort to be
found in the apathetic Louis. Bailly's stores of oratory had to be
drawn on freely for what the King found himself unable to supply, and
the honours of the day, which he might so easily have had, were heaped
instead on the dashing La Fayette. As it was, Louis returned safely to
Versailles, having met with a not unfriendly reception, but having
failed to adjust himself to the new situation, which was what he was
bound to attempt, having once abandoned the policy of repression by
force.

{74} The uproar of the 14th of July could not be suddenly changed to a
calm, whatever Louis XVI, La Fayette and Bailly might do. Grave
disorders broke out in many parts of France, and scenes of violence
continued in Paris. On the 20th, Count Lally moved a resolution for
the repression of the excesses that were being committed, but the
assembly, with no sense of responsibility for the conduct of
affairs,--directly interested, on the contrary, in weakening the
executive,--defeated it. In Paris, these scenes culminated on the
23rd, when Foulon, who had been Controleur des Finances, was brought in
to the city from his country estate, where he had been seized. Foulon
represented all that was worst in the old regime. As commissary with
the French armies and later in the internal administration of the
country, he had displayed the most heartless rapacity. His attitude
towards the lower classes was echoed in utterances that were popularly
quoted. The people, he declared, might feed on hay while he was
minister;--the people had now got him in their clutches. In vain
Bailly and Lafayette, during a long agony at the Hotel de Ville,
attempted to save him; the mob would not be denied. Finally Foulon was
seized; he was strung up to a street lantern, and later his {75} head,
the mouth stuffed full of hay and nettles, was paraded in triumph
through the streets.

While such scenes were being enacted in Paris, and while all through
France the large class of poor and criminals created by Bourbonism was
committing even worse excesses, the asse