He thereupon rose to make a short address. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘The day I have been eagerly waiting for has at last arrived, and I find myself surrounded by the representatives of the nation which it is my glory to command…A general restlessness and an exaggerated desire for change have captured men’s minds and would end by leading public opinion completely astray were they not to be given proper direction by your wisdom and moderation.’ He made a brief allusion to the inequality of taxation, added that he hoped all three orders would cooperate with him for the good of the state, and sat down to respectful applause. Barentin then spoke, but he spoke so softly that few of his sentences could be heard, and those that were were most unimpressively delivered. The deputies, some of whom were plainly annoyed by his condemnation of the ‘false and exaggerated maxims’ of the recent spate of pamphlets, were thankful when he sat down, leaving it to Necker to explain in more detail the condition of the country’s finances. This Necker did at inordinate length, boring Madame de La Tour du Pin so much that the speech seemed ‘never ending’. Occasionally passing sheets of facts and figures to an assistant who read them out for him in a tedious monotone when his own voice failed, he spoke for over three hours. He detailed the present situation of the Treasury, propounded its past achievements, elaborated on its future prospects, but made only passing references to proposed measures of constitutional reform, largely limiting himself to giving vague advice and inviting the delegates to reflect upon the Government’s difficulties. No firm instructions were given either as to procedure or to the vital matter of voting. The speech was heard with a certain restlessness but politely and without interruption, and after it was over and the King arose to depart, there were loud cries of ‘Vive le Roi!’ To Gouverneur Morris’s surprise and satisfaction there were also cries of ‘Vive la Reine!’, the first he had heard in several months. The Queen had sat throughout the proceedings with ‘great dignity’, wrote Madame de La Tour du Pin, though ‘it was plain from the almost convulsive way in which she used her fan that she was very agitated’. She now acknowledged the cheers with a low curtsey; this produced a louder acclamation and another, lower curtsey.
Despite the polite cheers for the King and Queen, in which far from all the deputies joined, the Third Estate left the hall in a mood of obvious disappointment. ‘Necker,’ complained one of them, ‘said nothing at all about a constitution and seems to accept the division of the three orders.’
In 1614 each of the three orders had retired to examine the credentials of its deputies on its own. Now, in 1789, they were again expected to conform to this rule, and the next day both nobles and clergy, meeting in the halls allocated to them, began to do so; but the Third Estate contended that the credentials of every deputy should be examined at an assembly of the entire convention. They remained in the large hall in the Rue des Chantiers. No rostrum had yet been built there; and the public, who were freely admitted, crowded round the deputies, offering them advice, shaking them by the hand, clapping them on the back, cheering popular speakers, booing others. The confusion of the early debates was aggravated by the deputies not yet knowing one another, by conflicts between those who favoured conciliation and those who did not, by their disinclination to adopt any rules of procedure which might indicate that they were organized as a separate order and thus at the mercy of the combined voting power of the privileged orders. A dean was appointed to supervise the debates, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, a respected astronomer and member of the French Academy whose father had been a court painter and custodian of the royal art collection at Versailles. But he found it impossible to exercise much control over them.
By the end of the month it had at least been decided that a concerted effort must be made by the Commons to persuade the parish priests among the clergy to come to join them. There were good grounds for hope that many of these priests would respond with enthusiasm. It was certainly well known that they were quite out of sympathy with the more conservative of the prelates and that there had been bitter exchanges during debates in the clergy’s hall. An abbé who had spoken slightingly of the Third Estate had been roughly told by a priest to hold his tongue; another priest had forcefully reminded the bishops, ‘In this place, my lords, we are all equal’; a third told the reactionary Abbé Maury, ‘The village priests may not have the talents of Academicians but they have at least the sound common sense of villagers!’
Encouraged by these disputes among the clergy, a large delegation from the Third Estate, led by the enormously fat Gui Jean Baptiste Target, a deputy from Dauphiné, proceeded to the hall where the clergy were assembled. ‘The gentlemen of the Commons,’ announced Target, ‘invite the gentlemen of the clergy, in the name of the God of Peace and for the national interest, to meet them in their hall to consult upon the means of bringing about the concord which is so vital at this moment for the public welfare.’ A number of the clergy greeted these words with cheers and would have accepted the invitation immediately had not the more conservative amongst them insisted on discussing it first. The deputation thereupon returned to the Commons who decided to remain in session until the clergy’s answer arrived. Hours passed and the answer did not come. The invitation was repeated; the clergy replied that they needed further time to consider it; the Commons said they were prepared to wait all day and all night if necessary.
Alarmed by the overtures being made to the priests and by the growing unrest in Paris and Versailles which was exacerbated by food shortages, the bishops turned to the King and asked him to intervene. Consequently, on 4 June, Necker proposed that each order should examine the credentials of its own members but allow the others to raise objections when the results were announced. If no decision could be reached, the King was to act as arbitrator.
On the day that this proposal was announced, however, the Dauphin died at the age of eight. Overwhelmed with grief the King shut himself up in his rooms at Versailles then withdrew for a week to Marly. While he was away, the Parisian deputies, whose elections had been delayed, began to settle themselves into the rooms reserved for them at Versailles and to harden the Commons’ determination ‘to appear formidable in the eyes of their enemies’. Among the Parisian deputies was the Abbé Sieyès who proposed that the clergy and nobility should now be asked to join the Commons, that those who did not should be considered to have forfeited their rights as representatives – in other words, that the Third Estate should constitute itself the representative body of the nation as a whole without the King’s consent.
A roll on which the names of clergy and nobles willing to join the Commons was accordingly opened on 12 June. Over the next few days not a single noble put down his name; as an order they merely promised to consider the Third Estate’s request ‘with their most studied attention’. But on 13 June three curés from Poitou appeared at the entrance to the Commons’ hall. They agreed, they said, to having their names put down on the roll. Their words were greeted with an outburst of clapping and cheering as deputies rushed towards them, embracing them with tears in their eyes. The next day another six priests, and two days later a further ten, followed their example.