Having murmured his thanks and kissed her hand, he watched her leave the room by its far doorway with the Princess; then, a few minutes later, Madame de Lamballe returned and let him out into the ante-room. He did not look at the paper the Queen had given him until he was outside the palace, but when he did he was pleasantly surprised. It was a draft on Thellusson's Bank for 500 ecus, and his journey to Naples had cost him barely a third of that sum.
Now that Roger was once more free of the Queen's business he felt that he must try to make up for lost time in cultivating the most prominent figures in the National Assembly; so he began to spend several hours each day in the Riding School of the Tuileries, where it now met. As he already knew quite a number of the deputies it was not difficult for him to get himself introduced to others that he wished to meet, and he soon had acquaintances in all parties.
In the late summer, during the first few weeks that the Three
Estates had sat as one body, the Assembly had naturally resolved itself into two parties: those who had been in favour of joint sittings and those who had opposed them. The more reactionary nobles and clergy, who composed the latter, had taken little part in the debates, treated the deliberations with cynical contempt and, wherever possible, sabotaged the proceedings. But in the autumn, realizing the futility of such a policy, the more sensible among them had begun to play a more constructive part, and this had resulted in the whole body splitting into a great number of small parties, all varying slightly in their views and ranging from absolutists to outright republicans.
The Extreme Right was led by d'Espremenil and the Vicomte de Mirabeau, brother of the great orator. The Main Right was a slightly larger body and possessed two of the best statesmen in the Assembly: the Vicomte de Cazales, a young Captain in the Queen's Dragoons who had emerged as a clear-thinking and lucid speaker, and the Abbé Maury, an extraordinary skilful and subtle debator. The Right Centre, which aimed at a Constitutional Monarchy on English lines, was a loose but still more numerous party. It included many of the most respected members of the original Third Estate, Mounier and Malouet among them; also the Counts Lally-Tollendal and Clermont-Tonnerre, with most of the other Liberal nobles.
The Left, which desired a strictly limited monarchy, was nebulous but powerful in numbers, as it consisted of the larger part of the deputies elected to the Third Estate and the majority of the cures who had been elected to the First. The Protestant pastor, Rabaut-Saint-litienne, Duport, Alexander Lameth, Barnave, Camus, Le Chapelier, Lafayette, Bailly and the Abb6 Sieyes were all members of it, but a number of them were now gravitating towards the Extreme Left, which consisted of a small group of enrages, as they were called, led by Potion and a dry little lawyer from Arras named Maximilien Robespierre.
Roger found that even his three weeks' absence from Paris had brought about a marked change in the character of the Assembly. As early as August, the surrender of the King after the taking of the Bastille and the "Great Fear" had led to a number of the most reactionary among the nobles who sat for the Second Estate following the Comte d'Artois, and other Princes, into exile. The attack on Versailles and removal of the Royal Family to Paris in October had greatly accentuated the movement, so that over two hundred deputies, all of whom were strongly Monarchist in principle, had now abandoned their seats and gone abroad, thus enormously weakening the Right and Right Centre.
Moreover it was apparent that the mob that daily filled the public galleries of the Assembly now exercised an even greater influence on its deliberations than before. The Riding School was a somewhat smaller chamber than the Salle des Menus Plaisirs in which the Assembly had sat while at Versailles, but, owing to the decrease in the number of deputies that now attended, the accommodation for the public was as commodious as before. In consequence, the deputies of the Right were constantly exposed to methodical terrorism from the supporters of the Left, both in the chamber and out of it. In several instances members who spoke strongly in support of the monarchy were threatened with having their houses burnt down, and all those who held moderate opinions found it necessary to go about armed. Even the highly respected Malpuet never attended a sitting without a brace of pistols in his belt; and Mounier, wearied out with the threats and heckling of the people to secure whose liberties he had done so much, had resigned in disgust and joined the exiles abroad.
This recent abandonment of the struggle by Mounier struck Roger as a particularly alarming portent, as the deputy for Grenoble could be considered, even more than Lafayette, Bailly or Mirabeau, as the Father of the Revolution. As far back as June 1788 the noblesse of Grenoble had held a consultation with local representatives of the other Orders and decided that, in view of the troubled state of the country, the ancient Estates of Dauphine should be revived. Without the royal consent elections had been held, and deputies nominated to sit in a Provincial Assembly to consist of the Three Estates deliberating together, and in which the representatives of the Third Estate equalled the total of the other two.
The Government had sent the Marshal de Vaux with troops to put a stop to these unorthodox proceedings, but he had found opinion in the Province so firmly united that he had been forced to compromise, exacting only the concession that, instead of the Assembly sitting in the Provincial capital, it should meet at the nearby town of Vizille. And there it had met, ten months before the States General assembled at Versailles, and already constituted on a basis that it later took the States General two months to achieve. The mainspring of this extraordinary innovation in the Government of the ancient Monarchy of France had been the young and energetic lawyer Jean-Joseph Mounier, who was chosen Secretary to the Assembly and drafted most of its resolutions. Moreover, when the States General met in the following year it had naturally adopted most of the precedents set by the Assembly of Vizille as the only example of democratic government then existing in the country, and recognized Mounier as the leading authority on parliamentary procedure.
Yet now, only seven months after the States General had assembled, such an iconoclastic fervour had seized on the mentality of the people, and so intolerant had they become of all moderate opinion, that this great champion of democracy had despaired of seeing a stable Constitution emerge from the state of semi-anarchy to which the surrender of the royal authority had reduced France. He had been driven into exile amidst the hoots and menaces of the scum of the faubourgs, who used the cry of "liberty" as an excuse to set all law at defiance, and whose sole object was to raise riots which would enable them to plunder the houses of the richer citizens.
This question of formulating a Constitution had naturally been one of the first matters with which the Assembly had concerned itself. The King had long been willing to grant one and, if he had had the courage of his convictions, he could have saved himself infinite trouble by doing so in '87 or '88. Then, practically any Charter ensuring the people reasonable liberties would have put an end to all serious agitations for reform. Even after the States General met, had he possessed an ounce of resolution he could still have taken matters out of their hands, and by giving the people a permanent voice in the government of the country retained the whole executive power himself. But his policy of drift had now landed him in a situation where he was not to be allowed any say in the matter at all; and as the year '89 drew to a close a succession of debates in the Assembly showed an ever-increasing tendency to leave the King as nothing but a puppet to be paraded for the amusement of the people on State occasions.