As Roger rode back to Paris he felt sad for the French nobles; for, although he found little to admire in them as a body, he would have hated to be one of them and have to rely for support on such a sorry King. His pessimistic view of their chances was confirmed the very next day.
Barentin had won the round over the speech at the Royal Session, but Necker got the upper hand in the one that followed. At his insistence the King wrote to the Presidents of the Two senior Orders, the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld and the Due de Luxembourg, asking them to invite their members to join the Third. Both demurred, so he sent for and pleaded with them. Still they held out, preferring his displeasure, and the howls of execration of the mob wherever they appeared, to a surrender that they considered to be against the true interests of the nation.
The King then panicked and resorted to a stratagem which came near to baseness. He ordered his brother, the Comte d'Artois, whom the nobles regarded as the leader of their resistance, to write a letter stating that if they persisted further in their refusal His Majesty's life would be in danger from the fury of the populace. The letter was read in the chamber of the nobles on the morning of the 27th. The gallant Marquis de St. Simon instantly sprang to his feet and cried: "If that be the case, let us go to him and form a rampart round him with our bodies." But the majority were against provoking an armed conflict; so, although with the greatest reluctance, out of personal loyalty to their Sovereign, the remaining members of the two senior Orders were tricked into joining the National Assembly.
That it was a shameful manoeuvre Roger had no doubt, as he was in Versailles at the time with every opportunity to assess the facts; and he knew that there was as yet little real strength behind the noisy rabble, whereas the Court still had ample power to suppress any serious disturbance.
For a week past bands of hooligans had been parading the streets creating disorder, and threatening anyone they saw whom they believed to be opposed to their idol, Monsieur Necker. In the neighbourhood of the park the peasants now defied the gamekeepers; three poachers had been brutally butchered, one of them only a few days previously, and the villagers round about were openly shooting the game in the royal forests. The whole country was in a state of extreme agitation, and during the past four months over 300 outbreaks of violence had occurred in different parts of it.
Even the French Royal Guard were no longer to be relied upon, as the agents of the Due d'Orleans were employing women as well as men to stir up sedition, and great numbers of the prostitutes of Paris were being used to suborn the troops. Both in the capital and at Versailles it was now a common sight to see groups of guardsmen arm-in-arm with girls, drunk in the middle of the day, and shouting obscenities, picked up in the gardens of the Palais Royal, against the Queen. Moreover it was known that a secret society had been formed in the regiment, the members of which had sworn to obey no orders except those emanating from the National Assembly.
But, despite all this, not a voice, much less a finger, had as yet been raised against the King. Every time he gave way he won a new, if temporary, popularity, and even when he stood firm there was no decrease in the respect shown to him. He had 40,000 troops within a few hours' march of the capital. The discipline of his Royal Swiss Guard was superb, and he had several other regiments of Swiss and German troops who had long been embodied in the French Army in the immediate vicinity. As they did not speak French they understood little of what was going on, could not be tampered with, and were entirely reliable. He therefore had nothing whatever to fear and must have known it from the fact that whenever he appeared even the rabble still greeted him with shouts of "Vive le Roi!"
So he had betrayed his nobility, and deprived them of all further opportunity to exercise a restraining influence on the extremists of the Third Estate, solely for the sake of escaping a little further badgering from a Minister whom he disliked and distrusted, yet had not the courage to dismiss.
Of his abysmal weakness further evidence was soon forthcoming. The Due de Chatelet, Colonel of the French Guard, much perturbed by the open disaffection of his regiment, arrested fifteen of the ringleaders and confined them in the prison of l’Abbaye. One of them managed to get a letter smuggled out to the Palais Royal. On its contents becoming public a tumult ensued, the mob marched upon the prison, forced its doors, released the offenders and carried them back in triumph.
Since the elections the revolutionary Clubs in Paris had gained enormously in strength, and they used as their mouthpiece a body of the Electors who had made their headquarters at the Hotel de Ville. Instead of dispersing after having elected their deputies to the Third Estate these Electors continued to sit, forming an unofficial but most powerful committee, who, every day, deluged their representatives in the National Assembly with a constant spate of requests and orders. The Electors now demanded that the Assembly should use its weight with the King to secure the pardon of the mutinous guardsmen. This the Assembly, now itself frightened of the mobs that the Electors controlled, was sapient enough to do; and the miserable King acceded to their request, thereby destroying at a stroke the authority of the officers of his own regiment of guards.
Roger now went daily to Versailles. He would have moved to lodgings there if he could, but ever since the assembling of the States
General the town had been packed to capacity and every garret in it occupied; so he often had to ride back to Paris in the small hours of the morning.
His temporary captivity at Fontainebleau now stood him in good stead, as the courtiers he had met through de Vaudreuil extended their friendship to him, introduced him to their families, and invited him to their parties. For, in spite of the troubled times, life within the palace went on as usual, except that there were no public entertainments owing to the Court being in mourning for the Dauphin. Twice the Duchesse de Polignac invited him to musical evenings in her suite, and on both occasions the Queen spoke kindly to him. He now saw her, although not to speak to, several times a day, and his affable manners rapidly gained for him an accepted place among the fifty or sixty people whom she regarded as her personal friends.
In consequence, he was now admirably placed for learning what was going on, and he soon became aware that the Court party was by no means yet prepared to knuckle under to the National Assembly. The Marshal de Broglie, a stout-hearted veteran of the Seven Years' War, had been appointed to the supreme command of the Army, and he meant to stand no nonsense if the mobs of Paris took up arms against the King. The Queen's old friend, de Besenval, had been selected to command the troops in the capital, and between them they now had 50,000 men concentrated in and about it.
Most people at the Court now felt that, unless the King's timidity led him to an abject surrender of every right still vested in the Crown, civil war must soon break out. They also believed that, although he might be prepared to do so on his own account, his jelly-like back would be stiffened for once at the thought that his powers did not belong to himself alone, but were held by him in trust for transmission to his children and future heirs as yet unborn.
De Broglie and his staff were therefore preparing against all emergencies with the utmost activity. The palace and its grounds were now an armed camp. Batteries were being erected to cover the bridges over the Seine and thousands of men were labouring to throw up a vast system of earthworks on the slopes of Montmartre, from which guns could bombard rebellious Paris.