before he applied to his friend, the Count de la Marck, whom he rightly believed to enjoy the queen’s good opinion, begging him to express to her his ardent wish to serve her.  He even drew up a long memorial on the existing state of affairs, indicating the line of conduct which, in his opinion, the king ought to pursue; the leading feature of which was an early departure from Paris to some city at no great distance, that he might be safe and free; while in the capital it was evident that he was neither.  And the step which he thus recommended at the outset deserves attention as being also that on which a year later he still insisted as the indispensable preliminary to whatever line of conduct might be decided on.

But at this moment his advice never reached those for whom it was intended.  La Marck, with all his good-will both to his friend and to the court, could not venture to bring before the queen’s notice the name of one who, only a few days before, had denounced her in the foulest manner in the Assembly for having appeared at the soldiers’ banquet, and whom she with her own eyes had beheld uniting with the assailants of the palace.  He thought it more politic, even for the eventual attainment of his friend’s objects, to content himself for the time with giving the memorial and stating the views of the writer to the Count de Provence; and that prince declared that it would be useless to bring it to the knowledge of either king or queen:  “that the queen had not sufficient influence over her husband to induce him to adopt such a plan;” and he even hinted that at times Louis was disposed to be jealous of her appearing to influence him.

But if these circumstances—­the quarrel between the enemies of the court, and the conversion of one more able and formidable than either—­were in the king’s favor, other events which took place in the same few weeks were full of mischief and danger.  Before the end of the month fresh riots broke out in Paris.  Bread, the supply of which Marie Antoinette, as we have seen, rightly regarded as a matter of the first importance to the tranquillity of the city, continued scarce and dear; and the mob broke open the bakers’ shops, and murdered one baker, a man named Francois, with a ferocity more terrible than they had even shown toward De Launay, or the guards at Versailles.  They tore his body to pieces, and, having cut off his head, compelled his wife to kiss the scarcely cold lips, and then left her fainting on the pavement still covered with his blood.  Even La Fayette was horror-stricken at such brutality.  It was the only occasion on which he did his duty during the whole progress of the Revolution.  He came down with a company of the National Guard, dispersed the rioters, seized the ruffian who was bearing aloft, the head of the murdered man on a pole, and caused him to be hanged the next day.  And during the next few weeks he more than once brought his soldiers to the support of the civil power, and inflicted summary punishment on gangs of miscreants, whose idea of reform was a state of things which should afford impunity to crime.