“Now, if Mirabeau is the greatest of these six hundred, who may be the meanest?  Shall we say that anxious, slight, ineffectual-looking man, under thirty, in spectacles, his eyes troubled, careful; with upturned face, snuffing dimly the uncertain future time; complexion of a multiplex atrabilious color, the final shade of which may be pale sea-green?  That greenish-colored individual is an advocate of Arras; his name is Maximilien Robespierre.

“Between which extremes of grandest and meanest, so many grand and mean, roll on towards their several destinies in that procession.  There is experienced Mounier, whose presidential parliamentary experience the stream of things shall soon leave stranded.  A Petion has left his gown and briefs at Chartres for a stormier sort of pleading.  A Protestant-clerical St. Etienne, a slender young eloquent and vehement Barnave, will help to regenerate France,

“And then there is worthy Doctor Guillotin, Bailly likewise, time-honored historian of astronomy, and the Abbe Sieyes, cold, but elastic, wiry, instinct with the pride of logic, passionless, or with but one passion, that of self-conceit.  This is the Sieyes who shall be system-builder, constitutional-builder-general, and build constitutions which shall unfortunately fall before we get the scaffolding away.

“Among the nobles are Liancourt, and La Rochefoucauld, and pious Lally, and Lafayette, whom Mirabeau calls Grandison Cromwell, and the Viscount Mirabeau, called Barrel Mirabeau, on account of his rotundity, and the quantity of strong liquor he contains.  Among the clergy is the Abbe Maury, who does not want for audacity, and the Cure Gregoire who shall be a bishop, and Talleyrand-Pericord, his reverence of Autun, with sardonic grimness, a man living in falsehood, and on falsehood, yet not wholly a false man.

“So, in stately procession, the elected of France pass on, some to honor, others to dishonor; not a few towards massacre, confusion, emigration, desperation.”

For several weeks this famous States-General remain inactive, unable to agree whether they shall deliberate in a single hall or in three separate chambers.  The deputies, of course, wish to deliberate in a single chamber, since they equal in number both the clergy and nobles, and some few nobles had joined them, and more than a hundred of the clergy.  But a large majority of both the clergy and the noblesse insist with pertinacity on the three separate chambers, since, united, they would neutralize the third estate.  If the deputies prevailed, they would inaugurate reforms to which the other orders would never consent.

Long did these different bodies of the States-General deliberate, and stormy were the debates.  The nobles showed themselves haughty and dogmatical; the deputies showed themselves aggressive and revolutionary.  The King and the ministers looked on with impatience and disgust, but were irresolute.  Had the King been a Cromwell, or a Napoleon, he would have dissolved the assemblies; but he was timid and hesitating.  Necker, the prime minister, was for compromise; he would accept reforms, but only in a constitutional way.