Prickers, scouts have been out towards Paris, as the rumour deepened:  whereby his Majesty, gone to shoot in the Woods of Meudon, has been happily discovered, and got home; and the generale and tocsin set a-sounding.  The Bodyguards are already drawn up in front of the Palace Grates; and look down the Avenue de Versailles; sulky, in wet buckskins.  Flandre too is there, repentant of the Opera-Repast.  Also Dragoons dismounted are there.  Finally Major Lecointre, and what he can gather of the Versailles National Guard; though, it is to be observed, our Colonel, that same sleepless Count d’Estaing, giving neither order nor ammunition, has vanished most improperly; one supposes, into the Oeil-de-Boeuf.  Red-coated Swiss stand within the Grates, under arms.  There likewise, in their inner room, ‘all the Ministers,’ Saint-Priest, Lamentation Pompignan and the rest, are assembled with M. Necker:  they sit with him there; blank, expecting what the hour will bring.

President Mounier, though he answered Mirabeau with a tant mieux, and affected to slight the matter, had his own forebodings.  Surely, for these four weary hours, he has reclined not on roses!  The order of the day is getting forward:  a Deputation to his Majesty seems proper, that it might please him to grant ‘Acceptance pure and simple’ to those Constitution-Articles of ours; the ‘mixed qualified Acceptance,’ with its peradventures, is satisfactory to neither gods nor men.

So much is clear.  And yet there is more, which no man speaks, which all men now vaguely understand.  Disquietude, absence of mind is on every face; Members whisper, uneasily come and go:  the order of the day is evidently not the day’s want.  Till at length, from the outer gates, is heard a rustling and justling, shrill uproar and squabbling, muffled by walls; which testifies that the hour is come!  Rushing and crushing one hears now; then enter Usher Maillard, with a Deputation of Fifteen muddy dripping Women,—­having by incredible industry, and aid of all the macers, persuaded the rest to wait out of doors.  National Assembly shall now, therefore, look its august task directly in the face:  regenerative Constitutionalism has an unregenerate Sansculottism bodily in front of it; crying, “Bread!  Bread!”

Shifty Maillard, translating frenzy into articulation; repressive with the one hand, expostulative with the other, does his best; and really, though not bred to public speaking, manages rather well:—­In the present dreadful rarity of grains, a Deputation of Female Citizens has, as the august Assembly can discern, come out from Paris to petition.  Plots of Aristocrats are too evident in the matter; for example, one miller has been bribed ‘by a banknote of 200 livres’ not to grind,—­name unknown to the Usher, but fact provable, at least indubitable.  Further, it seems, the National Cockade has been trampled on; also there are Black Cockades, or were.  All which things will not an august National Assembly, the hope of France, take into its wise immediate consideration?