Dissident Priests likewise give trouble enough.  Expelled from their Parish Churches, where Constitutional Priests, elected by the Public, have replaced them, these unhappy persons resort to Convents of Nuns, or other such receptacles; and there, on Sabbath, collecting assemblages of Anti-Constitutional individuals, who have grown devout all on a sudden, (Toulongeon, i. 262.) they worship or pretend to worship in their strait-laced contumacious manner; to the scandal of Patriotism.  Dissident Priests, passing along with their sacred wafer for the dying, seem wishful to be massacred in the streets; wherein Patriotism will not gratify them.  Slighter palm of martyrdom, however, shall not be denied:  martyrdom not of massacre, yet of fustigation.  At the refractory places of worship, Patriot men appear; Patriot women with strong hazel wands, which they apply.  Shut thy eyes, O Reader; see not this misery, peculiar to these later times,—­of martyrdom without sincerity, with only cant and contumacy!  A dead Catholic Church is not allowed to lie dead; no, it is galvanised into the detestablest death-life; whereat Humanity, we say, shuts its eyes.  For the Patriot women take their hazel wands, and fustigate, amid laughter of bystanders, with alacrity:  broad bottom of Priests; alas, Nuns too reversed, and cotillons retrousses!  The National Guard does what it can:  Municipality ’invokes the Principles of Toleration;’ grants Dissident worshippers the Church of the Theatins; promising protection.  But it is to no purpose:  at the door of that Theatins Church, appears a Placard, and suspended atop, like Plebeian Consular fasces,—­a Bundle of Rods!  The Principles of Toleration must do the best they may:  but no Dissident man shall worship contumaciously; there is a Plebiscitum to that effect; which, though unspoken, is like the laws of the Medes and Persians.  Dissident contumacious Priests ought not to be harboured, even in private, by any man:  the Club of the Cordeliers openly denounces Majesty himself as doing it. (Newspapers of April and June, 1791 (in Hist.  Parl. ix. 449; x, 217).)

Many things invite to flight:  but probably this thing above all others, that it has become impossible!  On the 15th of April, notice is given that his Majesty, who has suffered much from catarrh lately, will enjoy the Spring weather, for a few days, at Saint-Cloud.  Out at Saint-Cloud?  Wishing to celebrate his Easter, his Paques, or Pasch, there; with refractory Anti-Constitutional Dissidents?—­Wishing rather to make off for Compiegne, and thence to the Frontiers?  As were, in good sooth, perhaps feasible, or would once have been; nothing but some two chasseurs attending you; chasseurs easily corrupted!  It is a pleasant possibility, execute it or not.  Men say there are thirty thousand Chevaliers of the Poniard lurking in the woods there:  lurking in the woods, and thirty thousand,—­for the human Imagination is not fettered.  But now, how easily might these, dashing out on Lafayette, snatch off the Hereditary Representative; and roll away with him, after the manner of a whirlblast, whither they listed!—­Enough, it were well the King did not go.  Lafayette is forewarned and forearmed:  but, indeed, is the risk his only; or his and all France’s?