Bailly day by day recorded in his Memoirs a statement of his actions, of his anxieties, and of his fears.  It may be good for the instruction of the more fortunate administrators of the present epoch, to insert here a few lines from the journal of our colleague.

“18th August.  Our provisions are very much reduced.  Those of the morrow depend strictly on the arrangements made on the previous evening; and now amidst this distress, we learn that our flour-wagons have been stopped at Bourg-la-Reine; that some banditti are pillaging the markets in the direction of Rouen, that they have seized twenty wagons of flour that were destined for us; ... that the unfortunate Sauvage was massacred at Saint Germain-en-Laye; ... that Thomassin escaped with difficulty from the fury of the populace at Choisy.”

By repeating either these literal words, or something equivalent to them, for every day of distress throughout the year 1789, an exact idea may be formed of the anxieties that Bailly experienced from the morning after his installation as mayor.  I deceive myself; to complete the picture we ought also to record the unreflecting and inconsiderate actions of a multitude of people whose destiny appeared to be, to meddle with every thing and to spoil every thing.  I will not resist the wish to show one of these self-important men, starving (or very nearly so) the city of Paris.

“21st August.  The store of victuals, Bailly says, was so scanty, that the lives of the inhabitants of Paris depended on the somewhat mathematical precision of our arrangements.  Having learnt that a barge with eighteen hundred sacks of flour had arrived at Poissy, I immediately despatched a hundred wagons from Paris to fetch them.  And behold, in the evening, an officer without powers and without orders, related before me, that having met some wagons on the Poissy road, he made them go back, because he did not think that there was a wharf for any loaded barge on the Seine.  It would be difficult for me to describe the despair and the anger into which this recital threw me.  We were obliged to put sentinels at the bakers’ doors!”

The despair and the anger of Bailly were very natural.  Even now, after more than half a century, no one thinks without a shudder of that obscure individual who, from not believing that a loaded barge could get up to Poissy, was going, on the 21st August, 1789, to plunge the capital into bloody disorders.

By means of perseverance, devotedness, and courage, Bailly succeeded in overcoming all the difficulties that the real scarcity, and the fictitious one, which was still more redoubtable, caused daily to arise.  He succeeded, but his health from that epoch was deeply injured; his mind had undergone several of those severe shocks that we can never entirely recover from.  Our colleague said, “when I used to pass the bakers’ shops during the scarcity, and saw them besieged by a crowd, my heart sunk within me; and even now that abundance has been restored to us, the sight of one of those shops strikes me with a deep emotion.”