One of the most honourable, one of the most respectable and the most respected members of the institute, having been led, in a recent work, to relate the assassination of Foulon, has thrown on the conduct of Bailly, under those cruel circumstances, an aspersion that I read with surprise and grief.  Foulon was detained in the Hotel de Ville.  Bailly went down into the square, and succeeded for a moment in calming the multitude.  “I did not imagine,” said the Mayor in his memoirs, “that they could have forced the Hotel de Ville, a well-guarded post, and an object of respect to all the citizens.  I therefore thought the prisoner in perfect safety; I did not doubt but the waves of this storm would finally subside, and I departed.”

The honourable author of the History of the Reign of Louis XVI. opposes to this passage the following words taken from the official minutes of the Hotel de Ville:  “The electors (those who had accompanied Bailly out to the square) reported in the Hall the certainty that the calm would not last long.”  The new historian adds:  “How could the Mayor alone labour under this delusion?  It is too evident, that on such a day, the public tranquillity was much too uncertain, to allow of the chief magistrate of the town absenting himself without deserving the reproach of weakness.”  The remainder of the passage shows too evidently, that in the author’s estimation, weakness here was synonymous with cowardice.

It is against this, Gentlemen, that I protest with heartfelt earnestness.  Bailly absented himself because he did not think that the Hotel de Ville could be forced.  The electors in the passage quoted do not enunciate a different opinion:  where then is the contradiction?

Bailly deceived himself in this expectation, for the multitude burst into the Hotel de Ville.  We will grant that there was an error of judgment in this; but nothing in the world authorizes us to call in question the courage of the Mayor.

To decide after the blow, with so little hesitation or consideration, that Bailly ought not to have absented himself from the House of the Commune, we must forget that, under such circumstances, the obligations of the first magistrate of the city were quite imperious and very numerous; it is requisite, above all, not to remember that each day, the provision of flour required for the nourishment of seven or eight hundred thousand inhabitants, depended on the measures adopted on the previous evening.  M. de Crosne, who on quitting the post of Lieutenant of Police, had not ceased to be a citizen, was during some days a very enlightened and zealous councillor for Bailly; but on the day that Foulon was arrested, this dismissed magistrate thought himself lost.  He and his family made an appeal to the gratitude and humanity of our colleague.  It was to procure a refuge for them, that Bailly employed the few hours of absence with which he was so much reproached:  those hours during which that catastrophe happened which the Mayor