The moderate constitutional party had also attempted its clubs, but passion is wanting to defensive societies; it is only the offensive that groups in factions; and thus the former expired of themselves until the establishment of the Club of Feuillants.  The people drove away with a shower of stones the first meeting of the deputies, at M. De Clermont Tonnerres.  Barnave reproached his colleagues in the tribune, and devoted them to public execration with the same voice which had raised and rallied the Friends of the Constitution.  Liberty was as yet but a partial arm, which was unblushingly broken in the hands of an opponent.

What remained to the king thus pressed between an assembly, which had usurped all the executive functions, and those factious clubs, which usurped to themselves all the rights of representation?  Placed without adequate strength between two rival powers, he was only there to receive the blows of each in the struggle, and to be cast as a daily sacrifice to popularity by the National Assembly; one power alone still maintained the shadow of the throne and exterior order, the national guard of Paris.  But the national guard, which as a neutral force, whose only law was in public opinion, and was wavering itself between factions and the monarchy, might very well maintain safety in a public place, was unable to serve as a strong and independent support to political power.  It was itself of the people; every serious intervention against the will of the people, appeared to it as sacrilege.  It was a body of municipal police; it could never again be the army of the throne or the constitution; it was born of itself on the day after the 14th of July on the steps of the Hotel de Ville, and it received no orders but from the municipality.  The municipality had assigned M. de La Fayette as its head—­nor could it have chosen better:  an honest people, directed by its instinct, could not have selected a man who would represent it more faithfully.

XXII.

The marquis de La Fayette was a patrician, possessor of an immense fortune, and allied, through his wife, daughter of the Duc d’Ayen, with the greatest families of the court.  Born at Chavaignac in Auvergne on the 6th of September, 1757, married at sixteen years of age, a precocious instinct of renown drove him in 1777 from his own country.  It was at the period of the war of Independence in America; the name of Washington resounded throughout the two continents.  A youth dreamed the same destiny for himself in the delights of the effeminate court of Louis XV.; that youth was La Fayette.  He privately fitted out two vessels with arms and provisions, and arrived at Boston.  Washington hailed him as he would have hailed the open succour of France.  It was France without its flag.  La Fayette and the young officers who followed him assured him of the secret wishes of a great people for the independence of the