guards and citizens to arrest the king.  This was also a dictatorship, and the most personal of all dictatorships, that a single man, taking the place of the Assembly, and the whole nation, thus assumed.  He, on his private authority and the right of his civic foresight, struck at the liberty and perhaps the life of the lawful ruler of the nation.  This order led Louis XVI. to the scaffold, for it restored to the people the victim who had escaped their clutches.  “Fortunately for him,” he writes in his Memoirs, after the atrocities committed on these august victims, “fortunately for him, their arrest was not owing to his orders, but to the accident of being recognised by a post-master, and to their ill arrangements.”  Thus the citizen ordered that which the man trembled to see fulfilled; and tardy sensibility protested against patriotism.

Quitting the Tuileries, La Fayette went to the Hotel de Ville, on horseback.  The quays were crowded with persons whose anger vented itself in reproaches against him, which he supported with the utmost apparent serenity.  On his arrival at the Place de Greve, almost unattended, he found the duke d’Aumont, one of his officers, in the hands of the populace, who were on the point of massacring him; and he instantly mingled with the crowd, who were astonished at his audacity, and rescued the duke d’Aumont.  He thus recovered by courage the dominion, which he would have lost (and with it his life) had he hesitated.

“Why do you complain?” he asked of the crowd.  “Does not every citizen gain twenty sous by the suppression of the civil list?  If you call the flight of the king a misfortune, by what name would you then denominate a counter-revolution that would deprive you of liberty?” He again quitted the Hotel de Ville with an escort, and directed his steps with more confidence towards the Assembly.  As he entered the chamber, Camus, near whom he seated himself, rose indignantly:  “No uniforms here,” cried he; “in this place we should behold neither arms nor uniforms.”  Several members of the left side rose with Camus, exclaiming to La Fayette, “Quit the chamber!” and dismissing with a gesture the intimidated general.  Other members, friends of La Fayette, collected round him, and sought to silence the threatening vociferations of Camus.  M. de La Fayette at last obtained a hearing at the bar.  After uttering a few common places about liberty and the people, he proposed that M. de Gouvion, his second in command, to whom the guard of the Tuileries had been intrusted, should be examined by the Assembly.  “I will answer for this officer,” said he; “and take upon myself the responsibility.”  M. de Gouvion was heard, and affirmed that all the outlets from the palace had been strictly guarded, and that the king could not have escaped by any of the doors.  This statement was confirmed by M. Bailly, the mayor of Paris.  The intendant of the civil list, M. de Laporte, appeared, to present to the Assembly the