And so the Court, growing momentarily wise again under the spur of fear, preferred to temporize.  Necker should be brought back yet once again, the three orders should sit united as the National Assembly demanded.  It was the completest surrender of force to force, the only argument.  The King went alone to inform the National Assembly of that eleventh-hour resolve, to the great comfort of its members, who viewed with pain and alarm the dreadful state of things in Paris.  “No force but the force of reason and argument” was their watchword, and it was so to continue for two years yet, with a patience and fortitude in the face of ceaseless provocation to which insufficient justice has been done.

As the King was leaving the Assembly, a woman, embracing his knees, gave tongue to what might well be the question of all France: 

“Ah, sire, are you really sincere?  Are you sure they will not make you change your mind?”

Yet no such question was asked when a couple of days later the King, alone and unguarded save by the representatives of the Nation, came to Paris to complete the peacemaking, the surrender of Privilege.  The Court was filled with terror by the adventure.  Were they not the “enemy,” these mutinous Parisians?  And should a King go thus among his enemies?  If he shared some of that fear, as the gloom of him might lead us to suppose, he must have found it idle.  What if two hundred thousand men under arms — men without uniforms and with the most extraordinary motley of weapons ever seen — awaited him?  They awaited him as a guard of honour.

Mayor Bailly at the barrier presented him with the keys of the city.  “These are the same keys that were presented to Henri IV.  He had reconquered his people.  Now the people have reconquered their King.”

At the Hotel de Ville Mayor Bailly offered him the new cockade, the tricoloured symbol of constitutional France, and when he had given his royal confirmation to the formation of the Garde Bourgeoise and to the appointments of Bailly and Lafayette, he departed again for Versailles amid the shouts of “Vive le Roi!” from his loyal people.

And now you see Privilege — before the cannon’s mouth, as it were — submitting at last, where had they submitted sooner they might have saved oceans of blood — chiefly their own.  They come, nobles and clergy, to join the National Assembly, to labour with it upon this constitution that is to regenerate France.  But the reunion is a mockery — as much a mockery as that of the Archbishop of Paris singing the Te Deum for the fall of the Bastille — most grotesque and incredible of all these grotesque and incredible events.  All that has happened to the National Assembly is that it has introduced five or six hundred enemies to hamper and hinder its deliberations.

But all this is an oft-told tale, to be read in detail elsewhere.  I give you here just so much of it as I have found in Andre-Louis’ own writings, almost in his own words, reflecting the changes that were operated in his mind.  Silent now, he came fully to believe in those things in which he had not believed when earlier he had preached them.