ays the new ministry and their abettors found it prudent
to fly the nation; the Bastille was taken, and Broglio and his foreign
troops dispersed, as is already related in the former part of this work.

There are some curious circumstances in the history of this short-lived
ministry, and this short-lived attempt at a counter-revolution. The
Palace of Versailles, where the Court was sitting, was not more than
four hundred yards distant from the hall where the National Assembly
was sitting. The two places were at this moment like the separate
headquarters of two combatant armies; yet the Court was as perfectly
ignorant of the information which had arrived from Paris to the National
Assembly, as if it had resided at an hundred miles distance. The then
Marquis de la Fayette, who (as has been already mentioned) was chosen to
preside in the National Assembly on this particular occasion, named by
order of the Assembly three successive deputations to the king, on the
day and up to the evening on which the Bastille was taken, to inform and
confer with him on the state of affairs; but the ministry, who knew not
so much as that it was attacked, precluded all communication, and were
solacing themselves how dextrously they had succeeded; but in a few
hours the accounts arrived so thick and fast that they had to start from
their desks and run. Some set off in one disguise, and some in another,
and none in their own character. Their anxiety now was to outride the
news, lest they should be stopt, which, though it flew fast, flew not so
fast as themselves.

It is worth remarking that the National Assembly neither pursued those
fugitive conspirators, nor took any notice of them, nor sought
to retaliate in any shape whatever. Occupied with establishing a
constitution founded on the Rights of Man and the Authority of the
People, the only authority on which Government has a right to exist
in any country, the National Assembly felt none of those mean passions
which mark the character of impertinent governments, founding themselves
on their own authority, or on the absurdity of hereditary succession. It
is the faculty of the human mind to become what it contemplates, and to
act in unison with its object.

The conspiracy being thus dispersed, one of the first works of the
National Assembly, instead of vindictive proclamations, as has been the
case with other governments, was to publish a declaration of the Rights
of Man, as the basis on which