hrong.
Malouet, on leaving it, is almost dragged from his carriage, and the
crowd around him cry out, "There goes the bastard who denounced the
people!"--At length, its founders, who, out of consideration for the
municipality, have waited two months, hire another hall in the Rue des
Petites-Ecuries, and on the 28th of March begin their sessions. "On
reaching it," writes one of them, "we found a mob composed of drunkards,
screaming boys, ragged women, soldiers exciting them on, and especially
those frightful hounds, armed with stout, knotty cudgels, two feet
long, which are excellent skull-crackers."[2119] The thing was made up
beforehand. At first there were only three or four hundred of them, and,
ten minutes after, five or six hundred; in a quarter of an hour, there
are perhaps four thousand flocking in from all sides; in short, the
usual make-up of an insurrection. "The people of the quarter certified
that they did not recognize one of the faces." Jokes, insults, cuffs,
clubbings, and saber-cuts,--the members of the club "who agreed to come
unarmed" being dispersed, while several are knocked down, dragged by the
hair, and a dozen or fifteen more are wounded. To justify the attack,
white cockades are shown, which, it is pretended, were found in their
pockets. Mayor Bailly arrives only when it is all over, and, as a
measure of "public order," the municipal authorities have the club of
Constitutional Monarchists closed for good.

Owing to these outrages by the faction, with the connivance of the
authorities, other similar clubs are suppressed in the same way. There
are a good many of them, and in the principal towns--"Friends of
Peace," "Friends of the Country," "Friends of the King, of Peace, and of
Religion," "Defenders of Religion, Persons, and Property". Magistrates
and officers, the most cultivated and polished people, are generally
members; in short, the elite of the place. Formerly, meetings took
place for conversation and debate, and, being long-established, the
club naturally passes over from literature to politics.--The
watch-word against all these provincial clubs is given from the Rue St.
Honore.[2120] "They are centers of conspiracy, and must be looked after"
forthwith, and be at once trodden out.--At one time, as at Cahors,[2121]
a squad of the National Guard, on its return from an expedition against
the neighboring gentry, and to finish its task breaks in on the club,
"throws its furniture out of the wind