l; denunciations against them are
provoked; their subordinates are incited to rebel against them;[2506]
committees to watch them and calumniate them are appointed; the
perspective of a scaffold is placed before them in every relation, acts
or threats of accusation being passed against them, as well as against
their agents, on the shallowest pretexts, accompanied with such
miserable quibbling,[2507] and such an evident falsification of facts
and texts that the Assembly, forced by the evidence, twice reverses its
hasty decision, and declares those innocent whom it had condemned the
evening before.[2508] Nothing is of any avail, neither their strict
fulfillment of the law, their submission to the committees of the
Assembly, nor their humble attitude before the Assembly itself; "they
are careful now to treat it politely and avoid the galleys."[2509]--But
this does not suffice. They must become Jacobins; otherwise the high
court of Orleans will be for them as for M. Delessart, the ante-room
to the prison and the guillotine. "Terror and dismay," says Vergniaud,
pointing with his finger to the Tuileries, "have often issued in the
name of despotism in ancient times from that famous palace; let them
to-day go back to it in the name of law."[2510]

Even with a Jacobin Minister, terror and dismay are permanent. Roland,
Clavieres, and Servan not only do not shield the King, but they give
him up, and, under their patronage and with their connivance, he is more
victimized, more harassed, and more vilified than ever before. Their
partisans in the Assembly take turns in slandering him, while Isnard
proposes against him a most insolent address.[2511] Shouts of death
are uttered in front of his palace. An abbe or soldier is unmercifully
beaten and dragged into the Tuileries basin. One of the gunners of the
Guard reviles the queen like a fish woman, and exclaims to her, "How
glad I should be to clap your head on the end of my bayonet!"[2512] They
supposed that the King is brought to heel under this double pressure
of the Legislative Body and the street; they rely on his accustomed
docility, or at least, on his proven lethargy; they think that they
have converted him into what Condorcet once demanded, a signature
machine.[2513] Consequently, without notifying him, just as if the
throne were vacant, Servan, on his own authority, proposes to the
Assembly the camp outside Paris.[2514] Roland, for his part, reads
to him at a full meeting of th