ll, spoken
of bayonets. At all events, there is an essential difference between the
words of Mirabeau as related in almost all the Histories of the
Revolution, and those reported by Bailly. According to our illustrious
colleague the impetuous tribune exclaimed, "Go tell those who sent you,
that the force of bayonets can do nothing against the will of the
nation." This is, to my mind, much more energetic than the common
version. The expression, "We will only retire by the force of bayonets!"
had always appeared to me, notwithstanding the admiration conceded to
it, to imply only a resistance which would cease on the arrival of a
corporal and half-a-dozen soldiers.

Bailly quitted the chair of President of the National Assembly on the 2d
of July. His scientific celebrity, his virtue, his conciliating spirit,
had not been superfluous in habituating certain men to see a member of
the Communes preside over an assembly in which there was a prince of the
blood, a prince of the church, the greatest lords of the kingdom, and
all the high dignitaries of the clergy. The first person named to
succeed to Bailly was the Duke d'Orleans. After his refusal, the
Assembly chose the Archbishop of Vienne (Pompignan).

Bailly recalls to mind with sensibility, in his memoirs, the testimonies
of esteem that he obtained through his difficult and laborious
presidency. The 3d of July, on the proposition of the Duke de la
Rochefoucauld and of the Archbishop of Bordeaux, the National Assembly
sent a deputation to their illustrious ex-president, to thank him (these
are the precise words) "for his noble, wise, and firm conduct." The
electoral body of Bordeaux had been beforehand with these homages. The
Chamber of Commerce of that town, at the same time, decided that the
portrait of the great citizen should decorate their hall of meeting. The
Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, did
not remain insensible to the glory that one of their members had
acquired in the career of politics, and testified it by numerous
deputations. Finally, Marmontel, in the name of the French Academy,
expressed to Bailly "how proud that assembly was to count, among its
members an Aristides that no one was tired of calling the Just."

I shall not excite surprise, I hope, by adding, after such brilliant
testimonies of sympathy, that the inhabitants of Chaillot celebrated the
return of Bailly amongst them by fetes, and fireworks, and that even th