so much wickedness concealed
beneath the cloak of philosophy and hypocritical civism, we say to
you--Your decree has saved the country, and if they are obstinate in
refusing you permission to save the country, well, the nation will save
itself, for, after all, the power of a _veto_ has a termination--a veto
does not prevent the taking of the Bastille.

"You are told that the salary of the priests was a national debt. But
when you only request the priests to declare that they will not be
seditious--are not they who refuse this declaration already seditious in
their hearts? And these seditious priests, who have never lent anything
to the state--who are only creditors of the state in the name of
benevolence--have they not a thousand times forfeited the donation
through their ingratitude? Away, then, with these miserable sophisms,
fathers of the country, and have no more doubt of the omnipotence of a
free people. If liberty slumbers, how can the arm act? Do not raise this
arm again, do not again lift the national club to crush insects. Did
Cato and Cicero proceed against Cethegus or Catiline? It is the chiefs
we should assail: strike at the head."

A scornful laugh echoed from the tribunes of the Assembly to the
populace. The _proces-verbal_ of this sitting was ordered to be sent to
the eighty-three departments. Next day the Assembly reconsidered this,
and negatived its vote of the previous evening; but publicity was still
given to it, and it echoed through the provinces, carrying with it the
disquietude, derision, and hatred attached to the _Royal Veto_. The
constitution, handed over to ridicule and hooted in full assembly, had
now become the plaything of the populace.

For many months the state of the kingdom resembled the state of Paris.
All was uproar, confusion, denunciation, disturbance in the departments.
Each courier brought his riots, seditions, petitions, outbreaks, and
assassinations. The clubs established as many points of resistance to
the constitution as there were communes in the empire. The civil war
hatching in La Vendee burst out by massacres at Avignon.

VI.

This city and comtal, united to France by the recent decree of the
Constituent Assembly, had remained from this period in an intermediary
state between two dominations, so favourable to anarchy. The partisans
of the papal government, and the partisans of the reunion with France,
struggled there in alternations of hope and fear, which prolonge